DIALECTIC OF SPECTRALITY:

A TRANSPACIFIC STUDY ON BEING IN THE AGE OF CYBERCULTURE,

1945~2012

A DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES

OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Haerin Shin

May 2013
 © 2013 by Hae Rin Shin. All Rights Reserved.
Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-

Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/

This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/pv959jw0920

ii
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate
in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Johannes Gumbrecht, Primary Adviser

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate
in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Russell Berman, Co-Adviser

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate
in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Indra Levy

I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate
in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Youngmin Kwon

Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies.

Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost Graduate Education

This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in
electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in
University Archives.

iii
 Dissertation Abstract

The recent rise of digital media and human-machine interfaces has redefined survival for the

conscious human subject. The most advanced technological apparatuses run on the principle

of ambiguity and fluidity, countering the long-standing nostalgia towards an illusory state of

totality seen in the history of Western ontology. Drawing on psychoanalytic, postmodern and

cognitive theories, I reinterpret the fragmented, transgressive and incomprehensible aspects

of digital communication and interaction as the fundamental modes, not objects, of individual

and collective existence. I situate my discourse in a transcultural framework through Korean,

Japanese and American literature and visual media, including works by Neal Stephenson

(U.S.), Murakami Haruki (Japan) and Kim Young-ha (Korea).

iv
 Acknowledgements

I am immensely grateful to my dissertation advisors (Professors Russell Berman,

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Indra Levy, and Kwon Young-min), for offering me invaluable

advice and mentorship, and guiding me through the process of conceiving and writing this

dissertation. I owe this project to their support and encouragement. Especially Russell and

Sepp; Russell’s Sophomore College “Ghost Stories” class, with which I spent five wonderful,

most memorable summers, has been the key inspiration for the ghostly/spectral vein of my

research. The theoretical frameworks I propose in each chapter are heavily indebted to Sepp’s

tutelage (for which he allotted time for me almost every other week, despite his unbelievable

schedule!), his theory on “presence,” and his Heidegger seminar. Russell, and Sepp, you are

and will always be the role models of my life. It was an honor to have been your advisee.

I wish to thank Professor Stephen Sohn for giving me wonderful opportunities to

assist his research and become acquainted with diverse strains of critical inquiry, and

awakening my interest in psychoanalytic literary criticism. Professor Andrea Lunsford’s class

on Memoria provided the basic building blocks for the reflections on memory and identity in

this dissertation. Also, it was a blessing to have spent my last precious year at Stanford with

Professor Dafna Zur, my super-woman friend. My dear advisers and mentors, you all are the

most inspiring people I’ve ever met; your energy, scholarship, and productivity never cease to

amaze me.

I must also thank Professor Shin Kwang-hyun. I still can’t believe that he’s no longer

here with us, but his legacy will live on through his students. You were the one who

encouraged me to return to the study of literature. You were the one who rekindled my love

for books, writing, and everything I now hold most dear.

v
 I send my love and gratitude to friends who made my time at Stanford the best days

of my life. Angela, the moment you first came up to me at the department reception and

began talking about comics and speculative fiction, I knew that I had found a kindred spirit.

You are family, and you always will be. Serena, I can’t even imagine what the past six years

would have been like without you; every corner I turn I see memories of you, and with you.

Adrian, thank you for reading through the chapters, helping me with the copy editing process,

and providing me with such detailed, insightful comments.

Peering Portal Inc. has been the seedbed of my interest in digital media. I have

always loved works on telepresence technology, but I’ve never imagined myself being

directly involved with the practical aspect of its intricate build. Peering Portal became my

home, training ground, and the window through which I could peer into the inner workings of

the technological wonders I explore in my dissertation.

My dear parents have made it possible for me to be here. Returning to Escondido

Village (in 20 years!), I relived the golden days of my childhood; I fondly recall running

around the grassy lawns, climbing trees, and listening to the soothing sound of my father’s

typewriter tapping away as I snuggled under the covers.

Sean’s family has presented me with the best support system I could ever wish for.

Thank you for your patience, care, and love. You are the family I always wished for. I am

infinitely grateful for having met you, having become a part of you.

And most importantly, Sean. Thank you, for being in this world, and for being there

for me. This is for you, as will be everything else to follow.

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 Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: The Return of the Archetypal Ghost:

Technology and the Present-Progressive Mode of Being 5

Chapter 2: From the Ghostly to the Spectral: The Gravitational Force of Technology 40

Chapter 3: The Space “between Material Signifiers and Signifying Materialities”:

Language and Being in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash 74

Chapter 4: Narrativity as Responsibility: Archetyping the Social in

Murakami Haruki’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World 104

Chapter 5: The Remainder of Loss: Mediation and Its Failure in

Kim Young-ha’s Quiz Show 147

Closing Words 185

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 Introduction

Modernity and its horrors, war and social disintegration, brought a crucial shift in the

way we perceive the relationship between ourselves and the world. . The collapse of faith in

the omnipotence of reason, ironically accompanied by an unprecedented degree of

technological advancement, foregrounded the inherently fragmentary nature of being and the

incomprehensibility of its constitution. The scientific discoveries and technological

innovations of the past century, such as quantum physics, digital telecommunications, and

instantaneous mass media, appear to have further blurred the boundary between the

traditional Cartesian division of body and mind, rendering human existence itself ghostly.

How are we to understand “being” in a world where even the solidest material is essentially

seen as a loose chain of atoms, which in turn can be again broken down into smaller

constituent parts, and when we know and are known by the world through piecemeal sensory

inputs of spectral voices and phantasmal projections of images scintillating on computer or

smartphone screens? Such confusion is the legacy of the Enlightenment paradigm, which saw

technology and science as the crystallization of rationality and the gateway to physical as

well as mental amplification. However, upon closer observation, we find that the most

advanced mechanical apparatuses in fact run on the principles of ambiguity and fluidity

rather than with absolute clarity.

In this dissertation, I propose the concept of the “ghost” to frame intellectual history

and its present manifestation in our daily lives. Using the “ghost” as mankind’s universally

shared narrative of life and death, with its boundary transgression between being and non-

being, the incomprehensibility of its agenda and constitution, and the fragmentation of the

body and mind implied in its generation, I reinterpret the fragmented, transgressive, and

1
incomprehensible aspects of technologically mediated communication and interaction as the

fundamental modes, not objects, of surviving as human.

I acknowledge previous works on the relationship between technology and ontology

and the motif of the “spectral” or “ghostly” as strategies for blurring and crossing boundaries.

However, drawing on psychoanalytic criticism, postmodern theories and cognitive studies, I

bring a fresh perspective to the field by positioning the topic in a cross-disciplinary and

transnational frame, and triangulating universal as well as culture-specific modes of

contemporary life in the age of cyberculture. I offer cultural/historical explorations in three

Pacific-rim countries that have shown particular prominence in adopting and incorporating

telecommunications/telepresence technology: the United States, Japan, and Korea. The

United States is the leading force in information technology innovation both in the spheres of

practical science and speculative literature; Japan is the seat of an uncanny culture where

cutting-edge technology and pantheistic spirituality harmoniously coexist in reality and

fiction; and in Korea, a thorough integration of digital telecommunication into everyday life

forms a stark contrast to the utter lack of its literary representation. I situate this discourse in a

transcultural framework through readings of Korean, Japanese, and American literature, with

designated chapters on the works of Neal Stephenson (U.S.), Murakami Haruki (Japan) and

Kim Young-ha (Korea).

In chapter 1, I establish incomprehensibility, transgressiveness, and fragmentation as

the three core properties of the modern subject. Existence is an archetypal ghost, for it is a

universally shared narrative of life, death, and beyond, at once portending and sublating the

haunting subject that pines for an illusory state of integrity. Drawing on thinkers from Freud

and Lacan to Heidegger, I show how the ghost metaphor has been conventionally used to

connote the undesirable, such as irrationality, ambiguity, transgressive desire, or the loss of

2
bodily or mental integrity.

In Chapter 2, I introduce the thoughts of Deleuze and Guattari, Hayles and Wolfe as

points of comparison as I assert that the emergence of cyberculture has brought forth a

fundamental shift in this paradigm by demonstrating how the ability of a cognitive system

(whether it be human or machine) to expand on semiotic uncertainty is what constitutes

agential existence, beyond the reaches of axiology or hermeneutics. In an age when

disembodied, digitalized identities and sensory input abound, the archetypal ghost is no

longer a melancholic elegy to the finitude of being. Incompleteness, incomprehensibility, and

fragmentation are modes of survival in and of themselves rather than objects to be survived.

Chapter 3 centers on the American post-cyberpunk novel Snow Crash by Neal

Stephenson, in which a computer virus called “Snow Crash” literally crashes the minds of its

victims through sensorial exposure or biological infection. Critics such as Walter Benn

Michaels and Katherine Hayles caution us against the reductionist scenario of “all language is

inter-compatible code” for seeing humans as mere information processors, but I claim that the

survivors of the virus in fact illuminate the inherent ambiguity of language as a non-

conscious space from which human agency arises.

Chapter 4 is focused on the Japanese novel Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of

the World by Murakami Haruki. Self-vaccinated (metaphorically) by a concrete preexisting

sense of identity, the protagonist is the sole survivor among test subjects who had visualized,

narrativized versions of selfhoods artificially implanted in their brains in the form of

computer chips. Later, however, he becomes trapped in his own mind when the circuit

dysfunctions and cuts off his ability to interact with the external world. Many critics have

read the story as an advocacy of solipsism or nihilism, or an expression of the isolationist

tendency developed by the author’s generation in the hyper-capitalized, post-political turmoil

3
phase Japanese society underwent in the ‘70s and ‘80s, but I maintain that the novel in fact

affirms the role that responsibility (to oneself as well as ontological others, including both the

living non-organic matter) and narrativeness as world-building mechanisms play in our

survival as free-willed subjects, both as individual entities and as a collective species.

In Chapter 5, I look at Korean writer Kim Young-ha’s novel Quiz Show. The

recurring motif that “nothing is what it seems” in electronically mediated relationships leads

to a string of losses and disillusionments, reaching its climax at a surrealistic quiz show boot

camp, which I read as the ultimate allegory of the internet. Reading this plot as a reflection on

the historical traumas Kim’s generation was left to face amidst the material abundance and

ideological void in the ‘90s, I also see a life-affirming strategy of stripping away everything

and seeing what remains in the crux of being.

In the closing words, I offer a transcultural approach to the observations I make with

the novels from each of the three countries, and reexamine them in the religious and historical

contexts of American, Japanese and Korean culture. The three case studies of this transpacific

spectrum converge on the world’s most cutting-edge information technology industries, yet

emerge out of radically disparate views on subjectivity:the Western intellectual tradition of

dualism, Japan’s animism, and Korea’s shamanism.

4
 Chapter 1

The Return of the Archetypal Ghost:

Technology and the Present-Progressive Mode of Being

The Archetypal Ghost

Peter Straub, a well-known author of contemporary horror fiction, makes a most

peculiar choice in entitling his first financially and critically successful novel Ghost Story

(1979). The book takes the readers down a familiar path along genre conventions, weaving

cosmic battles between good and evil into microscopic events of interpersonal conflicts in

small town life, but essentially the plot boils down to the reemergence and demise of ancient,

shape-shifting entities that haunt mankind from times untold and places unknown. The shape-

shifters come back from the dead in defiance of the principle of mortality all living beings are

subject to, rise out of the dark depths of past deeds to exhume and execute unfinished

business, and even occasionally shed the bodily constraints of human form to enter and

manipulate peoples’ emotions and thoughts. However, aside from such sporadic

demonstrations of characteristics that are more commonly associated with ghosts, the

adversaries in the novel are not the typical, literal ghosts most readers must be familiar with.

Their existence is not preceded by a lived past truncated by death, nor do they remain

immaterial as ghosts, by definition, are expected to. The forms they take on throughout their

countless transformations are more reminiscent of monsters rather than actual ghosts, for they

claim solid flesh and blood presences.

Then why the label “ghost”? The answer lies in that the novel’s title serves as a meta-

commentary on the concept of the ghost and its story. In fact the body of the work itself could

be called ghostly, for the story unfolds through the eyes of a ghost story writer and members

5
of a social gathering called the Chowder Club, the main objective of which is to congregate

regularly and share ghost stories. The stem of the, or rather “their,” narrative, constantly

contracts and expands around and across various boundaries as the timeline, setting, and even

characters shuttle back and forth, undermining our conventional notion of reality and being.

Memories and deeds blend and convulse with the inexplicable forces penetrating into the

innermost privacy of people’s minds and will; concreteness of form oscillates and

disintegrates among the shifting shapes of the timeless enemy that is the ghost. The

fragmented, incomprehensible, and transgressive form and content of the novel,1 ghostly in

composition and configuration, are essentially about what a ghost (and its story) is.

Straub locates the origin of the ghosts in Ghost Story, and the tales engendered

throughout their forays across the tides of time, beyond the rear horizon of history. Indeed,

Ghosts, specters, revenants, wraiths, phantoms, and apparitions, and other terminological

variations have been an enduring subject of fascination throughout history as attested to by a

treasury of folklores, legends and fictional accounts on spectral presences that infringe upon

plains of physical, conceptual, and spatiotemporal otherness. The term “ghost” and its many

synonyms may each carry slightly differing connotations and designations of contextual

specificities. Nevertheless, the basic premise that underlies all the above concepts spring out

of a shared archetypal narrative, that of the existence and physical demise of a human being

as opposed to other forms of life, followed by a reemergence or vestigial lingering of that

being, often in the guise of the deceased’s mental and emotional characteristics accompanied

by an incorporeal yet often perceptible resemblance in form. This skeletal narrative structure

1
I employ the term “transgressive” instead of a more neutral word such as “boundary/border crossing” here, in
order to emphasize the implication that the act of crossing (retuning from the dead, in this case) is in violation of
rules or norms.

6
is quintessentially archetypal,2 for it effectively encapsulates core conceptual boundaries that

have been used throughout history to define or delineate what is and what is not “human.”

The most familiar dualistic counterparts of the “human,” such as inorganic matter, nature, the

divine, and machines as a more recent development, all spring from the notion that we as

human beings are differentiated from other entities by the fact that we are alive, sentient,

rational, and, most of all, mortal.

Up to this point the bare essentials of this narrative construct encompass the

fundamental fate of all life forms, but the narrative’s denouement is precisely where a crucial

breaking point that ties the particular combination of “ghost” and “stories” to a uniquely

human experience occurs. Firstly, the concept of the “ghost” takes the human, in contrast to

all that is not human, a step further into the realm of the unverifiable by endowing mankind

with a continuum that transcends the barrier between life and mere matter. With the ghost,

the story of life carries on through an immaterial yet vital element of one’s being that not

only constitutes existence in its physical manifestation, but also survives the disintegration of

life itself. Secondly, the inherent narrativeness of the “ghost”3 — the fact that the “ghost”

2
The term “archetype” is here used in reference to C. G. Jung’s definition. In his book The Archetypes and the
Collective Unconscious, Jung wrote that “There is an a priori factor in all human activities, namely the inborn,
preconscious and unconscious individual structure of the psyche” (77), which exhibits itself in images that are
essentially “patterns of functioning” specific to the human species. According to Jung, “These images are
“primordial” images in so far as they are peculiar to whole species, and if they ever “originated” their origin
must have coincided at least with the beginning of the species. They are the “human quality” of the human being,
the specifically human form his activities take” (78). An archetype, as a primordial image that defines the
condition of being (human), “represents or personifies certain instinctive data of the dark, primitive psyche, the
real but invisible roots of consciousness” (160). In his later work Man and His Symbols, Jung further
supplements his concept by saying that archetypes “are what Freud called “archaic remnants”—mental forms
whose presence cannot be explained by anything in the individual’s own life and which seem to be aboriginal,
innate, and inherited shapes of the human mind” (57). He refutes common misunderstandings of archetypes “as
meaning certain definite mythological images or motifs,” emphasizing that “these are nothing more than
conscious representations; it would be absurd to assume that such variable representations could be inherited”
(57), whereas the archetype belongs to the realm of the unconscious as a basic pattern that verges on the
biological, engraved in the systems of our thoughts, rather than the merely mental.
3
Here I am relying on Gary Saul Morson’s idea of “narrativeness,” which he sees “as the quality that makes
narrative not merely present but essential” (60). Morson asserts that “narrativeness requires presentness: the
present moment must matter. It cannot be a mere derivative of earlier events of dictated by later events, that is,

7
always requires a process of arriving at its concept, andthe precedence of the archetypal story

of life, death, and beyond—points to why the “ghost” is already a “story” in itself.

Meanwhile, a narrative is congenitally “ghostly,” in that it is the immaterial afterlife of the

concrete contents it was made from. The narrative, in short, is the reemergence (in moments

of its live performance or consumption) or residuals (in recorded form) of a certain real-life

or fictional event that had phased out of its moment of being.

In this light, by setting death as the point of departure for its being, the “ghost story”

is ironically a tale of survival and continuum, a conceptual mode of existence unique to the

human. The “ghost” as the “story” and the “story” as the “ghost,” conjoined, is the place

whence all that sets the human apart from other life forms, such as religion, culture, and

history, springs forth.4 Religion as the link between and divider of the mortal and the eternal,

organic and the inorganic; culture as the collective survival of individual achievements; and

history as the amplified scale of memory, the building blocks toward one’s temporal and

physical presence and its realization thereof.

Ghost as Survival

In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker says “the irony of man’s condition is that the

by the structure of the whole. It is not necessary that all moments have presentness, but some must, and it is
from them that narrativeness derives” (61).He notes that what gives a moment presentness is “open time,”
meaning “the excess of possibilities over actualities” that digresses from the conventional 1:1 relationship
between events and their spatiotemporal orientations. Morson’s conceptualization of openness and presentness
serves an important role in supporting my later argument, as I consider the formulation of being and reality as a
dialectic process that revolves around the archetypal ghost and its story as a presence predicated upon an open
system of reference (whereby the relation between the signifier and the signified takes on a constellational form,
destabilizing the corresponsive ties between meaning and being).
4
In his afterward for Spirits in Culture, History and Mind, an ethnographic study of spirits in diverse cultures
around the world, anthropologist Michael Lambek argues that the articles contained in the collection “take us
right to the heart of the anthropology of religion” by looking at “things that are hard to grasp by analytic reason
or that appear to be marginal to the central concerns of the societies in which they are found” (237). As “Spirits
are products of imagination, partial world constructions that are fictional but not simply fictitious,” (238) he
reasons that “to argue that spirits are imagined is not to hypostatize them but to locate the world of imagination
in its social context, in history” (239). In short, the archetypal story of the ghost, embedded in different religions
as a form of cultural memory, is the very foundation on which the human story, namely history, is built.

8
deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which

awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive” (66). This “shrinking” is where the

ghost is born; it is an unconscious maneuver put into force by life itself as a way of repressing

the anxiety of death. Indeed, the story of the archetypal ghost is essentially a tale of survival:

ghosts do not rise out of the void to haunt us, their existence is predicated on life followed by

death.. In a short and deeply insightful article titled “Violence and Time: Traumatic

Survivals,” Cathy Caruth, observing Freud’s idea of trauma and its revisitation through

nightmares, notes how there occurs a lag-time between the actual experience of being so

close to death, and one’s making sense of it:

Indeed, survival for consciousness does not seem to be a matter of known experience

at all. For if the return of the traumatizing event appears in many respects like a

waking memory, it can nonetheless only occur in the mode of a symptom or a dream.

Thus if a life-threat to the body is experienced as the direct infliction and the healing

of a wound, trauma is suffered in the psyche precisely, it would seem because it is

not directly available to experience. The problem of survival, in trauma, thus

emerges specifically as the question: what does it mean for consciousness to survive?”

(24, original emphasis)

Comprehending one’s death (or its near equivalent) is a hopeless task to begin with, as

Mikhail Bakhtin underscores in his ruminations on intersubjectivity as an existential

condition in his book Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, for “it is impossible

for me to experience the axiological picture of the world in which I used to live and in which

I am no longer present. I can, of course, think the world as it would be after my death, but I

cannot experience it, from within myself, as a world that is emotionally toned by the fact of

my death, the fact of my nonexistence” (104, original emphasis). Death is unempirical; one

9
can never experience—and, therefore, make sense of—one’s own death, for there remains no

self, or in Caruth’s term, consciousness, to experience or understand: “birth and death as

mine are incapable of becoming events of my own life,” because the subject of death “lack[s]

any essential axiological5 approach” to the experience of death (104). Death is and will

always remain beyond the conscious understanding of the self, factually accepted through

others yet never fully graspable; it is the ultimate Other.6 Martin Heidegger, posing “being-

towards-death” as an essential way of being in Being and Time, takes what appears to be a

slightly different approach to the alterity of death by stating that “death must be conceived as

one’s own most possibility, non-relational, not to be outstripped, and—above all—certain”

(258). Heidegger notes that the authentic being-towards-death is the being that embraces the

“not-yet” futurity of death as a legitimate constituent of Dasein,7 or in other words, the

5
In Bakhtin’s own words, “any emotional-volitional position that would give them meaning with respect to
value” (134).
6
The word “Other” with a capitalized “O” pertains to Jacques Lacan’s distinction between the small“other” and
the big “Other”; Dylan Evans explains that “The big Other designates radical alterity, an other-ness which
transcends the illusory otherness of the imaginary because it cannot be assimilated through identification. Lacan
equates this radical alterity with language and the law, and hence the big Other is inscribed in the order of the
symbolic. Indeed, the big Other is the symbolic insofar as it is particularized for each subject. The Other is thus
both another subject, in his radical alterity and unassimilable uniqueness, and also the symbolic order which
mediates the relationship with that other subject” (133). I make this distinction from the general use of the term,
for Lacan’s assertion that the symbolic other is the domain of the unconscious, or in other words a realm beyond
one’s conscious control, is central to my claim that the archetypal ghost is the quintessential unconscious alterity
of being. Also, Lacan had noted that the Other is where language and speech originates from, thus fully grasping
the meaning of language is an impossibility—the inherent, insurmountable incomprehensibility of the archetypal
narrative of the ghost is another aspect I wish to emphasize in pairing the ghost and story (the component of the
narrative) in my argument. Lacan’s following statement is particularly useful in parsing out the dynamics of the
ghost-human dialectic as a mechanism of desire (for immortality) and the eternal lack of a conscious grasp of its
meaning: “This Other is, nevertheless [in reference to the unconscious being the Other’s discourse, as mentioned
in the preceding phrase], only halfway from a quest that the unconscious betrays by its difficult art and whose
ever-so-informed ignorance is revealed by the paradoxes of the object in Freud’s work. For, if we listen to him,
we learn that reality [réel] derives its existence from a refusal, that love creates its objet from what is lacking in
reality [réel], and that desire stops at the curtain behind which this lack is figured by reality [réel]” (366).
7
Dasein refers, in particular, the being of human: “To be human is to disclose and understand the being of
whatever there is. Correspondingly, the being of an entity is the meaningful presence of that entity within the
field of human experience. A proper or improper understanding of human being entails a proper or improper
understanding of the being of everything else. In this context ‘human being’ means what Heidegger designates
by his technical term ‘Dasein’; not consciousness or subjectivity or rationality, but that distinctive kind of entity

10
essence of being human. However, should we consider the fact that Heidegger’s notion of

“Being” (with an upper case B, in contrast to his use of “being” with the lower case b) stands

apart from Dasein, for “Being” is the lived experience of the human being existing here and

now in the concrete textures of the world. Heidegger’s assertion in fact brings us back to

Bakhtin’s point via a slight detour, for this realization that death is part of being human

remains concealed in our everyday experience of being. We fear and flee in the face of death

and refrain from ruminating on the possibility of one’s own annihilation. The concept of

death in the normal procession of life, therefore, is always a death of others. It is a way to be,

rather than an actual experience.

Naturally, the moment of trauma, when this comforting illusion is subject to a

shattering blow, is the instant of fragmentation in multiple layers in which the division

between life and death, I and the other, past and present, body and mind splinter apart to

mutilate the sense of wholeness or the fantasy of continuity one harbors. The realization of

survival is then, on the flip side, an admittance of existential fragmentation, albeit one where

the fragments are tenuously and ironically still held together by the very fact that the cracks

and scissions inter-define the pieces. Whereas the utter proximity of death reinforces the

immediacy of life, the cognitive dissonance involving the incomprehensibility of death opens

one’s eyes to the inconsolable chasm between the Ego and Other, and the temporal

disjuncture found in the body and the mind’s differing receptions of the traumatic experience

stamps out any and all illusion of totality.

Thus, survival is a continuity obtained only through a sacrifice of integrity, a

submission to the unknowable nature of one’s being (for death is a part of being). And when

(which we ourselves always are) whose being consists in disclosing the being both of itself and of other entities.
The being of this entity is called ‘existence’” (Craig 310).

11
death is transgressed and survived, not only as a wish-fulfilling fantasy but also through lived

experience in the form of trauma, the ghost (and its story) is born, as the archetype of being

itself.

The Semiotic Ghost: Ghostly Archetypes

The statement that the ghost-story is the archetype of (human) being opens up the

possibility of an inversion, for unlike saying the ghost-story is an archetype (which is a

categorical grading, the ghost-story falling under the umbrella of the broad sweep of

archetypes), the definite article “the” here functions as an equation sign. Then, the [ghost-

story = archetype of (human) being] formula allows the latter to take up the former’s

properties, while the latter’s subcategories imbued with such properties may be subsumed

under the former. In other words, various other archetypes that harness the properties of the

mortal human being, specifically that of incomprehensibility, transgressivity, and

fragmentation, may then very well be called ghostly. We see precisely this happening in the

meta-genre commentary of Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, as well as in numerous other examples

in which a wide array of concepts and images that signify ghostly attributes wear the label of

“ghost,” their narratives becoming ghost-stories. A recent anthology titled Ghost Stories

attests to the ghost’s role as a comprehensive reference to transgression rather than a fixed

signifier. Out of a total of nineteen stories in the collection, less than half directly or even

approximately, feature the conventional ghost (dead person returned, preferably minus the

body). The others range between depictions of mysterious creatures, past memories,

inanimate objects, and even narrative and imagination itself, all of which do not exactly carry

the banner of, yet are firmly stamped with, ghostly presences. Guy De Maupassant presents

the human psyche, paired with the process of Darwinian evolution, as likely culprits of the

12
haunting phenomenon in the story, by introducing an invisible but (purportedly) clearly

corporeal being that gnaws at the protagonist’s sanity in “The Horla.” Katherine Mansfield’s

“The Daughters of the Late Colonel” is devoid of any traces of the supernatural, but the

memory and influence of a tyrannical father oppressively hang over the household not only

during his presence but also after his death, remaining ever tight in its grip on his daughters’

lives. In L. P. Hartley’s “W.S.,” the ghost is a fictional character come to life that serves as

the author’s Jungian shadow figure.8 It breaks through years of physical (discontinuance of

the fictional world it resided in) and psychological (the writer having projected all things he

reviled to this particular character) suppression to wreak vengeance on its creator. Picking up

the thread of the metafiction and pushing it even further into the sphere of metaphysics, Jorge

Luis Borges talks of a dreamer-creator who was in fact a dream of yet another in “The

Circular Ruins,” plunging the whole of reality and being into a labyrinthine reflexivity. “The

Happy Autumn Fields” by Elizabeth Bowen, by juxtaposing two women whose lives are

apart by decades but still achieve connection and resonance through written correspondence,

suggests that objects steeped in memory or even memory itself could be seen as ghosts.

These stories and their inclusion in the anthology under the less than fitting label of

the “ghost story” demonstrate how the ghost and its story have come to encompass a wide

span of meanings by virtue of their properties, namely depicting fragmentary, transgressive,

and incomprehensible beings or states of being. Invoking Carl Jung’s collective

unconscious,9 novelist William Gibson aptly describes this critical inversion as a “semiotic

ghost,” a term he coined. In his short story “The Gernsback Continuum,” Gibson proposes

8
“An archetype denoting the consciously denied, negative, rejected or evil side of the individual’s personality.
Confrontation, reconciliation with, and mastery over the Shadow are an essential aspect of individuation”
(Richards 17).
9
“The collective unconscious appears at first to be—to put it simply—the sum of archetypal structures that
manifest themselves in typical mythological motifs in all human beings. Underneath these structures, however,
one finds a still deeper layer that has the appearance of a unit” (Franz 84).

13
that ghosts are “bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their

own,” professing that such imageries are “part of the mass unconscious” (31). The archetypal

ghost-story, signified by its attributes, has now come to signify the ghostly archetypes that

embody its characteristics The “semiotic ghost,” in that light, is a slant signifier, constantly

shifting and leaning towards different referents.

The Human and the Ghost: Dialectic of Being

Despite the fact that the semantics of the “ghost” and its neighbors in the thesaurus

strongly gesture towards a human origin, ghosts and their stories in their flesh are not always

confined to the realm of the human experience. Tales of ghost animals, plants or even

inanimate objects abound from old.10 Once we venture out of the Western tradition, ghosts

take on an even more colorful spectrum, a topic to be discussed in the following chapters. But

it must be noted that the first and foremost subject of (as well as those who are subject to) the

ghostly formula is the “human.” Dead animals may rise out of the ground crying out in the

still of the night as in Stephen King’s Pet Cemetery,11 trees exert supernatural force in freely

alternating between the human and vegetative form,12 and even phantasmal cities rise out of

an unfulfilled future,13 breaking through the temporal and spatial fabrics of reality in the

world of legends, folklore, and fiction. Nonetheless, their emergence carries significance only

in so far as their presence affects the lives of humans, for without mankind consciously and

10
Stephen King’s novel Pet Cemetery, Christine, or Lisey’s Story are familiar examples from contemporary
cultural products; Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (a retelling of Japan’s
folktales) includes stories about tree spirits; animated lifeless objects are an integral part of Japan’s ghostly
tradition, evidenced most prominently in countless retellings and drawings of the “Night Parade of One Hundred
Demons.”
11
There are countless examples of similar stories, especially once we enter the animistic and shamanistic world
of Japan and Korea.
12
In reference to “The Story of Aoyagi” from Lafcadio Hearn [Koizumi Yakumo 小泉 八雲],)’s Kwaidan:
Stories and Studies of Strange Things.
13
Referring to Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum.”

14
individually acknowledging and sharing the phenomenon, the occurrence would in itself be

incapable of surviving as a narrative substance. That is, as long as the main generator,

occupant, and recipient of the narrative is human, and as long as narrative and language as its

carrier (whether it be oral, textual or otherwise) are purely human traits, all tales inevitably

converge on the human experience, to which ghosts (and death) are no exception.14

If we see this convergence as originating from the notion and being of the human,

and extending outward towards the ghost in terms of agential exertion, we also admit to an

evolutive, unilateral ontogeny. The human becomes the ghost, and creates and consumes the

narrative. In short, the human comes first. The ghost comes later, and rightly so considering

the lexical definition of ghosts—dead people or illusory traces of imagination are, alike,

results of human existence and consciousness. However, in hindsight, we see how the

relationship between the ghost-story and the human is more a dialectic than the one-way

street of agential, existential and intentional systemology Because when the ghost as a story

entered the lives of humanity, its properties in turn begin to define its creator and model, for

the ghost and its story “can grant the author immortality; or it is Orphic and retrieves the dead”

(Berman 58).

Archetypal Ghost as a Melancholic Subject

The ghost is what stands even farther beyond the ultimate unknowable that is death.

Never logically verifiable, physically graspable or even certifiable in terms of its existence,

the ghost is an everlasting enigma. Tales that narrate ghosts cannot, therefore, be fully

14
Russell A. Berman notes that “the problematic of human origins … are in effect the origins of language, and
hence the capacity to engage in literature” (58) in Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty, and Western
Culture. “At the roots of literature altogether is an affinity with death, a result of the nature of the symbolic
capacity that is language. The semanticity of language involves the ability to invoke the absent; the absent, and
the deceased, are therefore never fully gone, always available to poetic conjuring” (58).

15
understood, for their very substance defies figuration. Yet, the death divide is a two-way

hinge upon which the incomprehensible fragment of yonder connects with the hither, where

the ghost-story as the “other” comes into contact with the tangible texture of the human

experience. For the ghosts that we know, and that therefore exist, are only the ones that come

“back” to haunt. The ghostly survivors of death acquire their meaning only when they

interact with those who remain behind that fatal threshold. What is construed to be a ghost,

although it may fall short of forming an integral being due to the subtraction of the body, is

the most essential and private cache of one’s constitution, a cache inaccessible from without,

whether it be memories, vestiges of personality, or even the soul, which is nevertheless

penetrated and laid in bare view of external entities being haunted. Ghosts, therefore, are

simultaneously the erectors and the traversers of boundaries. And we the human, as the inter-

actor and counterpart, the prototype and the left-behind of the ghost, not only create and

acknowledge but also are always defined by these shimmering, incessantly transgressing

entities—hence the mutual dialectic is formed.

The dialectic of the human-ghost, however, is by no means equal in terms of the two

nodes’ positionality. I have established that the ghost-story is an archetype not only in the

sense that the realization of mortality and the effort to overcome this fatal self-understanding

initiated culture and history, marking the dawn of humanity’s self-conscious existence, but

also in that the ghost is banished to the realm of the collective unconscious the moment it is

conceived, in order for the ensuing attempts for survival to take place. Once conceived, the

idea of the ghost constantly hovers above the plain of sobriety in being, acting as its hushed

yet clearly extant other side. Whereas, the whole of being encompasses what no longer is

through its event horizon that is death. The denial and repression of the ghost is in itself

therefore a fragmentation, a loss of integrity. Thus, the birth of the ghost coincides with its

16
loss, and as its counterpart, the human, is thrown to the same fate. In this light, the

ontological dialectic of the ghost-story and the human is not only traumatic, but also

inevitably melancholic.

I am here importing Sigmund Freud’s definition of melancholia which he sets up as a

case of illusory, self-bound, and incurable mourning. Whereas mourning is a normal reaction

to the loss of a loved object, melancholia is a profoundly baffling and lingering kind of

malaise due to a strong degree of identification one feels with certain traits of the lost beloved.

Freud asserts that the melancholic subject “knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost

in him. This would suggest that melancholia is in some way related to an object-loss which is

withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing

about the loss that is unconscious” (245, emphasis added). The loss described here, because is

predicated upon partial or conditional identification, can be seen as a double-layered self-

fragmentation founded upon the incomprehensibility of the self. By realizing that there has

been a loss and by yet surviving that loss, one is faced with the possibility that the self is a

multi-faceted construct that allows partial existence. However, as the exact nature or the

aspect of the self that is lost remains unclear, a repression takes place, which manifests itself

in the form of “painful dejection” among other symptoms (244). The loss is a virtual form of

death, but one that is partial and survived; the “dejection” is none other than the nightmares

one experiences after having unconsciously survived a near-death experience in the case of

trauma. This ongoing pattern of suppression and resurgence is a compulsively repetitive

process of coming to terms,15 for as noted above, the ghost is not only the cause of a trauma,

15
In “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through,” Freud alleges that a traumatic experience tends to
surface in the form of repetition (acting out a series of seemingly irrelevant behaviors) rather than remembering
due to the repression that takes place as a survival mechanism, which is in fact a “working through” towards
recollection, and consequently, recovery. The repetitive cycle of repression and emergence of the ghost-story

17
but also the traumatized. The agency is bilateral, for the ghost and human collectively yearn

for a harmonized reunification—the dead wishes to reacquire lost life (hence the haunting),

while the living aspires to post-mortem continuance (resulting in the creating and telling of

the ghost-story), each acting as the other’s “lost loved object.” This mechanism of the

melancholic trauma, the constant looking backward and forward towards a prior state of

wholeness or a vision of recovery entailing an unconscious experience of topographic splints

in one’s mental integrity, is precisely the spatiotemporal substructure of the ghost story-

human dialectic.

The Metaphorical Ghost

So far I have established three points. First, the ghost and its story tell a tale of

trauma and survival, and therefore the ghost story is an ontological archetype of the human,

in particular the human being that is unconsciously aware of its mortal fate yet clings to the

hopeless project of transcending this fate by the very act of living. Secondly, as an archetypal

reference to various elements that constitute the configuration of being revolving around life

and death, the Ego and the Other, or any such boundaries that breach one’s illusory primal

state of totality, the ghost becomes a slant signifier, subsuming other archetypes that are

predicated upon the key properties that establish the survival narrative—fragmentation,

incomprehension, and transgression. As can be seen in the stories collected in the Ghost

Stories anthology, elements commonly found in our lives that traverse temporal and spatial

divides and infringe upon the stability of one’s present being, such as memory, repressed

layers of identity, or even imagination itself, warrant the descriptor “ghostly.” Thirdly, the

mutualistic relations between the ghostly beings and beings that are ghostly form an

here, however, is a “working through” doomed to failure, for as noted above, death is ultimately insurmountable
as an unempirical, unconscious Other.

18
interactive dialectic, the agential interchange between its two primary entries powered by a

melancholic vision of a primordial integrity, namely the state in which the sentient being

itself is absent and free of the frightful realization of non-being as its counterpart. A recent

surge of critical reflections that harness the concept of the “ghost” or “specter” attests to how

the reverse side of the archetypal ghost (that is, archetypes as ghosts) may effectively

encompass a wide array of discourses concerning incomprehensible, transgressive and

fragmented features of human life. Jacques Derrida, for instance, coins the term “hauntology”

in his book Specters of Marx. He attempts to bridge the perceptual severance between past

and present in the socio-historical superstructure by countering Francis Fukuyama’s claim

that ideology has come to its dialectical grand finale with the splintered yet surviving

(haunting) figure of the specter as an analogy of communism, or on a wider scope, history

itself: “To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into

the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being

and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology. Ontology opposes it only in a

movement of exorcism. Ontology is a conjuration” (202). The Freudian “return of the

repressed,”16 one of the most common tropes that connote the phenomena of haunting, also

finds voice in a more macroscopic setting, the subject of repression extending towards

collective memory as in forgotten layers of history rather than isolated incidents of individual

trauma. Kathleen Brogan’s Cultural Haunting: Ghost and Ethnicity in Recent American

Literature and Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

are two among many notable examples that lean towards this trajectory. In a similar vein,

16
Freud’s idea of repression is the result of censorship executed by the Ego, whereby wishes that are deemed
inappropriate in the conscious world are submerged and buried in the realm of the unconscious until further
notice. Drawing attention to the wish-fulfilling function of dreams in his book The Interpretation of Dreams,
Freud points out that the repressed wishes “are not dead like persons who have died in our sense, but they
resemble the shades in the Odyssey which awaken a certain kind of life as soon as they have drunk blood
[contact with the consciousness]” (211).

19
Marilyn Ivy also looks at ghosts as a way of reviving forgotten pasts, focusing more on

discourses on identity on the level of a nation-state. She explains how anxieties concerning

the tumultuous turns of modernity in Japan have brought forth a renewed appreciation or

discovery of marginalized entities such as phantasms and stories of the uncanny in

Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. Pheng Cheah, in Spectral

Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation, also

turns his eyes to the topic of nationalism, but shifts gears from the conceptual to the more

(ironically) physical, moving on from the conventional formula of “the haunting past and its

redemption or incorporation” to the (im)materiality of the ghostly. Cheah proposes that the

fluid and indefinite nature of the specter may serve as an effective alternative to the

traditional beliefs in the “nation” as a vital organism.

These studies are merely a few among many others that that appropriate the “ghost”

or “specter” image, which may, at a glance, appear to share a common ground with the

archetypal ghost and its dialectic relations with the human laid out in the previous section.

They uniformly address the properties I have identified as core elements in the ghost

archetype. The familiar notion of the “return of the repressed” as a survival mechanism is

employed to reveal a state of incompleteness in the present state of matters, which is

invariably succeeded by a gesture of looking back or forward towards a more harmonic state

of being where wrongs are either yet to be committed or safely resolved and incorporated

back into the breached totality of the present presence. However, there are crucial points from

which my claim departs from other such critical reflections: the semiotic role of the ghost,

spatiotemporal orientation, and ethical stance. In a majority of existing studies that utilize the

term “ghost” as a reference to specific aspects of the human experience, the “ghost” figure is

more a metaphor than an archetype, the temporal and spatial directionality of the discourse is

20
mostly centrifugal (either reverting to the past or reaching out towards the future from the

present as the center point), and the object or issue that is deemed ghostly falls under an

axiological lens, to be either exorcized from or rejoined with the living in the end. This last

point is of particular importance, for the will to totality found among such approaches is

ultimately the pursuit of a final resolution, which directly counters my claim that the ghost as

an ontological archetype forms an ongoing dialectic in relation to the human.

Let us then first observe the metaphorical quality of the ghost figure in prior

scholarship. As noted above, the “ghost-story” as the archetype of human (ghost-story =

archetype) opens up the possibility of a directional inversion in which other archetypes that

point to certain qualities of the human experience may be in turn seen as being ghostly on a

subcategoric level, in the process of which the ghost becomes a slant signifier that

encompasses signified objects that are not necessarily identical to the original signified that is

the human. This “slant” in the act of signification indicates an oblique spatial movement

whereby entities may preserve their distinctive quality yet stay connected through the

similarities that tie the signified objects together, which in this case, would be the properties

one associates with ghostly presences. This proximity on the level of parts paired with the

uncompromised integrity of each entry in the scope of signification, namely the reverse-

engineered archetype, bears greater affinity to the “metaphoric” rather than “archetypal.”

Metaphors are figures of speech, and the act of using a metaphor is the identification of one

entity with another based on representative features of the latter found in the former,17 in

which the two equated yet separate entities remain distinct throughout the process of

17
“A figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is transferred to an object or action
different from, but analogous to, that to which it is literally applicable; an instance of this, a metaphorical
expression,” (OED definition no. 1, emphasis mine) or “Something regarded as representative or suggestive of
something else, esp. as a material emblem of an abstract quality, condition, notion, etc.; a symbol, a token”
(OED definition no. 2).

21
utterance. The key point here is that the difference between the referent and referrer is that of

kind, not degree; the object and the subject of the act of reference ultimately stay

ontologically apart, despite the verb (“is” in the metaphorical speech “A is B”) that seemingly

conflates the two. The actual equation applies not to the entries in the formula “A is B,” but

the properties they share. In this light, the “specter” in Derrida’s hauntology, the “ghostly”

matters of Gordon, and the haunting forces in Brogan’s work all fall under the umbrella of

what G. Lakoff and M. Johnson called “complex metaphors,18” for the above appropriations

of the ghost image borrow the emblematic structure of the archetypal “ghost” narrative—

perishing and partial survival—in reference to a specific element of the human existence, and

use this referential connection to open up the possibility of branching out towards the wider

scope of characteristics attributed to the “ghost.”

Examples are easily found: the notion of ideological fragmentation seen in the fall of

communism or its transgression through a retrogressive existence for Derrida, immateriality

and fluidity of the national ideal for Cheah, configurative incomprehensibility of memory and

history as in repressed trauma seen in Gordon and Brogan. A similar yet broader example is

the silencing and denial of historical injustice that creates a sub-layer of historical

unconscious in a myriad of post-colonial and racial discourses. In short, the “ghost” as

metaphor is an instrument used to reveal the issues surrounding its referent, in the process of

18
According to cognitive linguist Joseph Grady, primary metaphors—which George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
in turn define as metaphors that are “directly grounded in the everyday experience that links our sensory-motor
experience to the domain of our subjective judgments” (256)—are like atoms in terms of their signification
process. A primary metaphor is built upon a basic level of 1:1 substitution and thereby can be combined to build
a larger structure that embeds a web of reference in which various concepts associated with the original referent
in the metaphor can be appropriated and expand the chain of meaning. For instance, let us formulate a sentence
based on the first line of the Communist Manifesto “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism”
(Marx and Engels 33): “Communism is a spectre that is haunting Europe.” Here, “spectre” as the metaphor of
communism, supported by the expression “haunting” that follows, forms a complex metaphor that harbors
multiple meanings whereby impressions connected to a “haunting spectre” (such as a sinister sense of lurking,
invocation of past deeds, etc.) are transposed onto our conception of “communism.”

22
which the “complication” of the metaphor, or the spatial “slant” of the signifier in my term,

serves as an epistemological tool.

The archetypal ghost, meanwhile, is an ontological statement that precedes the

slanting of the signifier; It is, rather than gestures towards, a mode of being. An archetype is a

precursor of its successors; the difference between the two entries connected by the

archetypal relation being stipulated by degree (which connotes temporal progression), not

kind. The state of oxymoronic being for the human that is, albeit unconsciously, aware of its

mortal fate is literally ghostly, for the conceptual realization of death is itself the paradox the

ghost embodies, which I see as a distinctive characteristic of my study.

The instrumental nature of the ghost as metaphor moves us towards the second

point.19 Namely, works that employ the ghost as a complex metaphor are inevitably

hermeneutic and teleological, and in specific, extrinsically final. Finding connections

between and subsequently equating two separate entities or concepts, which is the gist of

metaphoric reference, implies a willful exertion of agency in service of a specific agenda. For

instance, upon encountering a line from a poem that says “you are a rose,” the reader

associates commonly agreed upon qualities of a rose with the “you,” most likely arriving at

the conclusion that “you” are fragrant and beautiful like a rose. The rose metaphor is used, as

a tool, to fulfill the objective of praising. Likewise, when Derrida says Marxism is a specter,

he is invoking a set of properties we find in the specter—paraphrased, his statement would

read as “Marxism bears similarity to the specter in that it survived its demise, rises out of the

past to haunts us, and its agenda remains unfulfilled.” Why take pains to find such semantic

19
From a cognitive science perspective, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson allege that “Because metaphorical
maps are part of our brains, we will think and speak metaphorically whether we want to or not” (258), since
“Metaphor is a neural phenomenon” (257). Also, they assert that “Since the mechanism of metaphor is largely
unconscious, we will think and speak metaphorically, whether we know it or not.” Their claim may appear to be
in opposition to my notion of metaphors being instrumental, but here I refer to a strategic, “conscious”
deployment of metaphors as a way of delineating the complex associations attached to a given reference.

23
links? Because, as in the case of the rose, the act of likening is an intentional move towards a

higher objective. Naturally, complicated metaphors become a most effective strategy for

problematizing multi-faceted issues; the variety of attributes nestled within the signifier (that

is the ghost) may be deployed at convenience to serve different purposes. For instance,

Derrida brings in the example of Hamlet’s father,20 implying that haunting pasts demand

closure, which in his case would be the recognition of past influences upon the present state

of history. Meanwhile, in Brogan or Gordon’s works, suppressed (haunting) pasts are in

service of a better future rather than the present, for repression (death) of memories and

history is a painful undermining of the present’s stability, and therefore the hidden and

maimed must be revealed and cured for a more balanced existence in future tense:

“Haunting is a frightening experience. It always registers the harm inflicted or the

loss sustained by a social violence done in the past or in the present. But haunting,

unlike trauma, is distinctive for producing a something-to-be-done. Indeed, it seemed

to be that haunting was precisely the domain of turmoil and trouble, that moment (of

however long duration) when things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks

and rigging are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible show up

without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings cannot be put away, when

something else, something different from before, seems like it must be done. It is this

sociopolitical-psychological state to which haunting referred” (Gordon xvi).

20
In this light it is particularly revealing that Derrida focuses on the mutual aspect of utterance that first opens
up a channel of communication between the dead king of the netherworld and the inhabitants of earth, by
observing that “[Marcellus] does not ask him [Horatio] merely to speak to the ghost, but to call it, interrogate it,
more precisely, to question the Thing that it still is” (12-13). Here utterance is a tool for an ontological inquiry,
and also a stepping stone towards resolution while allowing the ghost its own voice. To quote Judith Herman on
the therapeutic (therefore, once again, instrumental) effect of speech: “The ordinary response to atrocities is to
banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is
the meaning of the word unspeakable. Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire
to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to
rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible
events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims” (1).

24
The metaphoric ghost, in this sense, calls for interpretation and solution, whereas the

archetypal ghost simply is, for it is the primal state of a conscious being. Being, with death as

part of the deal, simply is. It cannot be a problem to be solved, nor can it be understood. The

ghost I invoke in this study is no means to an end; it is strictly a mode of being.

The teleological nature combined with the complexity of the ghost metaphor

observed in the exemplified studies, in turn, points to a distinctly axiological stance coupled

with a centrifugal spatiotemporality that governs the logic of the conventional ghost story

narrative. Expressions such as “haunt” or “repress” commonly found in such texts, which

ramify from the ghost as a complex metaphor, imply a cognitive propensity towards, in

particular, a negative value judgment embedded within the issues being raised. By association,

ghostly properties such as transgression, incomprehension, and fragmentation acquire a

problematic status that must be rectified in order to achieve an epistemological and

ontological integrity based on a rationalistic view of the world. Ghostly infestations are not

right, nor are they desirable, because they violate the commonly accepted norms of a

reasonable worldly existence and consequently cause grief (dead things simply don’t and

shouldn’t come back), as acknowledged by Nicolas Abraham in “Notes on the Phantom: A

Complement to Freud’s Metapsychology”: “More often than not, the dead do not return to

rejoin the living but rather to lead them into some dreadful snare, entrapping them with

disastrous consequences. To be sure, all the departed may return, but some are destined to

haunt: the dead who were shamed during their lifetime or those who took unspeakable secrets

to the grave” (171). They are what shouldn’t be, yet are, often because something happened

that should not have happened (or the other way around). The solution is to right the wrong,

and by doing so return the disturbing anomaly of haunting forces to where they rightly belong,

the realm of the dead and past.

25
 In other words, in haunting there is an attempt to repossess the past and thereby

reclaim a better future. Ironically, in this very process of realigning the lost or fragmented

pieces that constitute a wholesome present, the present as the actual moment in which the

haunting takes place, and presence in its midst as the bodily agent that experiences the

haunting in present-progressive tense, are denied their positions. Should countless aspects of

past memories and their influences be the condition in which one lives the present, each

moment of being stays forever undesirable as long as the various specters that cry out for

redemption are yet to reach salvation. The world of Hamlet remains unjust and disordered

until the unfinished business that the dead has returned to relay is heeded and tended to. The

ghost as a metaphor for personal and collective traumas ever lurking in the subliminal depths

of an individual’s psyche or chasms of history must be either expelled or reassimilated into

the liminal for the living to carry on, as Brogan asserts by foregrounding the motif of reburial

in Tony Morrison’s Beloved: “Final burial operates as an exorcism in which the dead are not

killed off but are revised, transformed into ancestral spirits. Stories of cultural haunting

similarly imply that the work of mourning requires the integration of, rather than the

complete detachment from, the dead” (67).21 In short, the “ghosts” that “haunt” the majority

of critical and literary representations connote a negative sense of displacement or

disfiguration in the form of misrepresentation, ultimately condemning that which the specter

haunts—the presences in the present—to a state of mourning.

Reclaiming Presence: From Mourning to Melancholia

21
More on Beloved: “In Beloved, the haunting is not completely dispelled but is redefined through the novel’s
performance of funereal ritual; as Morrison herself observes, the novel moves toward a transfiguring and
disseminating [of] the haunting with which the book begins. Beloved reaches towards an integration of a revised
past through the unearthing and reanimation of the forgotten dead” (Brogan 67).

26
 I intentionally use the term “mourning” in contrast to “melancholia,” which I earlier

identified as the stance of the ghost-story and human dialectic. Whereas melancholia is a

virtual loss of one’s own qualities projected on to an external object and is therefore not a

literal but a conceptual damage, mourning is based on a physical, factual demise of an

external object of love.22 Presence is a mere transition between an a priori or reinstated

totality in a state of mourning, for the lost object, whether it be history, memory or ideology,

remains a gaping hole until it is safely replaced (and hence the problem resolved) by another

object that may function as an equivalent. The metaphorical ghost, in this light, is

spatiotemporally centrifugal: the present state of incompleteness and incomprehensibility

continuously reaches out towards the lost object in the past (the process of mourning) or the

reassembled totality envisioned in the future (the overcoming of mourning.), vacating the

substance of being in its present-progressive tense.

Meanwhile, the integrity sought by the archetypal ghost as a melancholic subject is in

fact unbreached,23for death can never be grasped in the empirical. The wholesome being that

is not threatened or truncated by death is none other than the present presence of being. That

is, the archetypal ghost is intrinsically gravitational in terms of its being, for the illusory

integrity of the past or its salvaging in the future converges upon the present point of

existence through the virtual recognition of death and its survival in present-progressive

22
Using the term “hyperremembering” to describe Freudian mourning, Tammy Clewell observes that the
process of remembering the loss, resuscitating it with its imaginary reincarnation, and then moving on to a
physical substitution by gradually cutting one’s emotional ties with the lost object is like “convert[ing] loving
remembrances into a futureless memory” (44). Clewell’s register of “futureless memory” is particularly
important, for it marks the lack of presence in mourning as a model of grieving; Freud had described the
transition from this state of “past without a future” to a restored, cured future as a “spontaneous end,” leaving no
space for a present-progressive subject to realize its loss as a condition of existence.
23
In connecting the Jungian Archetype and Freudian Melancholia in my concept of the “archetypal ghost as a
melancholic subject,” I find Jung’s observation in Answer to Job a concise yet comprehensive summary of the
concepts I have tried to combine: “there is in the unconscious an archetype of wholeness which manifests itself
spontaneously in dreams, etc., and a tendency, independent of the conscious will, to relate other archetypes to
this center” (106-107). This unconscious yearning for wholeness (and its impossibility, as attested to by its
manifestation in dreams as wish fulfillment mechanisms) as a central, gravitational force that pulls in various
other archetypes is where the archetypal ghost may be located.

27
within the dialectic of the ghost-story and the human. The archetypal ghost pulls in the past

and future in order to affirm its presence in the present. The gravitational spatiotemporality of

the ghostly dialectic on which my claim rests is neither linear nor spiral. A process of change

clearly takes place, yet the directionality of the dialectic movement points in, not out towards

any external objective. The center point that is the present progressive mode of being

constantly shifts in its nature, interacting with and rewriting the past from the contemporary

perspective, while the imaginary future is drawn into and realized in the form of the present.24

It must be noted that the past is never something we leave behind: the way we understand the

past, and therefore its configuration, ceaselessly changes based on our perception of reality

and being here and now. For instance, shifting perspectives (not necessarily new discoveries)

regarding archeological evidence continuously rewrite even the physical origin point of the

human race: “Various points with regard to human evolution and human nature have been

backed by citation of selected items of archeological evidence” (Isaac 287).

The future is a present yet to be, but at once is in the process of being realized based

on the happenings of the present. And, by incorporating these interactive and continuous

reengagements with the past and future as the entries of the dialectic constellation, the present

is the agential center of transformation—which, consequently, indicates that being is literally

a “mode” free of any fixed meaning, rather than any transcendental idea.25 A pattern or

24
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht explains the gravitational force of presence in the following words: “Since the 3rd
quarter of the 20th century … we have moved into a different social construction of time: “The broad present.”
In the pervious, historicist chronotope as defined by Reinhard Koselleck, we believed that we could leave the
past behind, while we enter the future as a vast horizon of possibilities we may choose from. As a result, the
present shrank to an imperceptibly short moment of transition, a view of time that still persists” (“How I think
(and Write) about What We Feel When We Read (Literature)”).
25
Gumbrecht provides a detailed account to this point in Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot
Convey, proposing that 1) “ “Being” … takes over the place of truth … which had been occupied, since the
times of Plato and of early Platonism, but the “ideas” … and that being is not something conceptual” (67). 2)
“Being’s movement in space turns out to be multidimensional (tridimentsional, to be precise) and that, in its full
complexity, this multidimensional movement accounts for what Heidegger calls “the happening of truth” ” (68).
3) About “the role of Dasein (Heidegger’s word for “human existence”) in the happening of truth” (69), or in

28
mode, presupposes existence over a stretch of a time-space continuum, namely the movement

of a given entity in different manifestations over space and time, the state of which can only

be discerned in present tense. In this light, the gravitational dialectic of the archetypal ghost

as the mode of being is eternally in flux, and is thus never completely comprehensible in its

entirety. It is fragmented rather than whole, and transgressive in its defiance of a streamlined,

progressive, and irrevocable temporality.

Technology is the Momentum

I find great affinity between Henry Bergson’s notion of the “élan vital” and the

concept of the present-progressive being I have laid out above, particularly in how he

proposed a subjective view of time, denounced the mechanistic or finalistic (which I would,

in my own terms, call centrifugal) understanding of evolutive change in a given entity,26 and

instead asserted that an inherent vital force is the origin and momentum of growth and

transformation and movement (“duration”).27 However, the gravitational pull I propose

essentially differs from Bergson’s idea of any congenital vitality, for I pinpoint a specific

drive that does not necessarily reside entirely within the subject undergoing change. The

traction that constantly disintegrates and reassembles the ghost-human formula is, in my view,

other words, the “unconcealment of Being” comes from a firm anchoring in specific cultural situations. Based
on these theses, Gumbrecht concludes that “Heidegger’s concept of “being” … is very close to the concept of
“presence” (which I have tried to identify … as the point of convergence between different contemporary
reflections that try to go beyond a metaphysical epistemology and an exclusively meaning-based relationship to
the world.) … Being and presence, imply substance; both are related to space; both can be associated with
movement” (77). This “spatial” and “dynamic” aspect of presence is precisely what I wish to emphasize in
foregrounding presence, both spatial and temporal, as the central axis of the ghost-human dialectic.
26
“It is of no use to hold up before our eyes the dazzling prospect of a universal mathematic; we cannot
sacrifice experience to the requirements of a system. That is why we reject radical mechanism. But radical
finalism is quite as unacceptable ... the doctrine of teleology … implies that things and beings merely realize a
programme previously arranged. But if there is nothing unforeseen, no invention or creation in the universe,
time is useless again. As in the mechanistic hypothesis, here again it is supposed that all is given. Finalism thus
understood is only inverted mechanism” (Bergson 39).
27
“Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances”
(4).

29
technology. I noted earlier that the archetypal ghost-human narrative’s dialectic interaction is

powered (transgressed) by a melancholic realization of and yearning for an imaginary

(incomprehensible) condition of wholeness preceding or presumably succeeding the present

state (fragmentation). Following this line of logic, I had also pointed out that the “loss” of

totality that is a harmonic condition in which one is free of the prospect of becoming

permanently alienated from one’s own self (death) is but an illusion, since the loss that is

death is but a projected second-hand experience that one sees only through an ontological

other. This, in turn, means that the loss is in fact not a loss but rather a “lack”—the

melancholic dialectic of being is a constant yearning for the “lack” of an imaginary, different

condition of being without non-being, which forever remains on the hypothetical plane as

long as being itself stands existent as the counterpart of non-being. Should we substitute the

word “being” with reality and “non-being” with unreality or with the imaginary, that

particular strain of potential unreality that hinges upon the tangible grasp of reality, it

becomes clear how humanity’s incessant pursuit of the lack it envisions in its present

condition has been pulling in its past experiences to mobilize, in present tense, a different

future. The power source for this mobilization to realize the unreal on the pedestal of reality,

is technology.

Another crucial component of the ghostly dialectic must be considered at this

juncture: the melancholic ghost-human is not only melancholic but also traumatized. Steeped

in melancholia, the archetypal ghost that resides in the depth of the human psyche falls into a

state of post-traumatic (albeit merely conceptual) repression in order to preserve itself, as

observed earlier, for it perceives the lack of its immortal whole more as a loss in the process

of awakening to its mortality (coming into being). Forcible ontological amnesia takes its toll,

for kinetically a pushing down motion entails a rebound phenomenon—the stronger the thrust,

30
the greater the resistance. Moments in history when the definition of human and reality

undergo paradigm shifts are also the times when the ghost and its story strike back with

greatest vengeance. In Britain for example, the rise of Gothic Literature and Romanticism as

the dark child of the post-enlightenment Europe,28 its continuance into the Victorian era,29

and the bloom of spiritualism leading up to early 20th century show how irrational narratives

particularly abound during distinctive periods that mark an unprecedented degree of

intellectual and material conversion for the human race,30 testifying to the dynamic and

transformative balance maintained within the archetypal ghost dialectic.

The act of pressing the incomprehensive, fragmented, and transgressive ghost down

into the purgatory of oblivion is an artificial maneuver on the side of the conscious being, a

defiance of the law of nature that governs the principle of mortality. The devising of such

means to change the natural status is none other than technological practice. And conversely,

by instigating the rebound of the ghostly shadow that lurks beneath the comprehensible,

wholesome and stable being, technology becomes the very force that brings the entirety of

28
In a historical and critical overview of Gothic literature (Gothic Literature), Andrew Smith explains that the
emergence of Gothic as a literary mode “was given new impetus in the mid-eighteenth century with the
emergence of Enlightenment beliefs that extolled the virtues of rationality. Such ideas were challenged in
Britain by the Romantics at the end of the eighteenth century, who argued that the complexity of human
experience could not be explained by an inhuman rationalism … The Gothic is at one level closely related to
these Romantic considerations” (2). He also adds that philosophical inquiries into the sublime (Kant), terror,
transgressive and frightening feelings (as in Burke) supported this trend, and observes how “this emphasis on
introspection privileges thought and understanding above certain Enlightenment ideas about the presence of an
independent or ‘objective’ reality that can be rationally comprehended” (3). In a separate volume that digs
deeper into the unconscious as the underlying mechanism of the Gothic titled Gothic Radicalism: Literature,
Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis in the Nineteenth Century, Smith even goes as far as to say psychoanalysis, the
“return of the repressed” trope so often associated with the genre, actually owes its origin to the Gothic: “the
Gothic formulates an antidote to the sublime, its tentative development of an unconscious dimension which will
in turn ghost psychoanalysis” (51).
29
“The characteristic medieval motifs of eighteenth-century Gothic gave way in the following century to
Gothic specters discovered haunting the domestic settings of Victorian realism. Ghosts, the uncanny and tyranny
are discovered in the modern city of Jekyll and Hyde or in the tormented ferocity of Heathcliff on the Yorkshire
moors” (Rowland 152).
30
In describing the popularity of Spiritualism in the Victorian era, the authors of The Victorian Supernatural
suggest that “The discovery of supernormal communications in dispersed theaters of empire suggested to some
accumulating evidence of pre-modern powers ‘lost’ to the Enlightenment, but which could be recovered with
sufficient study of primitive society” (205).

31
being (in embrace with its recognition as well as negation) to the fore, acting as the agent of

ontological unconcealment.31 I am using the term unconcealment in reference to Heidegger’s

notion of technology as the unveiler of truth in “The Question Concerning Technology,” as he

states that technology is no mere means, that it “is a way of revealing” (13). However, as

Heidegger points out, there is a distinct line to be drawn between the Aristotelian technê and

modern technology,32 for with the advent of the interactive media, digitalized data storage,

artificial intelligence, and cyborg prosthetics, all of which are ways to extend the human body

and mind beyond the traditional confines of physical and mental subjecthood, technology

takes up an unprecedentedly active role in revealing and realizing the mode of being.

Since the Enlightenment, reason has been lauded as one of the main channels through

which humanity engages with the external world, or in other words, perceives and interprets

reality as the condition of existence. In turn, how one cogitates and locates one’s self within

this reality has constituted one’s understanding of his or her own being. Whereas reason is a

means to parse out reality as it is, imagination is the method with which reality is to be

31
“Truth is primarily a feature of reality—beings, being and world—not of thoughts and utterances. Beings,
etc. are, of course, unhidden to us, and we disclose them. Heidegger later coins entbergen; Entbergung;
Entborgenheit, 'to unconceal; -ing; -ment', since unlike unverborgen, they can have an active sense: 'aléthes
means: 1. unconcealed [entborgen], said of beings, 2. grasping the unconcealed as such, i.e. being unconcealing'
(XXXI, 91). But beings, etc. are genuinely unconcealed; they do not just agree with an assertion or
representation. 3. Truth explicitly presupposes concealment or hiddenness. DASEIN is in 'untruth [Unwahrheit]'
as well as truth. In BT (222, 256f.) this means that falling Dasein misinterprets things. 'Untruth' is not plain
'falsity', nor is it 'hiddenness': it is 'disguisedness [Verstelltheit]' of the truth (XXXI, 91). Later, 'untruth' is still
not 'falsity', but 'hiding, concealing [Verbergung]' (LXV, 362). What conceals is no longer man, but being.
There are two types of unconcealing: (a) of the open, the world or beings as a whole; (b) of particular beings
within this open space. The first type (a) involves concealment: everything was hidden before the open was
established, and concealment persists in that the open reveals only certain aspects of reality, not its whole nature.
The second type (b) involves a concealment that we overcome 'partially and case by case' (LXV, 338f.)” (A
Heidegger Dictionary)
32
Heidegger sees technology, from the perspective of the ancient Greeks (techné, to be precise), as a way of
unconcealing truth (poiesis) rather than a mere act of material manufacturing, and frames it as a “bringing-forth.”
He views modern technology also as a revealing, but distinguishes the way in which the revealing occurs: “the
revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern]” (15), focusing on the aspect of
“storing” energy. The concept of “storage” plays a key role in the later part of the argument, where I look at how
modern technical apparatus (in particular, digital data storage) has come to change our notions of being by
leveling the plain between signifier and signified, embodiment and disembodiment that occurs in the process of
encoding and decoding information.

32
overcome, or simply, changed. And technology is none other than the embodiment and

practice of knowing and making reality as a conscious human being. Throughout the dialectic

gravitation of being, with reality in its tow, technology has enacted the push and pull between

what is and what was, or is to be. The creative and transformative nature of technology is

precisely what powers the gravity that engenders new elements of reality and draws them into

the configuration of the being that is part of, and present in, the state of reality. Located

between reality and unreality, being and non-being, technology may be understood as a

mediator, which is precisely the position Aristotle took in discussing his idea of techné in

Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics,33 the crux of which Felix Guattari concisely captures in

the following words: “Aristotle considers that the goal of technê is to create what nature finds

it impossible to achieve so that technê sets itself up between nature and humanity as a

creative mediation” (38, original emphasis).

The term “mediate” must be taken with a grain of salt, though. Assigning technology

a “mediatory role” in the literal sense would be paradoxical, for there in fact cannot be any

act of mediation between point A and B, as the latter that is unreality and non-being does not,

in the present tense of A, exist. What technology actually does, rather than channeling the

prospect of the unreal into the real, is transform the real into the unreal and the unreal into the

real, by first destroying the real. Technological creation is never a magical conjuration of a

thing out of nothingness; it is always a transgressive process that disintegrates and fragments

preexistent matter. Only then does creation occur, in the form of rearrangement and

augmentation. Of course, complete originality may well be achieved on a metaphysical level,

33
As Aristotle puts it: “All art is concerned with coming into being, i.e. with contriving and considering how
something may come into being which is capable of either being or not being, and whose origin is in the maker
and not in the thing made; for art is concerned neither with things that are, or come into being, by necessity, nor
with things that do so in accordance with nature (since these have their origin in themselves). Making and acting
being different, art must be a matter of making, not of acting” (Nicomachean Ethics Book IV).

33
but such newness would fall under the category of imagination rather than technology.

This transformative property of technological creation is reminiscent of the ghost-

human dialectic, and rightly so, for the traumatized, melancholic being constantly pulls in and

engages with its understanding of the past as well as the envisioned future in an ongoing

procession of change, the dynamic of which is technology in the concrete textures of reality.

However, the understanding of technology as a “channel” cannot be so easily

dismissed, for it alludes to a perspective through which the melancholic being/reality has

been understood as that in mourning. The phantasmal vision of integrity found in such studies

descends from a long tradition of rationalized intellectualism and individualism that leads up

to its breaking point in the early 20th century, which is essentially what the theorized ghosts

are deployed to overcome yet fail to surmount. The basic logic that governs mourning and

melancholia alike is constituted by posing a “better state” of being or reality that is

objectively lost, but is nonetheless to be emulated and retrieved. Here we see a clear desire

for mediation between point A as the current “fallen” state of loss and incompletion and point

B as the integral self in harmony with the beloved other. This is where mourning and

melancholia fundamentally depart from each other. In the former, the drive of desire is an

object-based loss and is therefore a process of cognizing the being of an external object

through its non-being, but what is realized and unconcealed in the latter is the constitution of

the self in perceiving a certain property or characteristic of one’s very own through its

conceptual transposition to an external entity. In this sense, whereas the “mediation” that

takes place in the process of mourning is more a remedying (of the loss) than a mediation, the

melancholic subject calls for a “remediation,” for the projected loss—an aspect of one’s own

self—is buried within one’s self.

These two different yet interconnected notions of technology, that of remediator and

34
remedy, are essentially teleological and hermeneutic as is the metaphorical ghost, and

therefore characterize two dominant modes of technological revealing of being until the

advent of modernity. More crucially, they herald the dominion of disembodied information

over the traditional notion of knowledge in our time, a time in which technology has become

an active enabler of, rather than a mere tool to achieve, a changed state of being. The last

chapter will provide a historical framework of the intellectual and literary history that

undergirds the three national cultures observed in this work as a way of diagnosing how

technology has mediated and remedied the melancholic subject throughout the dialectic

procession of the archetypal ghost, but here I wish to direct the reader’s attention, in

particular, to the rise of technology as a definitive component of the ontological discourse in

our time. Innovations that took place in various fields of science throughout the past century

not only changed the way in which people interact and change the world, but fundamentally

altered the constitution of being and reality.

35
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39
 Chapter 2

From the Ghostly to the Spectral: The Gravitational Force of Technology

The Final Synthesis? Posthuman, Singularity, Ultimate Convergence or Transcendence

In the previous chapter I noted that the original story of human being as the archetypal

ghost is predicated upon an unconscious realization, and survival, of mortality as an

inexorable fate faced by all living entities. The basic premise here is that the physical

component of our existence is perishable, which is why the ghost, whether it be the

immaterial soul or the mind as “a substance distinct from the body” as René Descartes puts it

in his description of the human corporeality,34 emerges as a possibility of continuance

beyond our bodily transience. I explained in the last part of the previous chapter how

technology is the momentum, the force that enables the dialectic of the archetypal ghost and

drives it forward, pulling in and realizing the unreal in its process. However, technology’s

role as mere generator or propulsion mechanism does not affect any fundamental change in

the narrative principle of the ghost-story, for the defining ontological threshold of its being,

namely death, still remains as the ultimate other. Technical maneuvers may push the hither

further, postponing the advent of the yonder. In short, technology enhances the chance of

survival and prolongs the duration of survival, but in itself cannot be survival.

But what if the traumatic step of death could be indefinitely deterred, bypassed, or

even actually overcome? What if the body could be immortal and thereby eradicate the need

for any immaterial transcendence as a safety net for existence, or, going even a step further,

the corporeal could be not forcibly but willingly discarded without any risk of plunging into

the unknown territories of afterlife through the process of complete comprehension and

34
From Description of the Human Body.

40
reproducibility? What if the very thing against which survival is defined—death—could be

fundamentally eliminated? In this chapter, I explore the ghostly dialectic of being through the

lens of technology as its momentum, diachronically identifying three crucial turns whereby

technological advancements reconfigure the transgressive, incomprehensible and fragmented

state of being towards, or prior to, death. In doing so, my focus lies on a particular strain of

technology that had only recently entered mankind’s field of visibility; one that signals the

apogee of its remediatory function by reconfiguring not its exterior conditions but its very

substance itself, changing the “seat” of reality rather than reality itself and consequently

bringing about the ultimate unconcealment Heidegger had directed our attention to, yet never

fully unveiled. A temporal and spatial juncture whereby the human body and the mind are

extended and redefined, the “ghost” and the “machine” losing its binary pull and becoming

open signifiers in a constant loop of remediation: the human-machine interface.

A brief glance at the scientific and technological front in our past century shows us

how far we have come in terms of our aspirations to immortality, or to rephrase, conquering

the three attributes that threaten to dismantle the pedestal of presence. Breakthroughs in

informatics, cognitive neuroscience, medical prosthetics and computer engineering have

continuously expanded the scope of our bodily and mental presence to an unprecedented

extent, bringing the above hypothesis into the range of possible objectives from mere far-

fetched speculation. Mechanical and bio-engineered augmentation, extension, and even

replacement of the body is a realistic venture. The properties of the human mind and body

can be logically mapped out and reproduced though advancements in neuroscience and

genetics, preserved in the form of codified patterns (as in genome researches and DNA

sequencing), and even emulated by artificially created intelligence. Meanwhile, phantasmal

projections of the individual subject in disembodied particles such as recorded voices and

41
images claim autonomous presence parallel to their originators as they occupy our smart

phone and computer screens or speakers. The archetypal ghost as the narrative of being in the

ghost-human dialectic may well have arrived at its grand finale, for as Friedrich Kittler has

noted, “If memories and dreams, the dead and the specters have become technically

reproducible, then the hallucinatory power of reading and writing has become obsolete” (110).

Without the threat of death as an ultimate loss, the narrative of the ghost becomes defunct.

“Our realm of the dead is no longer in books, where it was for such a long time,” (Kittler 110)

because what had been preserved and continued in the form of narrativeness can now be lived

out, whereby the melancholia of being may have found its ultimate resolution. In this chapter,

I take a closer look at the role technology plays in forwarding the ghost-human dialectic.35 I

identify three distinct historical turning points and provide a diagnosis of the present-

progressive state of the dialectic process that firstly accompanies the advent of new

technological apparatuses (namely, human-machine interfaces and digital medai) and

secondly reflects the archetypal ghost’s variegated maneuvers to survive its inherent

transgressivity, incomprehensibility and fragmentation.36

This possibility of technologically powered immortality has been constantly explored

in the sphere of fiction from times unknown, but the 20th century undoubtedly marks its

golden age, a time when science achieves explosive progress both in terms of enhancing the

conceptual and physical reaches of the human body and mind. Sir Arthur C. Clarke for

instance, a towering figure in the genre of hard science fiction, pushes out the frontiers of

evolution to a cosmic scale and signals to an ultimate transcendence of the body or even

individuality in favor of an all-encompassing, omniscient intellect in 2001: A Space Odyssey

35
Focusing on modern technology, a term I will explicate further as the chapter progresses.
36
The periods between each turning point will be referred to as paradigms, for I locate a dominant conceptual
system that undergirds the ontological discourse in the given periods.

42
(1968) as well as Childhood’s End (1953). This theme runs through William Gibson’s seminal

cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, where the founders of a plutocratic family called the Tessier-

Ashpools envision a species-wide integration into a hive-mind like state of totality, while

mankind’s ontological counterpart within the hierarchy of creative extra-species evolution—

human-generated, sentient consciousness simulations in the form of AIs—also aspires to

synchronized existence. Japanese film and anime director Oshii Mamoru even goes so far as

to suggest an inter-species merger towards a synthetic consciousness37 that also harnesses the

organic reproductive programming deeply embedded within the human DNA in his first

theater release version of Ghost in the Shell (1994)38. The newly born entity encountered by

the viewers at the end of this film is a combination of what self-evolutive AIs such as Hal in

2001: A Space Odyssey and Wintermute/Neuromancer in Neuromancer, and the humans in

the previous two works have struggled to achieve: the “end product” of all beings, where the

dialectic of phylogenic evolution and ontogenic development in enhanced bodily and mental

capacity reach a harmonized synthesis.

Of course the idea of the human-machine interface, both on a metaphorical and literal

level, predates the above fictional reflections by centuries. La Mettrie provided a structural

analysis of the human anatomy in light of its mechanistic functionality in the 18th century,39

37
The modifier “synthetic,” however, would be limited in its reference—for the “Puppet Master,” an entity that
verges on what we commonly see as man-made AI yet fundamentally differs in that its sentience (thus, its self-
established qualification as a subject rather than mere object) autonomously grew out of a compilation of neutral
data.
38
The Puppet Master grafts itself to the protagonist Major Kusanagi, who is a cyborg consisting of a
completely mechanized body with her brain as the sole exception. The brain, dubbed “Ghost (Go-su-to)” (a
reference to Ryle’s “Ghost in the Machine”, as is the title of the anime), is the only human part of her makings
which carry the “organic program” (DNA) that governs the mental function and physical propagation (hence,
conceptual and corporeal survival) of the individual. What is to be noted here is that even the brain, that last link
to the “machine” that is the body, is left behind when Kusanagi’s consciousness unites with the Puppet Master
and is transported into the disembodied network of digitized information dispersed about the globe.
39
Machine Man (1748).

43
falling in line with Descartes’ “animal machine.”40 The concept of the “human motor”

prevailed around the turn of the century, the objective of which was to maximize physical

performativity by applying the principles of mechanical engineering to human biology. Ernst

Jünger propounded the strength and endurance of the “machine” as the quintessential

aesthetic of his era, elevating the sheer utility of machine-powered productivity to the level of

a universal subjectivity.41 By the 1980s, the cyborg as the ultimate man-machine

convergence was even hailed as the harbinger of political liberalism by Donna Haraway.42

Notwithstanding the abiding fear of humanity either being stripped of dignity and degraded

into a mere cog in the system as portrayed in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or Charlie Chaplin’s

Modern Times,43 or losing its dominance over other species and falling under the power of

the incomparably efficient new breed that is the machine, fascination with the infinite

potential of speedy physical reinforcement by way of mechanization persists. The threat

posed by being functionally outperformed by machines in turn opened up the possibility of

harnessing the strengths harbored by this newly risen “other,” and at this stage in machine

technology, survival was still the same problem the human race has been tackling throughout

its entire history of existence. Put simply, if the opponent cannot be outraced, outsmart him.

Machines did not think, or feel, and therefore could not wield the ultimately transcendental

power of the ghost (mental qualities / the soul that makes us human according to Descartes,

and allows us to conceptually and collectively survive physical termination), nor were they

capable of exerting any degree of intentional agency, a quality that solely belongs to a

thinking mind. What was left in the wake of the shocking realization that the creature had—at

40
Discourse on the Method (1637).
41
“The Worker: Domination and Form” (1932).
42
“A Cyborg Manfesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” (1991).
43
A concern strongly voiced by opponents of Taylorism or Fordism, as well. See Anson Rabinbach’s The
Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origin of Modernity (1992).

44
least in physical performance—surpassed the creator, then, was to reassert the very property

that defines and initially engendered the creature-creator hierarchy: the power of reason and

its agential force.

The issue at stake at the pre-interface stage of humans and machines, therefore, is

merely a variegated mode of survival that has been already achieved and ceaselessly replayed

since the dawn of history. The fear of conquest or annihilation by this newly risen kind of

being did not bring about any perturbation to the foundational narrative of survival, that of

the archetypal ghost, for the “beyond” point of death still remained untouched, unreachable,

and bound by the carnal stage of being. What was in fact a point of concern, rather, was how

the externalized element of creation—via the metaphorical/functional connection to the

human constitution, namely the body as a machine—could be effectively internalized towards

the greater objective of survival. The human-machine interface, a technological maneuver

devised through the above chain of logic, served as the answer. Advanced medical science

opened up the possibility of literally incorporating machines “into” the human physique.

Thence the second groundbreaking paradigm shift that came about by way of modern

technology.

The term modern technology is essentially ambiguous. Here I use it refer to the

incorporation of technology into the human-ghost dialectic through a physical fusion of the

instrument with its instructor. As mentioned in the previous chapter, primordial technology,

which now generally falls under the category of “tools,” marks the first point of dialectic

movement, for tools—or any form of such intentional, material maneuver—undermines the

stasis of reality and create new objects, new lifestyles, and new possibilities of realizing the

hitherto unreal. In terms of survival, the “instrumentality” of technology, from the moment of

its birth, changed the positionality of being within the larger rubrics of reality from an

45
external perspective, as technically enhanced modes of living improved the probability of

survival on both individual and collective, conceptual and material levels. Memories and

knowledge were passed down through the technology of verbal and textual language,

sheltered environments protected mankind from the inroads of hash nature, and religion as a

logical explanation of world order that predates modern science provided the hope of life

beyond death. What I call modern technology, denoted by the emergence of the cyborg,

reconfigures the very seat of reality, that is, the endogenous “makings” of being and its

reception (realization) of reality, rather than the exogenous conditions of reality and the being

that is nestled within. The gravitational force of the dialectic archetype ghost in the pre-

cyborg stage pulled immaterial unreality, in the form of ideas, into the realm of substantial

presence that the ghost resided within. In contrast, in the post-cyborg mode of being, bodies

that could be reinforced, reproduced, or even replaced includes the ghost itself in this

transformative process, creating a hybrid being that embraces the techniques of warding off

its vanishing point into its composition.

However, this newly devised mode of survival is still limited, or rather, inherently

flawed, for the moment of death may be constantly pushed away from one’s field of empirical

visibility, but never truly abolished. The problem arises from the fact that an “interface”

requires a point of contact between disparate substances or entities that may qualify as either.

Given that the cyborg model relies on the sustainability of the material element of being, one

must conjecture that the exchangeability/reproducibility of our physical parts of the body

indeed ensures eternal life. However, what if the very control center that identifies and

recognizes the parts as a whole is excluded from any and all possibility of such fortification?

What if the very contact point that holds the instrument and its instructor together stands

forever vulnerable to the inroads of time?

46
 The referent here is the brain. In the previous chapter I have discussed how the

abstract properties that define and undergird one’s identity—such as emotion, personality,

intellect and memory—are precisely what enables and constitutes the concept of the “ghost,”

either as an essence of one’s existence or the center point around which all other aspects of

being here and now revolve. We may lose limbs and replace them with prosthetics, implant

pacemakers to supplement dysfunctional hearts, or even remodel our faces, which are the

gateway to and basis of our social existence. But losing one’s brain would be an entirely

different story. Of course, there are tales of and reports on people who have suffered severe

brain injuries and are still functional, albeit in a less than wholesome fashion, as in the case of

Phineas Gage.44 Neurosurgeons operate on countless brains on a daily basis, hacking away at

bits and parts of the very organ we see as the carrier of our minds. However, one must not

forget how Phineas Gage was described as a “completely different person” after the calamity,

having undergone a radical personality change due to the damage he sustained to a certain

area of the brain that is known to govern empathy. The targets of neurosurgeons are

unnecessary or dysfunctional parts that either do not belong to the original constitution of the

given organism (such as tumors) or those that affect the wellbeing of the overall neural

system, and thus must be sacrificed in spite of possible side effects.

The point is that the brain still remains as a sacred ground that cannot be easily

tampered with, where the material and immaterial, substantive and abstract, perceptible and

conceptual are intermingled. As an organic structure, the human brain is inevitably subject to

the erosions of aging. At the current juncture, there have not been any notable breakthroughs

44
Phineas Gage was a railway construction worker who is famous for his miraculous survival of a most
traumatic accident; his head was pierced by a metal rod (1848). He was still a functional individual after his
recovery, but his personality and behavior showed such a drastic change that his acquaintances described him as
a completely different person. See An Odd Kind of Fame: Stories of Phineas Gage, Antonio R. Damasio’s
Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, and D. Draaisma’s Disturbances of the Mind.

47
in medical science that can devise a way to substitute the organic brain matter with any

synthesized substance. The limitations of mechanical reformations of the body, therefore,

does not extend to the seat of agency that recognizes and renders, on a cognitive and

functional level, the other parts of the anatomy a segment of the whole physique. Any

external influences that diffuse one’s lifeline can be prevented and remedied with a steel shell,

but the interface itself is forever bound to the course of nature, the relentless fate of organic

deterioration. Death, hence the rise of the ghost, can be deferred but not eliminated, at least

with the current stage of technological progress.

This is precisely why I identify the invention of computing machines, namely a strain

of technology that emulates not only the material parameters of human functionality but also

purely mental capacities by logically processing abstract and conceptual questions, as the

basis of the third and last (at least, up to this point) paradigm shift in the dialectic of the

archetypal ghost. Prototypical computers such as ENIAC (1946) cannot measure up to even

the most elementary model of modern calculator today, but the realization that a man-made

object—one which consists of lifeless and inanimate matter, at that—could process and even

solve complicated and highly conceptual ideas (such as math problems) was a pivotal event

that could eventually subvert mankind’s ontological positionality. It has been mentioned that,

within the dialectical history of humanity’s station within the greater context of all living

matter, the discerning mind has served as the defining characteristic both in the ontogenic and

phylogenic spheres. The culture, religion, and other forms of technological apparatus by

which we define ourselves as human distinct from other living organisms all spring from

the ability to accumulate information on an independent and collective basis, and advance the

gathered data towards a systemized structure that in turn generates a new kind of system

which disrupts and alters reality. Learning theory used for advanced artificial intelligence

48
development is based on this very model of reorganization and creation from neutral data.

With the touch of the thinking mind, neutral information turns into knowledge, content that

has meaning and applicability towards achieving a certain objective.

Let us, for example, juxtapose an abacus and a calculator. Two beads on an abacus,

put together, can produce the mathematical calculation of 1+1=2. But the hand that moves the

beads belongs to the human user. The reduced spatial proximity of the two separate beads

does not signify anything in itself—it is the user who sees or touches the beads, detects the

change, and interprets this as the equivalent of the mathematical + sign, which in turn

requires the ability to conceptualize and at once navigate quantitative and qualitative

cognition (the two beads are qualitatively identical, and remain independent, but when

grouped together they generate a new category in not degree, but scale.) Meanwhile, in the

case of the calculator, the end result of “2” is generated by the internal operations of the

machine itself. We see the number “2” appearing on the screen, which is not only

quantitatively but also qualitatively and semantically different from “1” and another “1”

merely grouped together. The invisible driver behind the screen is of course the human

programmer who designed and coded the calculation algorithm, but the fact that the

conceptual leap between “1 1” and “2” has been carried out does not change. Regardless of

what goes on in the backstage, the output perfectly simulates a higher level of cognition

which was conventionally attributed to humans and humans alone. The key is performance.

By the same principle, how can one differentiate two superficially identical people

such as identical twins, and discern that they are individuals with minds that operate

differently on a creative basis upon receiving the same input? Because they behave and react

differently. The inner mechanisms of the mind are imperceptible unless they acquire a certain

degree of manifestation. The computing machine emulates the human performance on an

49
objective proof basis, which is the first instance of any non-human entity instantiating the

workings of ratiocination. The Turing Test and the Chinese Room operate on the very same

premise,45 stretching the “performance” criterion even further to undermine mankind’s

monopoly of a reasoning mind.

The example I introduce concerns a most primitive generation of mechanical

computation, and therefore can be easily debunked if it were to be used as evidence of

machines being as smart as humans. Moreover, purely mathematical functions can hardly be

sufficient proof of intellect, for they abide by a strict set of rules and do not diverge from a

predetermined path of logical deduction, which cannot vie with the human brain’s capacity to

negotiate or allow aberrations, combine neutral data and generate patterns, and make

axiological or emotional judgments and choices. Note how “what constitutes the human

being” in this case completely inverts the logic employed in physical human-machine

interface paradigm above. In the case of the latter, the dominant rationale is that humans are

like machines in physical operational principle, the unspoken premise being that what

remains different and therefore makes humans unique is the non-physical element, the

rational agency that directs and generates the mechanical outputs of the body. Meanwhile, the

computer presents a reverse metaphor of “human-like machines,” the gist of which is that the

computing machine can reproduce (at least on the surface level) the inner workings of the

rational mind and the agency to deploy a logical system towards a certain end, but still

remains at the level of mere partial semblance rather than perfect identification due to its

failure to embrace irrational abnormalities.

This shift of perspective sheds light upon a crucial point in our attempt to delineate

45
The Turing Test (proposed by Alan Turing) and the Chinese Room (John Searle) are methods by which one
may determine whether a given entity is a machine or a human being. Roger Penrose provides a concise
description of the two methods in his book The Emperor’s Mind, mentioned in the previous chapter.

50
the “ghost” node in the human-ghost dialectic, for it reveals that what lies beyond the body,

what must survive death as the ultimate fragmentation of being and transgress over to the

realm of sustained existence, is more than a mere mechanistic or teleological formula based

on a fixed directionality: there remain the incomprehensible, unpredictable variables coiled

around the core of human consciousness. In short, the third stage of dialectical shift in the

archetypal ghost narrative is defined by the inversion of the earlier human-machine interface

paradigm. Merely overcoming fragmentation (physical death, hence the departure of the

ghost from its union with the machine/human) or successfully inter-facing (transgressing

from the ghost to the machine/human and vice versa) the I and the other, subject and object

cannot suffice. Overcoming the incomprehensibility of the human mind is yet a dream, for

even its ability to navigate and negotiate the incomprehensible, if not comprehend all that is

unknowable, is far from our scope of conscious understanding.

However, explosive growth in computation theory, computer engineering and

computer language throughout the latter half of the 20th century constantly pushes the

boundaries of these human-like machines ever further, portending the rise of a new breed of

machines that can transgress from the strict boundaries of cosmos to the open plain of chaos,

the final frontier to be conquered in parsing out the mysterious workings of being,

specifically, human being. Therefore the human-machine appears to be signaling towards yet

another, new stage in its role in serving the archetypal ghost dialectic: the two nodes become

completely open signifiers, in terms of physicality and abstraction both. Human-like

machines and machine-like humans infinitely approach each other within and without. But I

don’t propose this as the new, forth paradigm, for this is still a mere prospect, not a tangible

possibility. It is still an ongoing process, which is why we must take a closer look at the

present-progressive aspect of the budding discourse on the posthuman or transhuman.

51
 The recent rise of “posthuman” or “transhuman” discourses, the gist of which is that

modern technology has provided the means to transcend the bodily fetters humanity has been

subject to, attests to this prospect of the new mode of being in the age of mechanical bodies

and embodied spirits. Katherine Hayles compactly describes this trend by saying “a

historically specific construction called the human is giving way to a different construction

called the posthuman” (2). According to Hayles, the posthuman claim can be broken down

into the following sub-theses:

First, the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation,

so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather

than an inevitability of life. Second, the posthuman view considers consciousness,

regarded as the seat of human identity in the Western tradition long before Descartes

thought he was a mind thinking, as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart

trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow.

Third, the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to

manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a

continuation of a process that began before we were born. Fourth, and most important,

by these and other means, the posthuman view configures human being so that it can

be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman, there are no

essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer

simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and

human goals. (2-3)

Preference of an absolute ideal over matter or a radical materialism that sees mental and

spiritual qualities of being as mere ramifications of physical entities and thereby byproducts

of a categorically material homogeneity has always been a strong vein of thought in

52
intellectual history. However, Hayles specifically locates the origin point of posthumanism in

the year of 1945, mapping out the historiography of the disembodied consciousness based on

an expansive research on scientific advancements in the fields of cybernetics. Alleging that

ontological discourses originating in scientific progress have risen and fallen in three waves

that overlap and catalyze one another in the order of their emergence,46 Hayles sees in the

posthumanist discourse a sense of impending transcendence, either of the human body or

physicality as a whole.

Although Hayles herself does not ascribe to this emphasis on disembodied

consciousness, as does many others such as Manuel de Landa who calls forth the idea of

“emergent properties” to debunk the illusion of a transcendental essence that characterizes

posthumanist perspectives,47 her analysis reflects the voices of numerous advocators who see

the “human” as old news. Robert Pepperell wrote in his book The Post-Human Condition that

“we are approaching the electrification of existence” (i), listing newly emergent technologies

such as virtual reality and global communications as forces that had brought forth this change.

He elaborates that “post-humanism” is about the end of an anthropocentric humanism,

evolution, and the way in which we the humans interact with the rest of the world (176). At

times his tone verges on the radically ecocritical, denouncing the dominance of the human

race, yet the emphasis he places on machines, particularly in “The Posthuman Manifesto,”

makes one suspect that he is merely replacing the position humanity has occupied throughout

46
Homeostasis (1945~), self-organization (1960~), and then virtuality (1985~). For further details, see Chapter
1.
47
De Landa directs our attention to the “misunderstandings in the current definition of the goals of Artificial
Life,” using the example of avatars that are capable of replicating not only the appearance, but also behavioral
patterns of its original model. Maintaining that thinking such simulations have, by their complexity, “captured
some of the essence of life, or the formal basis of living processes” is a gross mistake, De Landa says “what this
formulation overlooks is that the nonlinear dynamics underlying such emergent behaviors are a common
property of both living ad nonliving matter-energy”. In short, equating life-like behavior (external
manifestations) to life itself is simply a radically (and erroneously) reductionist move (“Virtual Environments as
Institution Synthesizers”).

53
history with its prized creature (or a mutated form of an offspring with reinforced bodies and

hyped up intellect), the machine.48 Meanwhile, others such as George B. Dyson, while

sharing the posthumanist view of machines as the apogee of Darwinian evolution and

admitting to its mysteries that exceed the grasp of human knowledge, sees the rise of

intelligent machines as the reemergence of Nature (the overarching umbrella under which

humans, non-human living organisms, and artificial mechanisms all fall) over the tyranny of

humanism.49 However, such views ultimately converge upon the notion that the teleological

end point of evolution is where a certain, most uniquely human property—whether it be an

unprecedentedly evolved intellect that emulates that of a machine as in Pepperell’s case or the

will to power and dominance connoted in Dyson’s argument—nullifies the necessity for

boundaries and differences, achieving a state of absolute homeostasis and homogeneity.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil takes a step even further, prophesying the inevitable advent of

an ultimate state of unity in which the Cartesian dualism is not only transcended, but

completely erased through a technologically powered merger of matter and mind. The

mediatory potential of technology is brought to its fullest extent under the banner of

Singularity, leading to the creation of a state of being at once unprecedented and terminal in

its positioning within the ghostly dialectic of life and death, human and ghost, body and mind.

In his own words: “the singularity will represent the culmination of the merger of our

biological thinking and existence with our technology, resulting in a world that is still human

but that transcends our biological roots. There will be no distinction, post-Singularity,

48
In particular, seen in statements such as “In the Posthuman era machines will be Gods,” “Complex machines
are an emergent life form” or “A complex machine is a machine whose workings we do not fully understand or
control” (The Posthuman Manifesto).
49
“Technology, hailed as the means of bringing nature under the control of our intelligence, is enabling nature
to exercise intelligence over us. We have mapped, tamed, and dismembered the physical wilderness of our earth.
But, at the same time, we have created a digital wilderness whose evolution may embody a collective wisdom
greater than our own” (228).

54
between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality” (9, emphasis added).

Yet others reverse-engineer the boundary-blurring brought forth through technology

by focusing on not singularity but heterogeneity as the key in conceiving the human-machine

convergence. For instance, Félix Guattari subverts the commonly accepted categorization of

machines as apparatuses of technology in his essay “Machinic Heterogenesis,” suggesting

that the problems concerning technology are in fact “dependent on the questions posed by

machines” (38). Satisfied neither with the mediatory (thus limiting and instrumental) role of

Aristotle’s techné nor the Heideggarian technology as the unveiler of truth, Guattari

foregrounds the “machine” to redirect our attention to the functionality of technology. The

machinic, “perceived in a constellation of meanings and histories and referents”(38), acquires

the status of a comprehensive reference to beings that are like machines in terms of their

properties, as well as beings of the machine. At once a modifier and modified, the concept of

the “machinic” is inherently boundary-blurring, providing a semantic foundation for its

ontological heterogeneity. Expanding the metaphor of the machine to encompass “technical,

social, semiotic, or axiological” (39) systems as a whole, while also employing the dynamism

of the machine-in-function as the driving force that generates transversal beings, Guattari

asserts that the functional (I read a double-tied signification here; the function could either

mean the mechanics of producing expected results through a set of predefined procedures, or

literally a mathematical function as a framing device) machinic is by nature autopoietic

within the ontological nexus, residing within the constitutive axes of time, space and energy

in reality.50 In short, the heterogeneity of machinic entities, encompassing both genealogy

and functionality as the two crisscrossing threads of ontological positionality (as given vs.

50
Guattari’s attempt here cannot be read apart from the concept of “virtuality” and the “desiring machine” he
co-conceived with Gilles Deleuze in Anti-Oedipus (1972). For more details, see Chapter 3 on Snow Crash.

55
instantiated), becomes a remediatory feedback loop whereby the machinic system will give

birth to machine-generated beings which in turn run on the principle of the system.

Indeed, Gilbert Ryle’s critique of the “ghost in the machine” dogma (the mind-body

dichotomy)51 may be defunct in an age when the properties of the mind and body may in fact

be mapped on an equal plain of reference rather than remain disparate as logically

incompatible categories, the basic premise of the posthuman, transhuman, singularity,

machinic, and many other claims that emphasize the human-machine interface all being that

the divide between the physical and immaterial has been irrevocably blurred. The human has

reached over to the ghost and vice versa in the process of which transgression eventually

becomes unification in the form of an embodied mind as in digitalized and thereby

quantifiable genome maps and electric patterns; incomprehensibility is overcome through

objectified information that erases the need for subjective knowledge; and fragmentation is a

mere stepping stone towards the dominance of one part over another.

The Dialectic Continues: Interactive Technology and Embodied Human Agency

However, the archetypal ghost has not yet reached the end of its shelf life. The

discourses that portend an era of transcendence or convergence are in fact merely a gesture

towards a future state of integrity that chains itself to the teleological instrumentality of being,

as were the metaphoric ghosts that constantly invoke a preexistent innocence before the

conceptual “fall” to its fragmented presence. As I have asserted above, the vision of totality is

51
Ryle defines the dogma of the “ghost in the machine,” namely the notion that there is an incomprehensible,
yet clearly existent property that resides in the depth of our bodily shell. By arguing that attributing physical
presence to mere conduct (such as describing our minds as having their “places”) in language use results in
mistaking behavior for substance: “when we characterize people by mental predicates, we are not making
untestable inferences to any ghostly processes occurring in streams of consciousness which we are debarred
from visiting; we are describing the ways in which those people conduct parts of their predominantly public
behavior” (50).

56
only an illusory other posed to affirm the present progressive state of being. It must be noted

that the ghost and its story is an unconscious survival, rather than a certifiable presence.

Psychologist Paul Bloom explains that our inclination to pose a hypothetical “other” in order

to understand what is here is a natural intuition: “we can explain much of what makes us

human by recognizing that we are natural Cartesians—dualistic thinking comes naturally to

us. We have two distinct ways of seeing the world: as containing bodies and as containing

souls” (Preface xii). Bloom’s point is particularly relevant within the context of the archetypal

ghost, for our inclination towards harboring a dualistic world view does not necessarily mean

the world is dualistic in its actuality. Bloom’s observation on our understanding of afterlife

further supports his point, for he notes that belief in immaterial survival is more a necessity

driven by our inability to comprehend non-being rather than any firm conviction that there

exists an alternative mode of being.52 The incomprehensibility, fragmentation, and the desire

for transgression of the overall state of being including the prospect of death, is a perspective,

not a concrete hurdle to be surmounted by means of technical maneuver. This point becomes

even clearer when we consider the above mentioned thread on how the actual “event” of

death remains forever beyond the empirical horizon.

The homeostatic singularity of a post-corporeal mode of existence, then, can be seen

as a self-contradictory exit strategy that mistakes what is in fact a termination of being (the

event of physical death) as a terminal towards transcendence, basing its logic on a phantom

principle. In other words, we see a hypothesizing of an open system whereby a constituent

sub-system (mind, consciousness, or other abstract properties of being) may persevere

52
“Consider again Descartes’ own intuition that the experience of the body is different from the experience of
the self, of the soul. I can imagine my body being destroyed, my brain ceasing to function, my bones turning to
dust, but it is harder—some would say impossible—to imagine my self no longer existing. This implies that we
should find it easier to understand the cessation of biological function (death of the body) than the cessation of
mental function (death of the soul)” (207).

57
beyond its hardware, when in fact the very act of “opening” the system is paradoxically none

other than its closure. Meanwhile, the deterritorializiation that occurs through the machinic

autopoiesis poses yet another limitation, for erasure of boundaries happens only within the

closed system of the real, thereby excluding the intrusion of or expansion beyond death as an

ultimate “other” (note that in his book Bergsonism, Deleuze had denounced the Bersonian

vision of possibility espoused in Creative Evolution in favor of the virtual, which is the

counterpart of actualization rather than “real”-ization).

What then, has been changed with the wonders of modern technology? An

“unconcealment” of a sort has clearly occurred, for it is an undeniable fact that technology

has transformed the ways in which we view or interact with the world as well as our own

selves. But that which is brought forth is not any one unifying principle through the

remedying touch of technology or the proliferation of many as seen in the remediatory

reflexivity of heterogeneity. What is revealed, then, is the possibility of interaction not only

between, but also within the two nodes of the dialectic formula. The unreal is brought into the

realm of the real, non-being brought into being, and vice versa. And in this process, the

transgressive, incomprehensible, and fragmented present, the being as human, is revealed to

be survival itself rather than the object of survival. The archetypal ghost, as established above,

is an image that arises from humanity’s deep-seated yearning for an illusory state of integrity;

the metaphorical ghost, posthuman or singularity all exhibit a purposeful attempt to repossess

this totality, which is the result of a false consciousness that reflects our denial of an

unconscious awareness of the futility embedded in such pursuits. The loss such projects set

out to recover is, as I have stated, in fact a “lack,” and therefore can never be redeemed. What

can happen, though, is the “filling in” of the lack, the addition of new components—made

possible by the creative and gravitational force of technology. And, this “filling in” is none

58
other than the present-presence of being human: being in present-progressive is survival

made flesh. In contrast, prior models see the degraded state of presence as something to be

survived and remedied for the reinstatement or accomplishment of the past or future. In order

to further elaborate my claim, below I present four points of inter and intra-mediation of

being and reality brought to light through modern technological innovations: cognitive

inversion/symbiosis, cognitive compartmentalization, heterogenic simultaneity, and

consequently the spectral, rather than ghostly — the newly revealed mode of the human

being as the archetypal ghost.

Cognitive Inversion/Symbiosis

Cognitive inversion here refers to the trans-positioning of the conceptual and

perceptual made possible through the prevalence of electronic telecommunication media as a

dominant lifestyle. For the traumatized and melancholic human subject, survival is predicated

upon the repression of the unconscious realization of its alternative, death. In other words, the

unreal yet impending fate of nonexistence must be prevented from making inroads into the

perceptive body that occupies the present-progressive being. However, what if the body can,

or even must, be able to harness instability and disintegrity in order to survive? What if

transgression itself is a mode of survival, rather than something to be survived? This not a

rhetorical question; amidst the deluge of disembodied information and its digitalized

telecommunication as a part of our daily lives, concepts are transformed into percepts,

opening up the ultimate subjective that is the mind to a realm of physical objectivity.

Immaterial visions devoid of material substance are instantiated. Shared sensory inputs as the

foundation of an empirical experience are applied not only to concrete objects, but also ideas.

Dreams and hallucinations have come a long way, for the alternate reality that stands

59
apart from the immediacy of reality can now venture out of one’s isolated mind and rest on a

plain of consensus, most prominent examples being the phantasmagorical projections we see

each day on the computer display. The vast sea of fantastic virtualities we swim through

almost every waking moment (phones, computers, electronic street advertisement boards,

television and radio broadcast, film, etc.) is by no means “real” in the conventional sense, yet

the very fact that these illusions can be empirically “shared” among different bodies enlists

them as, undeniably, a kind of reality. It is an “actively induced enchantment” that allows a

different world order to coexist with the here and now, operating on the principle of the

Todorovian “marvelous” rather than on the ambiguities of the merely fantastic. It is a state

William Gibson described as a “consensual hallucination experienced daily by a billion

legitimate operators” (51) in Neuromancer, referring to the experience of being immersed in

cyberspace. The creative, technologically powered and informed agency of involved subject

is a most important aspect of the variegated realities that transgress from the realm of the

purely subjective into a consensual objectivity, for the very fact that reality can be predicated

upon a congregation of individual selves, each one a conceptual “other” to all the rest, points

to the interactive role of technology operating in its full-drive mode.

Cognitive inversion in terms of fragmentation takes place in the realm of signs. To

delve further into to the architectonics of survival as a whole, we must look at the mechanism

of survival, the tool we use to bridge and facilitate cognitive symbiosis: information

transmitted through language. Language can be a categorical concept—all tools for

communication, encompassing the visual, textual, verbal, bodily, auditory, and all other

sensory perception and conveyance of information, but here I specifically refer to verbal and

textual language that requires a semiotic system. There is nothing notably new about the

importance of language in itself. What demands our notice here is that the mechanism of

60
communication is also subject to a cognitive inversion whereby abstract semantics is

transformed into a tangible, perceptible system of semiotics embodied in a new form of

universal yet never perceptively present language, specifically within the context of digital

media enhanced culture—the binary code. The operational mechanism of computers and all

advanced mechanical aids is material; the basic unit of bits that constitute other, more

complex programs in the motherboard of any advanced machine is a regulated string of

repeated electric patterns. This basic pattern is as similar as semiotic language can ever get to

the functional mechanism of our thoughts; the sensory percepts that travel through our body

to reach the brain and eventually enter the sphere of cognitive awareness consist of a rapid

succession of electric signals fired though our neurons, the construct of which bears uncanny

resemblance to the binary code structure of the bit rate system.

Perceptualized, materialized language mechanism leads us to the third point of

cognitive inversion: what goes on in terms of the incomprehensibility of survival. Of course

we are aware of the fact that certain qualities of our physical and even mental components

may be separately portrayed through technological apparatuses, but it would be absurd to

assume that because our voices and images could be recorded and replayed, and the avatars

we select and use in video games can still exist on their own while we are away from the

computer,53 or that we ourselves are dissolved and scattered among variegated modes of

virtual self-representations. Nor do we mistake such disembodied fragments as functional

individuals, or claim to completely understand what lies beneath the interactive embodiment

53
In fact they may physically, for the program that constitutes the avatar or any other form of virtual
representation does not necessarily vanish the moment we sever our connection to the net. However, the role or
identity it plays out or portrays remains in suspension when the user as the puppet master vacates the premises.
The puppet remains as a “closed system” without the agency that drives its present-progressive mode of being,
an object rather than a subject, in such case. One may recall Gibson’s comparison of ROM (read-only memory)
and RAM (random access memory) structures in Neuromancer; the difference between the two explains why
Dixie Flatline (a reconstruction of a dead hacker’s memory and thought patterns) is a “structure,” whereas
Neuromancer (a self-sentient AI) refers to and conceives of itself as a “personality.”

61
of perceptive conceptualization machines. Disenchantment no longer applies to a world

where the “possibility of understanding” is held back by the snowballing body of knowledge

and information packed into even the simplest technical devices that demand impossibly vast

amounts of time and effort in order for them to be fully understood, but the important

difference we must see in the present mode of technological incomprehension is that it is

based on an unconscious awareness of our inability to comprehend. We can still use various

devices that make our lives easier without knowing the intricate mechanism of its internal

functionality. What we need to know is its “embodied” functionality, what we perceive, and

act upon.

Cognitive Compartmentalization

Thus, interactive perception as embodied conception (in the bringing-forth of how

transgression, fragmentation, and incomprehensibility have become a way of living) survival

itself, rather than a state to be remedied or overcome. But that is not all. Here we move on

from inversion to compartmentalization to observe how the boundaries between the real and

non-real are transgressed when humanity’s unconscious (or using Paul Bloom’s words,

“intuitive”) understanding of itself as a traumatized, melancholic subject weighed down by

the cognitive discrepancy between the impossibility of comprehending death and the body’s

inexorable fate of perishment is, with the aid of telepresence technology, transported to the

realm of the nonconscious. In Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Brian

Masumi writes that “Nonconscious is a very different concept from the Freudian unconscious

(although it is doubtless not unrelated to it)… the differences are that repression does not

apply to nonconscious perception and that nonconscious perception may, with a certain

amount of ingenuity, be argued to apply to nonorganic matter” (16).

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 The unconscious signals to a state of latency in which the bodily experience has

become aware but not properly processed and incorporated into the meaning-sets that

constitute the conscious mind’s view of the world. In other words, a lapse occurs within the

mind, pertaining to a topographic categorization of different functions of our mentality based

on their relations to the outer world. Meanwhile, when a given piece of sensory data remains

within the confines of perception and does not enter into the relational chain of temporal

continuity whereby one is “aware,” or fails to establish the relational connections with other

perceptions that William James sees as the seedbed of pure experience,54 it is relegated to the

domain of the nonconscious. Here, the “gap” is located between the body and the mind,

whereby the body takes on a mind of its own. Referring to Benjamin Libet’s famous

experiment in the 1970s in which he proved how there exists a half-second time lapse

between the brain’s physical perception of an event and a conscious awareness of the sensory

data input, Brian Massumi points out that there is an “incipiency of mindedness in brain

matter” (195). The nonconscious resides in this split-second of darkness where matter

operates in the absence of the mind: “all awareness emerges from a nonconscious thought-o-

genic lapse indistinguishable from movements of matter” (195).

The important point here is his insight regarding how the rise of digitalized

54
In “Does Consciousness Exist?”, the opening essay of his book Essays in Radical Empiricism, William James
explains that “if we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff
of which everything is composed, and if we call that stuff 'pure experience,' the knowing can easily be explained
as a particular sort of relation towards one another into which portions of pure experience may enter. The
relation itself is a part of pure experience; one of its 'terms' becomes the subject or bearer of the knowledge, the
knower, the other becomes the object known” (4). Taking a radical turn from his empiricist predecessors by
claiming that consciousness cannot “exist,” James claims that the empirical experience undergirding the state of
being conscious can only arise from a continuity of materially grounded events that inter-define one another. In
other words, consciousness is neither substance nor concept, it is a relation: “Consciousness connotes a kind of
external relation, and does not denote a special stuff or way of being. The peculiarity of our experiences, that
they not only are, but are known, which their ‘conscious’ quality is invoked to explain, is better explained by
their relations—these relations themselves being experiences—to one another” (25, original emphasis). Thus,
“That entity [consciousness] is fictitious, while thoughts in the concrete are fully real. But thoughts in the
concrete are made of the same stuff as things are” (37, original emphasis).

63
information technology and its popularization through media interface have expanded the

role of nonconscious perception in our daily lives. We may hear what we hear and see what

we see, which is no different from the ways in which our predecessors from centuries ago

would have lived, but it must be noted that the layers upon layers of cognitive transposition

present day media involves by far exceeds the breadth and depth of perceptive interaction in

any previous timeline. The simplest image we see on the computer screen in fact consists of

at least five stages of intricate encryption and decryption that requires the highest level of

cognitive abstraction and instantiation, beginning with the binary codification (a linguistic

abstraction in itself) of a given set of sensory percepts, which is then further complicated into

various kinds of computer languages and functions. The thus disembodied and objectified

information is eventually transposed on to a myriad of display terminals, perceived by the our

body as a physical receptacle, reconfigured into a series of electric shocks and pauses through

our nervous system, andonly then, recognized as a meaningful event or entity by our

discerning minds. However, as noted above, the eventuality of the last stage does not always

coincide with the occurrence of its former four steps, for we do not consciously register

everything we see or implicitly know as part of an empirical construct. A most useful

example in our everyday lives would be our inability to remember and thereby incorporate

past instances that may or may not be stored in our bodily container of the brain back into the

present context of life, all that is going on around us in a given frame of time. Aristotle

argued that remembering involves, unlike Plato’s notion of memory as a block of wax for

inscription of events55 or St. Augustine’s storehouse,56 a willful exercise of one’s

55
From Plato’s Theaetetus. According to Plato, “memory is a block of wax, and perception is a seal that stamps
itself in the wax more or less perfectly. Or, the mind is an aviary, empty in childhood, but filled by the time a
person has grown up. Hence, the pursuit of knowledge is of two kinds: “…one kind is prior to possession and
for the sake of possession, and the other for the sake of taking and holding in the hands that which is possessed
already”.

64
awareness.57 The “agency” of recollecting disparate data segments and organizing them into

a coherent narrative is precisely what the conscious mind exerts, and without it, physical

perceptions remain caught in the purgatory of the nonconcious. In this light, cognitive

compartmentalization between the perceiving body and cognizing mind is the very

springboard of agential survival in our time.

Heterogenetic Simultaneity

The third point I wish to make, that of heterogenetic simultaneity, springs from the

cognitive inversion that takes place within and without the textures of reality and being as

observed above. The symbiotic nature of survival and its nonconscious mode of processing

actively calls for a simultaneous juxtaposition of various aspects of our (non)being and

(un)reality. The way in which we, to borrow William Gibson’s term from Neuromancer,

constantly “flip” between different modes of engagements with concrete and consensus

realities (multitasking with different devices or simply surfing into and jacking out of the net)

provides us with a glimpse into the dynamics of simultaneous modes of being harnessed into

one through the state of nonconscious information processing as an actively induced strategy

in the information age. Kristin Veel’s article “Information Overload and Database Aesthetics”

for instance, in addressing the issue of this dispersed presence among variegated modes of

reaility/being, foregrounds the idea of “distraction” and “attention.” She tells us how the

proliferation of narratives out of joint in our time may be a reflection of the way in which we

arrange and consume information, subverting the commonly accepted dichotomy between

56
From The Confessions. (metaphors of memory used in The Confessions include buildings, storehouses, caves,
treasure chambers.) St. Augustine believes “not all memories come from sense impressions (e.g. knowledge of
math formulas). He therefore disagrees with Aristotle and takes a Platonic approach here, arguing that laws and
other abstractions are present in our memories from birth, though hidden very deep. In his view, the disciplines
of science and philosophy literally work to pull these memories out of us.”
57
For more details, see Chapter 4 on Wonderland.

65
distraction and attention. Veel uses the term “information overload” to indicate, taking a step

away from the idea of “excess” discussed above in association with the term, a state of

unfamiliarity, noting that “the experience of information overload involves unfamiliarity with

sensory and cognitive inputs as much as their volume and intensity” (309). The ability to

process this sense of unfamiliarity, ironically, may be precisely what enables our generation

to maintain the paradoxical state of attentive distraction.

Communications scholar and a pioneering researcher in the field of virtual reality,

Jeremy Bailenson, concurs with Veel’s observation using the example of multitasking: “we

are often mentally in more than one place at the same time, or at least traveling back and

forth between many places psychologically very quickly, whether text messaging in movie

theaters or chatting on the phone while driving a car” (151). Of course, not everyone sees this

propensity to multitask as a positive phenomenon. The fact that our generation is adept at

multi-tasking and synchronization, which attests to our ability to horizontally reconcile

different modes of engagements with a given material, could mean vertically “delving in” to a

given material has become harder than ever. Communications scholar Clifford Nass is

convinced that “productivity and efficiency [a common myth about heavy multi-taskers who

can do so much in such a short span of time] are the illusions” (57). Findings in Clifford and

his colleagues’ research titled “Cognitive Control in Media Multitaskers” indicate that “heavy

multitaskers are actually prone to distractions and irrelevant information and perform worse

on tests designed to measure their ability to focus and successfully switch among tasks” (57).

The argument drawn out from here is that the tendency to perform and prefer lateral

workflows, a by-product of digital and electronic media with an unprecedented degree of

processing power and juxtapositional interfaces that promote a speed and motion-oriented

involvement (the multi-window interface of web browsers is a good example), undermines

66
one’s ability to (and leaves no time for one to) actually “engage with” a single task, depriving

us of room or time for the “delving inward” mode of reading and thinking.

However, following Veel’s line of logic, “ubiquitous digital information technology”

could have rendered “the ability to focus on more than one thing at the same time” (310) a

precondition rather than the inhibitor of concentration, for disembodied, decontextualized

information in contrast to knowledge depends on accessibility. In order to access a given

piece of data, one must recognize the existence of the object based on a codified order of its

arrangement within the vast reserve of the archive, rather than actually comprehending its

properties. Veel’s remark that “the faculty of attention and the archive point to a shared

preference for simultaneity over selection” (31) may be understood in this context of

information taking over the position knowledge had held earlier in history. Information turns

our attention to the difference among various contents that surrender to one’s grasp by way of

comparing and contrasting, whereby the discerned object remains distinct from the agent that

exerts the agency. Meanwhile, knowledge requires a kind of merging with the content,

erasing the boundaries between the cognizer and the cognized in the process of the subject’s

making the object part of its own constitution. What is described here is precisely how the

nonconscious operates, whereby the physical process of leveraging data takes over its

abstract meaning. Here, the act of signification is the key, as the emptied out signifier that is

the data (in contrast to knowledge as meaning-laden reference) allows a simultaneous

coexistence of the non-being and being, reality and unreality.

A closer look at Guattari’s vision of the machinic in “Machinic Heterogenesis”

further explicates the point on simultaneity based on a heterogenetic (not heterogeneous)

system of signification. As he claims, the structuralist notion of the signifier would not fit in

with Guattari’s approach to the “machinic,” for the phylogenetic and ontogenetic

67
constellation of meanings and their formal manifestations refuse to be pinned down with any

given semiotic formula. The signifier that is the machine constantly floats about among the

axes of being (energy, time, and space), thereby acquiring the status of what I call a “slant”

signifier, slipping and morphing through the process of “open” autopoiesis as Guattari would

put it. But I suspect that this demonstration of the signifier’s multivalence, while weakening

the despotism of the signified, may fall short of completely subverting the semantic ties

between the signifier and the signified. The “machine” as the signifier may stretch itself out

towards countless directions, forming neither dialectic nor representative nodes of

transvalence among themselves, but the central premise of the “machine as concept” (despite

Guattari’s attempt to deconstruct this very claim) still remains intact.

Guattari’s example of the lock and the key, ironically, appears to support this view,

for despite the fact that the lock-key combination may phylogenetically and ontogentically

evolve—not in the sense of progressing towards functional betterment but more as

accumulative change that reflects its practical usage within the given context—through

technological augmentation and material wear and tear, its fundamental reason-for-existence

is a fixed point of reference. The lock and the key are, essentially, instruments that either

block or grant access, regardless of their shape, composition, or state. In this light, I can see

Guattari’s conceptualization of the machinic as indeed being heterogeneous, yet cannot

accept his implication that it may also be “heterogenic” (46). I also agree with Guattari on

that the Lacanian “chain of signifiers” does not hold up in the world of the machinic, for the

linear image of the chain is fractured and fractal-ed (another image Guattari invokes) in the

vast plain of virtualities, but this multitude appears to be signaling towards “chains (plural) of

signifiers” instead of abolishing the chain itself, revolving around a point of conversion that

is the signified. There is no need to go as far as Heidegger’s “truth” in “The Question

68
Concerning Technology” —the Concord (jet) may rise out of diverse threads of actualized

conditions, but it is still there to “transport.” Therefore, I would say, Guattari’s machinic

indeed comes close to a heterogeneous (different in their manifestation, not configuration)

system of signification in which various signifiers (that is the machine) slant towards and out

from the signified (meaning), but still differs from the heterogenetic (different in origin,

hence, ontologically disparate) simultaneity I see in the open system of information archives.

If the heterogeneity of various entities and events and their spatially simultaneous

existence through the constellation of data as open signifiers underline the interactive

function of technology between the archetypal ghost as the human and the external world, the

part that pertains to interaction “within” emerges out of the necessity for a temporal

simultaneity in the process of abstraction and embodiment (which are of course, two

conceptually heterogenetic categories). Hayles, while mapping out an elaborate

historiography of how the posthuman discourse has risen to popularity, herself called for the

re-embodiment of being, stating that:

If my nightmare is a culture inhabited by posthumans who regard their bodies as

fashion accessories rather than the ground of being, my dream is a version of the

posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being

seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that

recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that

understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on

which we depend for our continued survival (5).

However, re-embodiment is in fact unnecessary, for the body component has never been

actually lost, nor will it ever be eliminated. It is merely nonconscious.

The ghost-story and its ghostliness in our time thus exist in a state of not

69
hierarchically subsuming but interactive infringement, a dialectic whereby being, in specific

the being of human and human reality, are revealed to be spectral. Spectral rather than

ghostly or ghost-like, for the spectral is not a mere adjective form of the specter that is a

synonym of the ghost but is a state of being “of or pertaining to the spectrum of a

transformation” (“Spectral” OED). The spectral connotes a “process of change” that

presupposes an open system of simultaneity, by which the body and the mind, the human and

the ghost, must coexist on a leveled plain of reference. This is made possible by the

gravitational force of technology and an actively asserted agency that holds the disparate

entities together in a present-progressive mode of survival.

70
 Works Cited

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Benjamin, Walter. Selected Writings: Volume 1 1913-1926. Cambridge: Belknap Press of

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Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. Mineola, New York: Dover, 1998.

Blascovich, Jim and Jeremy Bailenson. Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eterenal Life, New

Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution. New York: William Morrow,

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Bloom, Paul. Descartes’ Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes

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Deleuze, Gille and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. New

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Deleuze, Gille. Bersonism. New York: Zone Books, 1988.

Descartes, René. “The Description of the Human Body.” The World and Other Writings. Ed.

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Dyson, George. Darwin among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence. Reading,

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Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1994.

Guattari, Félix. “Machinic Heterogenesis.” Reading Digital Culture. Ed. David Trend.

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Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature,

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Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. New York:

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 Harper & Row, 1977.

James, William. Essays in Radical Empiricism. New York: Longmans, Green, and co., 1912.

Kittler, Friedrich, Dorothea von Mücke, and Philippe L. Similon. “Gramophone, Film,

Typewriter.” October 41 (1987): 101-118.

Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York:

Viking, 2005.

Landa, Manuel De. “Virtual Environments as Institution Synthesizers.” International

Symposium on Electronic Art. The European Graduate School, 1992. Web. 21 Nov.

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Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC:

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Plato. Theaetetus. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. The Internet Classics Archive. Web. 1 Dec. 2008.

Pepperell, Robert. The Post-Human Condition: Consciousness beyond the Brain.

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Stephenson, Neal. In the Beginning …Was the Command Line. New York: Avon Books,

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 Chapter 3

The Space “between Material Signifiers and Signifying Materialities”:

Language and Being in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash58

Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) is a post-cyberpunk novel set in an alternative

hyper-capitalistic present, where a virtual reality world called the Metaverse serves as an

escapist haven from the dreary reality of poverty and violence. The story revolves around a

computer virus called Snow Crash, which scrambles the human brain upon sensory contact or

even through physical injection. The underlying mechanism here is that all language is

essentially code, and therefore holds a deep-seated compatibility across all formal and

semantic barriers in its primitive form—the binary code system.

While Stephenson’s innovative fusion of computer science, human physiognomy,

and semiotic theory gained popular and critical traction, the mechanistic logic of seeing the

human body and mind as mere hardware and software of a biological information processor,

and disregard for the hermeneutic component in linguistic communication found in the

“biological language contagion” idea, met with mixed responses. Walter Benn Michaels

criticized Snow Crash for promoting a divorce between meaning and form by portraying

information as an empty husk that bypasses yet ironically controls cognition: “So a world in

which everything—from bitmaps to blood—can be understood as a "form of speech" is also a

world in which nothing actually is understood, a world in which what a speech act does is

disconnected from what it means” (69).59 Meanwhile, Katherine Hayles focuses on how the

performative aspect of language in Snow Crash demonstrates the meaning and impact of

58
Quoted from Katherine Hayles’ comment on the human-machine motif in Snow Crash: “The tangled loops it
[the human-computer analogy] creates between material signifiers and signifying materialities” (278). How We
Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics.
59
From The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (2004).

74
form itself rather than its semiotic function: “saying is doing” (278)60 in virtual reality, a

world where the act of writing code equals making things happen or be.

I assert that Stephenson uses the reductionist formulae of humans = machines, raw

biological stimuli = apperception, and signifier (form devoid of meaning) = signified (being
61
as meaning ) in Snow Crash more as conceptual vaccines than literal creeds. The virus can

directly affect only those who actually understand binary code due to their professional

expertise such as hackers and programmers, and require biological substantiation to spread

among laymen. The universal and absolute language the virus represents is a self-negating

paradox, for it annihilates communication instead of perfecting it. The individual and

conscious agents to mediate, or to be mediated among, dissipate into the hoard of hive-

minded beasts they have become.

In the previous chapters, I introduce the image of the “archetypal ghost” to explain

how the ontological gist of being is a universally shared narrative of life, death and beyond,

and is therefore inherently fragmented, transgressive, and incomprehensible. Like a specter of

a once whole but now disembodied entity that crosses over to and haunts the realm of the

living, the concept of being is predicated on one’s realization of his/her mortal fate as the

ultimate fragmentation, marred by death that is an ever unempirical yet crucial part of our

lives, and transgressively desirous of existence beyond the point of extinction. As the content,

form, and act of this primitive tale, language shares its ghostly properties. And in turn, it is

this very imperfection of language and the agency it propels us to exert in order to bridge the

ontological and epistemological schism among heterogeneously and simultaneously extant

subjects that make us and enable us to survive as human. In this Chapter on Snow Crash, I

60
From How We Became Posthuman.
61
The term “being” I use throughout the chapter means a present-progressive (~ing) mode of material existence,
similar to Heidegger’s concept of Dasein in Being and Time. I am still referring to humanity as the subject of
being in most cases where I omit the modifier “human.”

75
explore how our use of digital media technology and its analogy to human language reify the

role of agency as the result and transgressive survival of the imperfect, incomprehensible

being that we are.

I begin with a historical and stylistic overview of Snow Crash’s generic traits,

moving towards a theoretical discourse on the meaning and mode of signification as act in the

age of cyberculture in reference to Félix Guattari’s concept of the “machinic” and Katherine

Hayles’ “posthuman.” Metaverse and the Snow Crash virus will be the two key subjects of

discussion throughout the textual analysis that follows, supported by comparative readings of

other works such as The Matrix and William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy.62 I will also observe

the hierarchical structure of computer languages to highlight Stephenson’s emphasis on the

plasticity and ambiguity of language as a marker of human agency.

From Hacker Punks to Cybernetic Heroes: The Evolution of Cyberpunk

To better understand the human-machine motif in Snow Crash in relation to the

stylistic and historical legacy the novel originated from, we should briefly overview its

generic traits. The term “cyberpunk” was first brought to the attention of theliterary world by

the writer, editor, and cultural critic Bruce Sterling. In his preface to Mirrorshades: The

Cyberpunk Anthology (1986), a collection of short stories by a cache of authors whose works

focus on futuristic visions of intelligent machines and cybernetically enhanced humans,

Sterling establishes the socio-historical conditions from which the collection came: “technical

culture has gotten out of hand. The advances of sciences are so deeply radical, so disturbing,

upsetting and revolutionary, that they can no longer be contained. They are surging into

62
The Sprawl Trilogy is a three-volume series of fiction by Gibson: Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986)
and Monalisa Overdrive (1988). The novels can be read as independent stories, but the setting remains grounded
in the same spatial scope called “the Sprawl” (a giant megalopolis that spreads over half the eastern coastline in
the North American continent) with occasional overlaps in characters and their life paths.

76
culture at large; they are invasive, they are everywhere. The traditional power structure, the

traditional institutions, have lost control of the pace of change” (xii). In response to this trend,

Sterling argues, cyberpunk arose as a subgenre of speculative fiction reflecting a socially

conscious cultural movement: “For the cyberpunks … technology is visceral … it is

pervasive, utterly intimate … Certain central themes spring up repeatedly in cyberpunk. The

theme of body invasion: prosthetic limbs, implanted circuitry, cosmetic surgery, genetic

alteration. The even more powerful theme of mind invasion: brain-computer interfaces,

artificial intelligence, neurochemistry—techniques radically redefining the nature of

humanity, the nature of the self” (xiii).63

Writers prior to the formal birth of cyberpunk—most representatively Philip K.

Dick64—have dealt with similar topics and tropes, but William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984)

is conventionally seen as the inaugural work of cyberpunk fiction, effectively embodying the

genre traits and concerns Sterling sketched out above. Gibson’s greatest feat, in addition to

his eerily accurate foresight as to how the internet would occupy such a central presence in

the coming years, is in that his stylistic sophistication earned literary as well as public

recognition for the theme of the human-machine interface (and even possibly conversion).

Pairing dazzling futuristic urban landscapes reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner with the bleak and harsh yet pensive tone of Chandleresque

63
For more background on cyberpunk, see: Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier (1991);
Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment (1995); Postmodern Sublime:
Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (1995), etc.
64
In fact literally all the themes Sterling mentions in the above quote have been already explored by Philip. K.
Dick, but his works were too ahead of his time in order for them to have had any tangible socio-cultural impact
beyond the reach of a select readership. Representative works include numerous short stories and novels such as
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Ubik (1969), A Scanner Darkly (1977), VALIS (1981), etc.

77
noir,65 Neuromancer heralded the advent of the highly networked society we now live in

from a dark, wary perspective.

Snow Crash, however, often dubbed “post-cyberpunk,” reflects the changing

dynamics of technological intermediation in our everyday dealings with the human-machine

interface since the popularization of digital media, in particular the dynamics between

humans and computers as “thinking machines.” In contrast to a sense of resignation towards

the dehumanizing effects of mechanized bodies, paranoiac fear towards the rise of intelligent

machines that threaten to outperform the human race and consequently render us defunct in

both our functionality and physical existence, and the odor of social decay that thickly hangs

over their predecessors in the ‘80s, Stephenson’s world bustles with jest, flicking an

appreciative nod towards the “punkish” witticism of Gibson’s snarky cowboys while

embracing the cyber-spatial settings as a mode of life rather than its lamentable degeneration.

The opening lines in the two seminal works each in the subgenres of cyberpunk and

post-cyberpunk fiction, Gibson’s Neuromancer and Stephenson’s Snow Crash, are

symptomatic of this transition. Note the grandiose language of the first few lines in Snow

Crash, portending the opening of an epic adventure: “The Deliverator belongs to an elite

order, a hallowed subcategory. He’s got espirt up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry

out his third mission of the night” (1). These three sentences foreshadow the state-or-art

hyperbole that defines Stephenson’s stylistic trait in this novel, for later this dramatic title

called “Deliverator” turns out to be an aggrandized reference to a part-time pizza delivery job.

It is indeed an elite order, though, for “Pizza delivery is a major industry” (2); people

matriculate in mafia-run pizza universities for full four-year terms to learn all about the

65
Gibson sees himself more as the successor of Dashiell Hammett than Raymond Chandler, but his lyrical style
and tough, street-smart yet pensive and essentially moral characters bear greater affinity to Philip Marlowe than
Sam Spade. For a full account of Gibson’s interview, see:[ http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-
art-of-fiction-no-211-william-gibson].

78
complicated industry, “knowing more about pizza than a Bedouin knows about sand” (3)

when they eventually emerge out of the system. This grand mission of our Hiro Protagonist—

literally the “protagonist” and “hero” of the novel, a name that is in itself a testimony to

Stephenson’s skillful hand at packing racial concerns, genre-homage and linguistic pun into a

single appellation66—turns into a tragicomic adventure, and he ends up losing his job, the

pizza, and even the delivery car. Through this short opening episode, the readers are

effectively but indirectly and humorously introduced to the caustic state into which the

economy has fallen. Over a short span of eighteen pages that cover the pizza-epic,

Stephenson subjects the reader to a kaleidoscopic vision of privatized territories serving as

ruinous relics of the sovereign nation state, corporate-owned highways that meticulously

dictate the users’ mobility, the absence of public order evidenced in skate-boarding couriers

who leech onto and disrupt automobile traffic, and rigid bureaucratic guidelines (deliver in 30

minutes or disaster beyond economic loss will ensue in the form of Mafia persecution) that

verge on the absurd. However, despite all the adversities that hinder Hiro’s every step towards

achieving his goal, he maintains control over his body and will, escaping unscathed and

whole albeit financially destitute. In short, the world has gone amok and technological

progress not only assists but complicates, but life is life, and we carry on.

In contrast, the landscape that unfolds before our minds’ eye when Neuromancer’s

curtain rolls up is bleaker than ever. See the opening sentence: “The sky above the port was

the color of television, tuned to a dead channel” (1). Note the inverted order of mimetic

hierarchy in this description: the sky is like television, Nature imitating the artificial, and

66
Hiro’s father is an African American, and his mother is Japanese; in earlier cyberpunk novels, protagonists
bore the characteristics of an anti-hero; Hiro is a generic Japanese name, but its pronunciation is identical to the
English word “hero.”

79
what is more, the latter is in an undesirable (“dead channel”) and dysfunctional state as a

technological apparatus. This is because in the spatial setting for this scene, the Sprawl, there

remains no Nature to speak of, no natural “body” other than the cybernetically engineered to

allow unmediated perception. Case—the protagonist, an unemployed and penniless hacker

like Hiro in Snow Crash—excuses himself to a disinterested audience: “It’s not like I’m using

… It’s like my body’s developed this massive drug deficiency” (1). He is not “using,” a

condition that denotes involuntary substance addiction but also connotes a sense of agency

that initiated the dependence—“his body” is calling for a chemical supplement out of its own

will, at once depriving Case as the subject of agency and consequently alienating him from

his own body. This one line shows the extent to which technology has come to control and

dehumanize. Neurologically sabotaged in a botched operation, Case is cut off from his life

line, the ability to project “his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination

that was the matrix” (5) through a cybernetic interface called the “deck” (equivalent to the

computer terminal in our reality). Marooned in a world where there exists only impaired

Nature and no pure mind-space, which he envisions in the network of computer-mediated

communication and presence, Case is described to have fallen “into the prison of his own

flesh,” for to his mind, “the body was meat,” (6) a statement that proclaims his ultimate

contempt for the organic and natural. Case’s surroundings are not so friendly either. Ninsei, a

black market town he resides in as an ineffectual ex-hacker, “wore him down until the street

itself came to seem the externalization of some death wish, some secret poison he hadn’t

known he carried” (7). Dysfunctionality erases the reason for existence in Case’s world;

unlike Stephenson’s jovial gamer Hiro, Case has no life outside the social machine. Five

pages into the book, readers are already weighed down by a sense of futility and deterioration

80
permeating the individual as well as the collective.

A juxtaposition of this desolate atmosphere that governs Neuromancer and the

humorous overtone in Snow Crash shows how over a period of eight years, the punks in the

cyber-age have indeed come a long way. However, the transformation of cyberpunk

narratives stretches far beyond the boundaries of mere stylistic and thematic evolution, for

although respectively set in a fictional near-future and an alternate present, these two

novels—as well as other works that wear the label of cyberpunk—reflect the concrete here

and now in which they were conceived. Extra-diegetic factors strongly play into this change

in mood and tone, reflecting the social milieu these two works originate from. Neuromancer’s

pessimistic view of the social machinery, the future of capitalism, and techno-orientalist67

portrayals of Japanese presence, all come from corporate America’s growing fear of the

economic and technological challenges posed by newly rising powers in the East, and the

ever increasing political tension with the other side of the Iron Curtain in the early to mid

‘80s. On the other hand, Snow Crash arrives in the early ‘90s right after the fall of the Berlin

Wall, victory in the Gulf War, and the collapse of Japan’s economic bubble (1986-1991).

Tides appeared to have turned in favor of the U.S.’s politico-economical creeds, signaling

towards the rosy prospects of Silicon Valley’s impending glamour days. Suspicion towards

the system still holds, as seen in Stephenson’s parody of the Federal Government’s

bureaucratic inefficiency or privatized “burbclaves” (suburban clusters owned and guarded

67
David Morley and Kevin Robins’ article titled “Techno Orientalism” provides an accurate and detailed
explanation: "Western stereotypes of the Japanese hold them to be sub-human, as if they have no feelings, no
emotions, no humanity ... Japan has come to figure in our cultural unconscious as the symbol of barbarism …
Japan is seen as the society where technology and rationalization have fused perfectly. It is now virtually
synonymous with the technologies of the future—Japan is seen as the society where technology and
rationalization… As the dynamism of technological innovation has moved eastwards, so have these new
technologies become subsumed into the discourse of racism. As these technologies have become associated with
Japanese identity and ethnicity, they have reinforced the image of a culture that is cold, impersonal and
machine-like. The barbarians have now become robots.” Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic
Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries (172).

81
by corporate franchises) and highways as examples of unruly capitalism and ineffectual

governance.68 But what we sense in Snow Crash is more cynicism than outright despair.

Times were simply better.

Of course, hackers will still be hackers, devoid or scornful of social ambition,

roaming the peripheries of corporate plutocracy or government conspiracies. The tropes of

capitalism gone awry, and the resultant anarchistic chaos, persist. The risk of losing touch

with one’s concrete reality amidst the illusory visions of digitalized fantasies looms over the

horizon, casting a dystopian shadow upon the material abundance of hyper-techno lifestyles.

Readers can easily see that the definitive motifs of cyberpunk in the ‘80s listed above carry

themselves over to the next decade. Case’s gloomy surroundings as a low-life cowboy

(hacker) and his instrumentalization by the invisible yet ubiquitous and nearly omnipotent

hands of corpocrats or their supercomputers in Gibson’s Neuromancer; the dark underbelly of

techno-heaven in the form of Chiba’s Nightcity where the disabled and impaired feed off of

illegal trade or corporate espionage throughout the Sprawl Trilogy;69 and the pathetic

addiction to the melodramatic shows Simstim decks induce as witnessed in Bobby

Newmark’s mother in Count Zero.70

Nevertheless, whereas the earlier generation of cyberpunk writers portrayed their

protagonists as antiheroes who plow on with their lives as bottom-feeders, Stephenson

maintains that hackers (and programmers, as their legitimized versions) are in fact the “cool

68
The imagery of burbclaves and privatized highways in Snow Crash bear striking similarity to actual
residential settings and transport lines in the Philippines. Considering Stephenson’s familiarity with the country
(i.e. his detailed descriptions of the urban and rural landscape, economy and people in his novel Cryptonomicon,
as well as personal visits in the essay “Mother Earth Mother Board”), it would be safe to suggest that he based
these images on the real-life cases he had witnessed during his travels.
69
A fictional sub-clave of Chiba (千葉縣). Chiba is an actual municipality in Japan.
70
Simstim is an acronym for “simulated stimuli,” a fictional device that allows its users to directly sync with
the perspective and sensory perception of another person’s experience, similar to the SQUID (Superconducting
Quantum Interference Device) in Strange Days (1995) or the “Hat” (brain/computer interface) in Brainstorm
(1983). Bobby Newmark’s mother is one of the main characters in Count Zero, Bobby Newmark is a backstreet
low-grade hacker.

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guys” and technocrats, noting how the basic construct of a technologically augmented

lifestyle—on individual as well as societal levels—is designed, run, and controlled by those

who can deal with the basic mechanisms of technological infrastructure. This view is clearly

manifested in his essay “Morlocks and Eloi at the Keyboard,”71 where Stephenson observes

an unprecedented inversion of the social hierarchy in our time, noting how Morlocks—a

fictional race that originates from menial laborers in contrast to the Eloi, the other half of

humanity that comes from the non-working bourgeoisie—have risen out of their dark

subterranean caves to claim ownership of their craft: “Contemporary culture is a two-tiered

system, like the Morlocks and the Eloi in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, except that it’s

been turned upside down. … The Morlocks are the minority, and they are running the show,

because they understand how everything works” (58). The basic idea here is that those who

are capable of handling the substructure of technology, rather than merely enjoying what the

media market produces and offers, are in fact the genuine power hub of the society. The entire

plotline of Snow Crash rests on this technocratic maneuverability of social structure from a

grassroots perspective,72 as a conspiring media magnate schemes to take over the world by

targeting hackers and programmers, wary of their ability to understand the communications

infrastructure that upholds and undergirds the subjects of social agency.

Beyond the Machinic: Agency as Survival in a Snow Crash-infested Metaverse

The idea of agency here is reminiscent of Félix Guattari’s “energy” in his “Machinic

Heterogenesis” (a concept that succeeds the “desiring-machine” in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism

71
In Neal Stephenson’s essay collection In the Beginning … Was the Command Line.
72
Certain critics such as Benn Michaels read signs of danger in the term “technocrat,” but as I had mentioned
above, punks will be punks, hackers are still hackers. The characters (or even Stephenson himself, as a
programmer and engineer) in Stephenson’s world may have the power to “control” the communications
infrastructure, but instead, they “enjoy.”

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and Schizophrenia), which serves as the momentum that produces the reality of the machine

itself.73 The “machine” serves a dual purpose: it is a metaphor that encompasses individuals

who desire and the overall social construct comprising such desiring entities, and it is the

synecdochic machine as a specific strain of technology that has come to reconfigure the

human-ghost dialectic discussed in Chapter 2. The difference between the grassroots

technocracy Stephenson propounds in Snow Crash, and the sense of resignation to the

unwieldy flow of systemic power imposed upon the individual that is seen in more

prototypical cyberpunk fiction, is an indicator of how the gap between the human-machine

interface and convergence goes through a dialectic transformation. Works that reflect the

beginning stages of computer technology and its popularization through the internet adhere to

the conventional notion that the story of “being human” consists of surviving the ghostly

properties of the archetypal ghost narrative. It means surviving the transgressive inroads of

non-human elements that encompass the ghost as well as the machine (i.e. machine

intelligence and cyborg bodies), fragmented bodies as amalgamations of organic (living) and

mineral (dead) components, and other entities incomprehensible from the human perspective

like the A.I.s we constantly encounter in early cyberpunk fiction. Stephenson’s Snow Crash,

on the other hand, harbingers the advent of a new generation that sees spectral simultaneity

and symbiosis of the ghostly and the bodily as survival, and consequently, the mode of being

in itself.

73
Deleuze and Guattari explain the desiring-machine as the social system but also individual agency as its
constituent and the instantiation of unconscious; the embodiment of the incomprehensible and transgressive
desire within the human psyche as well as the capitalist production system. Here I interpret it in the context of
my thesis, i.e. the desire in question is the desire to survive and to be.

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 Let us delve deeper into the idea of “machinic”74 within the context of Snow Crash.

The mobile and productive functionality of the desiring machine brings us back to the

mathematically functional machinic75 in Chapter 2; one could inject various ingredients and

pull out different outcomes that correspond to the formula of the function, but the mechanism

that underlies the process always remains identical: the work of the function itself is

repetitive. And this “functional” nature of the machinic appears to be quintessentially

allopoietic, which is precisely why the inhabitants of Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy are trapped in

an endless loop of inertia. Functionality defines them as individuals and members of the

society. When this pragmatic aspect of their existence falls apart, as in the case of Case the

disabled hacker in the opening pages of Neuromancer, or his handler Armitage whose

psychotic breakdown turns him into a liability, the entire foundation of their being comes

crumbling down and is rendered meaningless within and without their selves. They are cogs

in the greater machine that is the society, replaceable ciphers defined by the meaning

endowed upon them in the context they are deployed, rather than an absolute entity that

transcends any need for interpretation by merely being themselves. In this light, the machine

74
Supplementary explanation from Chapter 2: “Félix Guattari subverts the commonly accepted categorization
of machines as apparatuses of technology in his essay “Machinic Heterogenesis,” suggesting that the problems
concerning technology are in fact “dependent on the questions posed by machines” (55). Satisfied neither with
the mediatory (thus limiting and instrumental) role of Aristotle’s techné nor the Heideggarian technology as the
unveiler of truth, Guattari foregrounds the “machine” to redirect our attention to the functionality of technology.
The machinic, “perceived in a constellation of meanings and histories and referents” (55), acquires the status of
a comprehensive reference to beings that are like machines in terms of their properties, as well as beings of the
machine. “At once a modifier and modified, the concept of the “machinic” is inherently boundary-blurring,
providing a semantic foundation for its ontological heterogeneity” (55).
75
Also from Chapter 2: “Expanding the metaphor of the machine to encompass “technical, social, semiotic, or
axiological” (39) systems as a whole, while also employing the dynamism of the machine-in-function as the
driving force that generates transversal beings, Guattari asserts that the functional (I read a double-tied
signification here; the function could either mean the mechanics of producing expected results through a set of
predefined procedures, or literally a mathematical function as a framing device) machinic is by nature
autopoietic within the ontological nexus, residing in the constitutive axes of time, space, and energy in reality. In
short, the heterogeneity of machinic entities, encompassing both genealogy and functionality as the two
crisscrossing threads of ontological positionality (i.e. given vs. instantiated), becomes a remediatory feedback
loop whereby the machinic system will give birth to machine-generated beings that in turn run on the principle
of the system” (55).

85
on a macroscopic level (society) as the signifier may be autopoietic for it consistently re-

produces itself not in the fashion of repetition but more openly by incorporating inputs from

its components (which are, ontologically speaking, external entities) throughout time and

space, thus being heterogeneous. But the individual, microscopic machine, as that which is

signified by the outer mechanism of the social machine, presupposes production that is not

necessarily reflexive, which can be seen in the “desiring machine” (for it produces reality,

which could be an actualization of the desire, but cannot be an ontological equivalent to the

desire itself).

The only thing that remains sustained and unchanged in this process, then, is the act

of signification rather than any persistent meaning or its container, which brings me back to

the issue of agency. If the machine (individual and systematic) is there to produce, who

makes the machine to produce? Or in other words, who desires, and who abstracts? The

notion of the machine as the signified may carry a certain degree of agency within its logic,

for the machine changes, reproduces itself, and varies in form as well as meaning. But this

level of agency is confined to the externality of the phenomenon of signification, for it resides

within the scope of the signified’s manifestation. Then, where can we find the internality of

what the machine offers? Who is conscious of the machines’ agency, who creates the

machine-as-concept (the signified)? Namely, who or what is the very presence that enables,

enlivens, and embodies the machinic?

As noted in Chapter 2, agency is the key threshold between the machine-human

interface and its paradigmatic leap towards the yet to be realized, controversial state of

machine-human convergence. Virtual reality technology provides us with a way of

understanding how agency plays a key role in locating the human in the ambiguous space

between the body and the mind, for it is an externalized space of agency where concepts

86
 76
become percepts via a consensual exertion and acknowledgement of agency.

Take, for instance, the alternate selves in virtual reality, such as the avatars in Snow

Crash.77 In the dystopic alternate present where giant corporate entities rule over the federal

government, people can jack into a computer simulated game called the “Metaverse,” wear

virtual bodies of their choice (Avatars), and stroll down the sprawling streets on a land of

nowhere. An easy way to imagine the Metaverse today would as a fully 3D version of the

well-known virtual reality game Second Life, or The Matrix safely under each user’s control.

Avatars can be bought off the shelf, or custom-built if one is sufficiently rich or technically

skilled. The main point here is that you can be “whatever” you “want.”78 Wish fulfillment,

escapist retreat, and vicarious pleasure are all within immediate reach. Avatars seem to grant

an unprecedented degree of agency in the process and state of “being.”

So avatars allow us to be whatever we want. But that alone wouldn’t do much good

unless we can actually experience the effect of being a different self. Whether I want to

overcome a physical complex, enjoy the privileges of being a celebrity, or simply try

something that is impossible in reality, the act of taking on the avatar and the alterity it

signifies will become a semantic cipher if no one else “acknowledges” it. Identity becomes,

demands, marketing. Ironically, the raison d’être of the Avatar, a self by free choice and

hence manifestation of originality as an individual, is the recognition and legitimization of

non-selves, made possible by a cognitive inversion process; the imaginary, conceptual self I

76
The concept of “virtual reality” has been in circulation outside the immediate quarters of information science
even before computers became an integral part of our lives, as seen in Philip K. Dick’s works, William Gibson’s
Sprawl Trilogy, the cult classic film Tron, or more recently, Mamoru Oshii’s animation Ghost in the Shell. But
the first time it entered the public conscious with full force was undoubtedly when the Wachowsky brothers’
cyberpunk trilogy The Matrix hit the theaters in 1999.
77
Often mistaken to be Stephenson’s original neologism, but Stephenson states in his afterward to Snow Crash
that the word “avatar” has already been used to indicate a digital representation of one’s own self in a virtual
reality game called “Habitat.”
78
Of course, as the engenderer of this fantasy world, capitalist economy still regulates the degree to which
one’s desires can be actualized. Money still is an issue. Here, I focus on the potential for realization (of desire)
rather than to what degree the potentials are being instantiated.

87
choose can be visually and actively perceived by others. In this sense, self cognition not only

relies on or aims at, but is, being cognized by others.

If this statement sounds too steeped in the grammars of science fiction, in other

words too “unreal,” we can simply take a moment to look around at how people broadcast the

private to the public to obtain objective proof of their subjectivity, at the immense impact that

emails, Twitter, and Facebook have on our lives, or at how people grow addicted to the

responses they receive through such “socializing” apparatuses, responses which confirm the

fact that they themselves are recognized by others. Of course, a definition is necessarily an

exclusion—saying what something is implies what it is not. Like two sides of a coin, the I

and the other are inherently interdependent. The agency in certifying one’s existence is being

incessantly intermediated between the I and the other. The question is what is the real self—is

it the I as I myself perceive and believe it to be, or the self seen and noticed by others? Is it

now “I am thought, therefore I am,” instead of “I think therefore I am?” The answer would be,

“both” and “in between”; the capability to straddle the multiple layers within the spectrum

comprising different modes of being. This is not simply a reflection of current trends, but a

requirement in the age of interactive media. Survival in our time is cognitive symbiosis made

possible by cognitive inversion—symbiosis as the condition for a metaphysical, and

collaboration as the dynamics for a physical mode of survival.

This observation that being and living as human amidst digital media and cybernetic

bodies involves various modes and components (including machinic/functional qualities)

may be what enabled Stephenson to imagine the possibility of directly injecting language into

our brain as exemplified in the Snow Crash virus, a malignant bitmap that crashes the

neurological structure of its victims via visual contact. Of course, since the topographies of

the human brain and consciousness do not completely coincide in their functionalities,

88
Stephenson’s hypothesis may not be viable within the currently applicable parameters of

neuroscience. However, the very fact that a vision of a “physicalized language” has thus

emerged speaks for the cognitive inversion our world has undergone since the advent of the

computing machines, which has allowed us to actually see (perceive) the visceral innards of

semiotic conversion, the transversal interchange between abstract meaning and embodied

signs.

In his essay collection In the Beginning … Was the Command Line, Stephenson

reminisces on the old days when computer programming verged on physical labor, running

back and forth between different hardware clusters and manually punching out bytes in paper

cards. He points out that such prototypical computers, which are essentially “grafting[s] …

on to the already-existing technologies for translating letters into bits and vice versa [Morse

code, telegraphy, etc.] … embodied two fundamentally different approaches to computing,”

(12-13) namely the Command Line Interface and Graphic User Interface. The formeris none

other than semiotic process embodied in external, concrete matter, fully displayed for our

visual perception. Instead of deducing, we see how meaning is coded into and decrypted

though the pure matter that is the machine. The Graphic User Interface, the system adopted

by Microsoft and Apple operating systems today, differs in that it neatly conceals the

computational cogwheels turning under the surface. However, with the advent of touch-

screen interfaces, cognitive inversion takes yet another turn; nowadays we see but also feel

and touch communication, not only through but also with externalized cognitive aids in the

form of mechanical devices.

Hence my emphasis on cognitive shuttling (inversion and symbiosis) and individual

agency. But then, are we to simply accept the logic underlying this human-machine

compatibility in Stephenson’s concept of physicalized language, one that is—instead of being

89
mediated through digital communication terminals as in the case of Metaverse—directly

administered to, and therefore becomes one and whole with the subject? Especially when the

basic premise of the virus is that human and machine language systems branch out of the

same root, a primitive form of universal and absolute signification system (the binary code in

the case of Snow Crash)? Should we accept this hypothesis that everyone and everything is

fundamentally identical and the variations merely superficial? I will further address this point

in the next section on the structure and hierarchy of computer language. But here I bring in

the film The Matrix (1999) as a point of comparison, to show how the reductionist mantra of

“all is code” dissolves into the realization that to be human is to go beyond the code.

One of the most memorable scenes in The Matrix, and also one that serves as a

perfect visual rendering of the idea that code language is the foundation of all embodied

presences, is where Neo, the hero and savior of the dark limbo of a simulated reality dubbed

“the Matrix,” awakens to his messianic destiny in the last sequence of the film (2:05:40).

The camera takes a cross-cut, from Neo’s face steeped in a state of shocked revelation to his

first-person perspective, in which the visual plain unfolding before his eyes is suddenly

transformed into a map of blinking binary code. By seeing into the makings of the matrix, i.e.

by recognizing and in turn becoming one with the very fabrics of the (non-)reality he

occupies, Neo acquires the power to defy and manipulate, and ultimately survive,79 the

system.

Here, semiotic cognition becomes the seat of agency, whereby one may shuttle

between the raw sensory input in the form of the electric charges injected into the brain and

what they represent as cognized correspondence that constitute the shapes, sounds and

79
This point only applies to The Matrix, not to its sequels. To be more precise, it applies only to this very scene
of Neo’s messianic awakening, for Neo eventually dies in the last installment of the trilogy. To be discussed in
the following pages.

90
meanings portrayed in the space of virtual as well as embodied reality. The temporal

progression underlying the move from semiotic cognition to agency is of crucial importance,

for the emphasis I place in Neo’s revelation is on “being” rather than “knowing”; the ornate

mechanism of the Matrix on a system operations level is already shared knowledge among

other members of the rebels who freely enter and exit, interact with, and defy the simulation

structure. Neo’s awakening is more an ontological transformation than a realization or

discovery, for his power arises out of his self-induced repositioning as the fundamental

building block of the system itself, rather than a mere representation of codified stimuli. Note

how in the scene in question, the monotonous dual-tone flow of binary codes stretches over

the entire field of Neo’s vision, which is in turn a perspective we as viewers are to naturally

side with. At this critical moment, the viewers—conceptual as well as perceptual “others” to

Neo on multiple levels, as ontologically disparate entities who reside outside the virtual world

we see on the screen—become one with Neo, who stands constitutionally identical to the

Matrix. This all-encompassing unification reverses the hierarchy between the Matrix and Neo,

for instead of seeing himself as a representation of the codified signals the Matrix feeds into

his mind, he now understands everything within his conceptual reach as a different version of

his own self. This is precisely why his agency extends beyond and across the perceived

boundaries of entities, freely bending the expected laws of physics (stopping a bullet or flying

around the sky in the closing scene), for in essence, he wields command over himself, not

others.

This ontological transformation, however, is precisely why he must be sacrificed by

the end of the trilogy. Should the world be Neo and Neo be the world, he cannot truly “save”

the world as it is, for the values he appreciates and tries to preserve against the tyranny of the

machines is the individuality and diversity embodied in the people he cares for, which—

91
ironically—his very existence negates. Agent Smith, Neo’s archenemy and the dark persona

of the machine that builds and controls the simulated world, effectively demonstrates the

drawback of this homogeneity. In The Matrix Reloaded, Agent Smith converts people—

representations of actual humans plugged in to the system and computer-generated programs

wearing the shell of a human figure alike—into copies of his own self, producing a grotesque

vision of countless Agent Smiths crowding the scene, acting and thinking in sync like a giant

hive (00:53:14). At this point, Smith becomes the equivalent of an endlessly self-replicating

virus, a closed feedback loop that inevitably leads to the increase of entropy and eventually

nullifies the framing system itself due to the lack of external input that sustains the

mechanism. By eliminating the diverse “sources” of energy that operates the matrix, or in

other words the humans that literally power the simulation, homogeneity becomes a self-

destructive force that brings forth an inorganic equilibrium, erasing the very foundation of

being as a dialectic process. What the case of Agent Smith’s viral degeneration and Neo’s

final resolution for self-abnegation in The Matrix Revolutions (01:53:05) tells us is that a

degree of incomprehensibility and heterogeneity, a fragmented state of diversity and their

ceaseless interaction in the form of agential transgression, is the foundation of being both in

plural (on a species level) and singular (as individuals). Totalized homogeneity that operates

on the basis of an omniscient and therefore omnipotent being is in itself a paradox. Without

the conceptual frames that contrast with and define being, such as non-being (death) or other

beings (inter-defining multiplicity), a metaphysical conceptualization of being may persist,

yet existence as the actual embodiment of beings in the world cannot be.

Ambiguity and Incomprehensibility: The Magical Space of Latency

In a society that operates on the basis of digitalized communication, amidst a deluge

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of information moving at light-speed between different computer processors, the amount of

data input we receive surpasses the speed with which our mind interprets and allots meaning.

Now, let us take a closer look at how the Snow Crash virus actually works. A terrorist tactic

used by a media monopolist within and without Metaverse, the destructive force this

computer virus wields lies in that it erases the boundary between matter and mind, literally

“crashing” the infrastructure of being. Snow Crash is a raw bitmap of digital data containing

a program that nullifies the upper-level coding language, namely the human language we use

in our everyday lives, from the neural structure of those who are inflicted. The word “virus”

here extends beyond the merely metaphorical and acquires a biological layer of applicability,

according to Stephenson, in that its binary codes directly graft onto the human nervous

system and reengineer one’s DNA as the fundamental program of being within the body, and

consequently eliminates the distance between material perception and conscious cognition.

The result is a mind and body crash in which the processing capacity of the mind becomes

first irrelevant, and then dysfunctional, turning the entity into a biomass of present yet

stopped, static programs.80

As absurd as the above logic may sound, Stephenson’s inquiry into the concept of

“physicalized language” must be seen as a contemporary parable of the hierarchical mind-

body dualism we may subscribe to in the wake of singularity81 discourses. Let us leave the

Metaverse behind for the moment and reflect upon our daily engagement with basic 2D

80
The meaning of the term “crash” here is two-fold; a program-level failure that eliminates the functionality of
a given system (as a unified entity), or a destructive physical contact (as in A crashes into B) that nullifies the
spatial and substantive distinction between disparate constituents of a whole entity. In the case of Snow Crash,
“crash” serves both purposes. Hacker and programmer Da5id, the first victim of the malicious virus, suffers both
an overall systematic failure in that he becomes a zombiesque mind-vegetable, unable to think, nor properly and
autonomously function on a physical level. His ability to “think” is wiped out as his DNA is reprogrammed to
stay within a closed loop of fixed sign systems, for the virus blocks one’s ability to generate new meaning, the
power that lets us leap across (translate, hence transform) that gap between mere form and poignant meaning.
Da5id as a present-progressive individual, therefore, is logged-out from existence.
81
I omit details or critical references here, since I devote a long section on this topic in Chapter 2.

93
projection displays. The sensory perceptions that allow us to make sense of—see, hear, and

even feel with the recent haptic and olfactory additions to digitally generated illusions—the

world on the screen are in fact never quite what we take them to be in other parts of our

minds, or the functions that generate what we consider our minds in the brain. Upper-level

computer language fundamentally differs from the solely textual, verbal, or other perceptive

forms of language in that it is an ornate combination of them all. The machine language in the

binary code of zeros and ones as its constitutional basis is inherently textual, in that it

demands the two step process of sensory perception (noting that there exist these signs, the

formal aspect) and intellectual interpretation (making sense of what they mean, the semantic

aspect). Then there’s the crucial step further: developing the abstract semantic into a

concrete secondary form: what we actually see on the display, whether it be simple texts or

sensory manifestations like objects or sounds we see and hear in videos or 3D holographs.

For the layman, comprehension and conveyance of information are made possible only in this

last stage of visual-auditory manifestation. However, Stephenson claims that hackers (or

programmers, for that matter) are enlightened to what goes on behind the stage: they see into

the matrix.

Let’s return to the mind and body binary and see where this trail of logic takes us.

The body is a physical entity tied into the rubrics of time and space, and therefore has its

limits. There’s only so much one can physically see or hear at a given moment, which is in

fact a protection mechanism that prevents overload. The mind, however, transcends space and

time. One can live a lifetime in a millisecond as in the case of Farquhar in Ambrose Bierce’s

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”82 or the nameless protagonist in Murakami Haruki’s

82
The man is about to be hanged from a bridge. He makes a miraculous escape and journeys back home, only
to realize that, at his moment of death, his salvation had been a wishful hallucination during his fall from the
bridge.

94
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.83 Thoughts fly over to loved ones across

oceans and beyond mountains, even traversing the threshold of death, as seen in the tale of

faithful Akana in “The Chrysanthemum Vow.”84 But again, even the mind needs a physical

platform of input and output, for the “stuff” of thought. Enter the brain, which serves as both

the car and its driver. What if one blocks the channel between the biological makings of the

brain and its functional operation? Or put rather reductively, what if one severs the tie

between body and mind, leaving the mind unable to process, make sense of, and therefore

incorporate the data into its bodily system, while the raw nerves of the brain are exposed to a

floodgate of input? Overload results and the brain shuts down, with the mind in tow, leaving

only a mere shell. Bombard the hackers and programmers, who are—purportedly—able to

intuitively convert neutral data into meaningful knowledge based on their specialized

cognitive abilities, with an instantaneous inundation of information in the form of binary

codes (more specifically, white noise screen) that not only floods but blocks the drainpipe of

selective, progressive cognition, creating a time lag between the body and mind and

ultimately twisting them out of joint.

This idea of a mind-body lapse is predicated upon a particular set of technologies that

we have not yet achieved, for instance the direct interface between computer and organic data

processing. However, given the speed of progress in the field of computer science, human-

machine, software-hardware, and mind-body interfaces may not be that far away.

The affinity between the human biology (DNA codes) and the binary computer code

structure, which Stephenson brings to our attention as the basis of his Snow Crash virus-

83
The novel consists of a pair of parallel worlds: one is his actual reality, and the other is a virtual fantasy
world implanted and activated by a chip in his brain. While the real (external) “I” struggles to survive a single
day, the virtual “I” lives out nearly a year.
84
“菊花の約.” Imprisoned, he commits suicide and appears in spirit form to keep an important promise. From
Ueda Akinari (上田 秋成)’s Tales of Moonlight and Rain (雨月物語 ).

95
induced infocalypse scenario, takes a deeper plunge into the intricate mechanism of language

as L. Bob Rife the media magnate’s world-domination scheme continues to unfold. The

technocrats as the agents of the social substructure had to be brought down because Rife was

planning to infect the rest of humanity with glossolalia, a universal and mechanical form of

language that deprives individuals of their agency and renders them susceptible to

brainwashing instructions across linguistic barriers. Put simply, those who are exposed to the

virus, either through direct perceptual interface as in the case of targeted hackers or bio-

material injection as seen in other victims, lose the ability to retain their culture-specific

language and revert to a primitive babble that is understood intuitively, making them

vulnerable to uncritical reception of top-to-bottom directives issued from Rife. Stephenson,

through Hiro, calls this form of language the “deep” structure of consciousness that

underlines the higher strata of cognition (expressed and conceived through language) in

individual agency and identity.

Since the delivery vehicle of the glossolalia infection is a computer virus predicated

on a structural affinity and interface between the human and the machine (computers), one

might equate this “babble,” from a technical perspective, to a “low-level” computer

programming language.85Low-level programming language is the fundamental principle that

underpins the primary functionality of a computing machine; an infrastructural system by

which signs acquire a rigid one-to-one relationship with the content they refer to. Assembly

language would correspond to this category, for, whereas binary codes are the raw materials

of information, assembly code assembles the neutral binary data for a specific purpose. It is a

85
Programming languages can be categorized into low and high-level languages, depending on the volume of
codes necessary for writing a given program, or how freely one may tinker with the internal configuration of the
computer’s body. For further technical details, see Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools by Alfred V.
Aho et al. (2007).

96
semiotic system that is maximally efficient and therefore devoid of any ambiguity or space

for creative interpretation seen in human language. Low-level programming language gives

its handler (the programmer) complete control over the basic building blocks of memory,

leaving nearly no space (extra memory) for any act of abstraction. Because the machine can

easily understand the instructions given through assembly, the processing speed of this code

is exponentially faster than that of higher-level programming languages that use arbitrary

language structures and compile the codes into operational programs.

For this reason, low-level programming language embodies functionality in its most

extreme degree. The “glossolalia” in Snow Crash serves a similar role, for it erases all

distinction among different pathways through which language is delivered, universalizing the

methodology and the scope of signification in its course. No room for abstraction or

interpretation here means the very lack or gap to be creatively filled is abolished. Conceptual

mapping or creative application in higher levels of cognition cannot be achieved with this

form of language, which is precisely why Hiro and others strive to thwart it from spreading.

The non-conscious moment that occurs between perception (interfacing with external inputs)

and conception (making meaning out of or becoming actively conscious of a phenomenon) is

the very seat of agency, as I noted in Chapter 2. By eliminating this in-between state, low-

level computer language—or glossolalia in Snow Crash—can become more efficient while

the properties that make us disparate individuals disappear.

On the other hand, high-level programming language (e.g. C++), which comes in a

wide scope of variations like actual human language, incorporates mechanisms that allow

abstraction and application. The direct correspondence within the command structure of

signification is compromised in this case, relatively diminishing the temporal immediacy of

task execution and utilizing a greater amount of memory within the hardware, but the upside

97
is that such structures allow the user to process larger programs with enhanced efficiency.

Also, high-level programming language is designed to resemble natural language to a greater

degree, rendering the semiotic system easier for a human user to interpret. In other words, the

syntax structure of the code is isomorphic to its semantic content.86 As one climbs higher up

this ladder of programming hierarchy, utility and convenience for the human user achieves an

exponential degree of improvement on the basis of increased overhead time and overall

cost.87

These two elements, namely the temporal gap that occurs between initial input and

subsequent output, and the quantitative effort that goes into the process of abstraction and

86
In a course I designed and taught in the winter quarter of 2012, entitled “Reality Check: Different Modes of
Reality and Representation in the Age of Cyberculture,” Alex Kindel (Symbolic Systems major) offered the
following insight on the inner workings of programming language:
“For example, C++ has a "foreach" loop structure that might look like the following:
foreach(string word in lexicon) {
word = "kitten";
}
This code says "for each string, which we'll call a word, in the lexicon, we want to take that word, and change it
to 'kitten'." Note the striking similarity to English in terms of syntax and semantic meaning. Each operator in the
code snippet has an equivalent in the natural language sentence. There is also a tradeoff between efficiency and
similarity to English, in that the language needs to be structured rigidly (avoiding the idiosyncrasies of English)
in order to be interpreted by the computer. This is suggestive of a deeper linguistic divide between machines and
humans, in terms of cognitive abilities. Humans can use language loosely and ambiguously, but programming
languages have a much more difficult time interpreting ambiguity and imperfect syntax.”
Also, Jaehyun Park (Computer Science major), who was a member of my “The Rhetoric of the Unreal” course
in the winter quarter of 2009, provided another example:
“Let us say there is a set of numbers consisting of 1,000 figures (a[1], a[2], ..., a[1000]), from which we are to
calculate the average. In high-level language, it is literally possible to input a code that commands the machine
to acquire the “average of these numbers,” whereas in low-level language, one must go through the ornate
process of adding all the figures one by one and dividing them by 1,000. With C, a low-level programming
language, a total of three lines of code must be written. Meanwhile, with Python (a high-level language), one
line would suffice: "sum of a[1]...a[1000] divided by 1000”. This code, as in the first example with “kitten,” is
very similar to English in both lexicon and syntax. The word “sum” or a more sophisticated concept of “A of B”
or “A divided by B” is directly imported into the code language. Put simply, the basic hierarchy of programming
language proceeds in the order of “high-level→low-level→assembly→binary codes”; penetrating deeper down
into the CPU one would reach the binary code system.”
Its visual presentation resembles the opening scene of The Matrix or Ghost in the Shell, where strings of “1”s
and “0”s cascade down the screen.
87
Think of ordering a book from Amazon, in comparison to walking over to a store and purchasing the desired
product. The price one must pay in the case of the latter—equivalent to low-level programming language—
includes the physical exertion required to transport oneself to and back from the site of transaction and searching
for the target, but the result is immediate and tangible. An online transaction, an analogy of a high-level
computer language here, would greatly reduce the temporal and physical investment on the user’s side, but the
end product may take more time to acquire.

98
application, is the magical space of latency; the non-conscious “split second of darkness”

functioning as the seat of agency and creativity, where perceived sensory input as mere data

is transformed into a segment of knowledge incorporating individual interpretation and

variation.

Conclusion

The presence that pushes the act of signification forward comes from outside the

comprehensive “machine” metaphor. It comes from the consciousness that harbors the “of” of

the object that is the machine, which I ultimately see as the human. My focus on Snow Crash

is anchored in my view of humans as the agent of signification and hence the transgressors of

mechanical semiotics, fragmented and incomprehensible agents that counter the compulsion

towards absoluteness. In How We Became Posthuman, Katherine Hayles claims that survival

as “human” in the age of computer generated, assisted or bound cognition is not an option or

potential but a matter of course. According to Snow Crash, Hayles says, we have always been

Posthuman, as on a base level we are all “computational machines” (233); and that “we could

emerge out of it with reason and consciousness as late additions we made on our own” (244).

But “reason and consciousness” do not self-generate as happenstances, nor do they come out

of a pure exertion of will. The non-conscious, the split second of darkness that bridges the

merely machinic and the ghost that survives it, is the origin point of agency that defines,

enables, and is the human. In that sense, we may say there is no posthuman to begin with,

rather than asserting that we are one already. There has been, and is, only what is human—for

its archetypal narrative of being (being despite its prospect of un-being, and survival) has

been changing and redefining itself, harnessing the properties its earlier mode has tried to

99
overcome. The human emerges out of a porous, amorphous border where its fragments, the

machine and ghost or the body and mind, interface and converge. Snow Crash, marking the

age of spectral symbiosis with technology, provides a portrait of our time’s mode of being.

100
 Works Cited

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Tools. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 2007.

Bierce, Ambrose. "An Occurrence on Owl Creek Bridge." Project Gutenberg. Web. Accessed

May 6 2010.

Blade Runner. Dir. Ridley Scott. Perf. Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward

James Olmos, and Daryl Hannah. Warner Home Video, 1999. DVD.

Brainstorm. Dir. Douglas Trumbull. Perf. Christopher Walken, Natalie Wood, Louise Fletcher,

and Cliff Robertson. Warner Home Video, 2009. DVD.

Dick, Philip K. A Scanner Darkly. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.

---. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Ballantine Books, 1996.

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Featherstone, Mike and Roger Burrows. Cyberspace, Cyberbodies, Cyberpunk: Cultures of

Technological Embodiment. London: Sage, 1995.

Ghost in the Shell. Dir. Mamoru Oshii. Manga Entertainment, 1998. DVD.

Gibson, William. Count Zero. New York: Arbor House, 1986.

---. Mona Lisa Overdrive. Toronto; New York: Bantam Books, 1988.

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Guattari, Félix. “Machinic Heterogenesis.” Reading Digital Culture. Ed. David Trend.

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Hafner, Katie and John Markoff. Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier.

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Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature,

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 and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1962.

Metropolis. Dir. Fritz Lang. Perf. Alfred Abel, Brigitte Helm, Gustav Fröhlich, and Rudolf

Klein-Rogge. Parufamet, 2010. DVD.

Michaels, Walter Benn. The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History. Princeton,

N.J.: Princeton University, 2004.

Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. Ed. Bruce Sterling. New York: Ace Books, 1988.

Morley, David and Kevin Robins. Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes

and Cultural Boundaries. London; New York: Routledge, 1995.

Murakami, Haruki. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. Trans. Alfred

Birnbaum. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.

Stephenson, Neal. Cryptonomicon. New York: Avon Press, 1999.

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---. “Mother Earth Mother Board.” WIRED magazine 4.12. Web. Accessed 5 Mar. 2011.

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Strange Days. Dir. Kathryn Bigelow. Perf. Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, Juliette Lewis, and

Tom Sizemore. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 1999. DVD.

Tabbi, Joseph. Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to

Cyberpunk. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995.

The Matrix. Dir. Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski. Perf. Keanu Reeves, Laurence

Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss and Hugo Weaving. Warner Home Video, 1999. DVD.

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The Matrix Revolutions. Dir. Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski. Perf. Keanu Reeves,

Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss and Hugo Weaving. Warner Home Video,

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Tron. Dir. Steven Lisberger. Perf: Jeff Bridges, David Warner, Bruce Boxleitner,and Cindy

Morgan.Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2002. DVD.

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 Chapter 4

Narrativity as Responsibility: Archetyping the Social in Murakami Haruki’s Hard-Boiled

Wonderland and the End of the World

In the previous chapter on Snow Crash, I looked at how the mantra of “all language

is code” (powered by the rise of digital information technology) serves as the basis of an

epistemological and ontological homogeneity, which may land us in a dangerous terrain

where identity, individuality, and agency become mere bumps on the road towards an illusory

state of pan-species harmony and transcendence. The author, Neal Stephenson, refutes this

position by demonstrating how ambiguity and imperfection in advanced human language

calls for an active exertion of agency, bridging the gaps and in turn creating meaning out of

that empty space of non-conscious for individual entities who can embrace the transgressive

and incomprehensible aspects of being. In Snow Crash, therefore, the archetypal ghost as a

universally shared story of being human is the result of collective efforts towards

individuation accumulated over the span of a species-wide evolution, or in other words, an

accomplishment that runs against a more primal condition of being as a loose string of

biological codes. The principle and means of digital telecommunications technology, in this

light, effectively showcase how a sentient and agential consciousness is born out of the non-

conscious realm of semantic blanks in a hierarchical structure of communication.88

Murakami Haruki (村上 春樹), in his 1985 novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the end

of the World,89takes us on a surrealistic journey through a world that bears notable similarities

to that of Snow Crash in its key motifs, yet fundamentally differs in its workings. As in Snow

88
Refer back to Chapter 3 on Snow Crash.
89
Sekai no owari to hādo-boirudo wandārando 世界の終りとハードボイルド・ワンダーランド , hereafter referred to
as Wonderland, , Volumes 1 and 2.

104
Crash, the human brain is the main scene of action. The protagonist is a cross-breed of Hiro

the hacker/programmer and Y.T. the courier from Snow Crash: his job is to codify, store,

decrypt, and deliver confidential corporate or scholarly research data through his brain.

However, we must note that there is a crucial difference between the visions of human-

machine interfaces presented in Snow Crash and Wonderland, in terms of ontological

constitution as well as epistemological cognitivity. Although Neal Stephenson clearly affirms

the inherent incomprehensibility of the human psyche as the seedbed of agency, he still

alludes to the hope of completely decrypting the mysteries of human biology and its mental

dimension by introducing a character—Juanita, Hiro’s wife and a hacker/programmer

herself—who not only survives but also acquires control over the surgical fusion of her

neurological system and the implant that serves as a positive link between disparate

individuals. The ultimate product of a successful (non-debilitating) interface is a transhuman

figure who can, in Juanita’s own words, “hack the brainstem” (430) of others. In contrast,

Murakami interprets the mechanism underlying the process of interfacing computerized

(external and non-organic) data with the neurosurgical construct of the human body (internal

and organic) as an ever impenetrable cipher in itself. In Murakami’s world the brain is a

“black box,” forever obscured to its inventors and executors alike. The constitution of being

is by principle unknowable not because the workings of the unconscious are occasionally

redirected by the random-access variable that is the non-conscious (as is the case with Snow

Crash, which in turn means grasping control over agency itself could lead to the discovery of

a universal decryption key as evidenced by the revelatory evolution of Juanita), but due to the

fact that the very order that defines the inner sanctum of self is chaos and fluidity. An order of

non-order, put simply, defies logical interpretation by its very definition.90

90
Here, I merely “compare and contrast” Snow Crash and Wonderland; I am by no means suggesting that the

105
 Individuality is also the very key to survival in Wonderland as was the case with the

Snow Crash virus epidemic.91 For, because of his preexisting, strong self-image, the

protagonist is the only one who survives the neurosurgical experiment in which all other

subjects die as the concretized, visualized form of identities packed into the computer chip

implant clashes with the flexible self-understanding organically developed and harbored by

their minds. However, as the story develops, the readers learn that the main character’s

excessively exclusive definition of self traps him in an isolated fantasy world dubbed, most

fittingly, the End of the World. This self-sufficient personal cosmos serves as a defense

mechanism against any abrasive interaction with the outside world, i.e. other beings.

Imagining itself a reclusive single man living a simple life delineated only by his work and

solitary leisure time with books at home, the protagonist’s mind pursues a crystal-clear vision

of a little town where everything is predefined, predetermined, and frozen in a reassuring

stasis. This very comprehensibility of the illusory self-image/habitat, in turn, is where his

definition of self and being fails. When the link that connects his inner world to the outer is

broken due to the malfunction of the circuit embedded in his brain, he realizes that reliance

on and interaction with others, beings that delineate and attest to his own being, is in fact the

world of Wonderland is more complex than Snow Crash in its views, conceptualization of being, or reality as I
see it. The issues I deal with in this dissertation increase in complexity with the progression of each chapter, as I
lay new concepts (agency and the non-conscious with Snow Crash; responsibility and narrativeness with
Wonderland; and the ultimate incomprehensibility of the world and being with Quiz Show) upon the framing
arguments I pose in Chapters 1 and 2 with the archetypal ghost and technology as the momentum of present-
progressive being. However, this does not mean that the works discussed in later chapters are more complex in
themselves.
91
“Individuality,” within the context of Murakami’s works takes on a slightly different hue from the term’s
commonly understood meaning, particularly in comparison with the concept’s role in Snow Crash. Japan’s
prominent psychoanalyst Kawai Hayao, in his conversation with Murakami (Murakami Haruki, Kawai Hayao
Ni Aini Iku), points out that the “I” (私) in the Japanese sense (in connection to the I novel) is different from the
Western notion of the “ego” (self-awareness and it demonstration) in that it bears more affinity to the concept of
個性 (kosei, originality of personality). Kawai’s reflection rings true to Wonderland, as the “self” the protagonist
builds within his mind belongs more to the realm of the unconscious (unawareness) than the conscious, and is a
bastion of self-contained difference he maintains in contrast to the external world. Note that the protagonist
literally “walls off” the outer world in The End of the World, clearly setting the boundaries between the I and
the other without even being aware of it.

106
crux of life, that the archetypal ghost cannot exist without the multitude that “share” the story

of being. Knowing (one’s own self) can never suffice—being calls for “response,” and must

be “responsive” and “responsible,” a realization voiced by his alter ego in the End of the

World: “I have responsibilities … I cannot forsake the people and places and things I have

created” (399).92 His admission that the external elements surrounding and comprising one’s

being-in-the-world (Dasein, being precisely of human)93 is one’s own creation (an ever-

impenetrable object in that they can only be understood and incorporated into one’s life

through the process of subjective interpretation, yet stand crucial to one’s self-definition) is

Murakami’s answer to and affirmation of the core properties of the archetypal ghost. The

“story” of being calls for others who can hear, and respond to the narrative.

Murakami, however, appears to be evading (ironically) any fixed stance towards the

necessity of “others” within the structure of his narrative. The convoluted plotline of

Wonderland oscillates between knowing (self-identification) and ambiguity, clearly defined

boundaries and transgression, fragmentation and unification, alternately affirming and

denying each node of these dichotomies. Murakami’s (or the protagonist’s) choice to strand

the narrator in the End of the World like a brain in the vat at the denouement of the novel

sends mixed messages. Is the author trying to tell us that one’s own mind is the last safe

haven for us contemporary civil subjects, tired of being pushed around by the social machine

and its cryptic agenda? Is the lesson here that an escapist (or passive, since in this case the

brain implant is an imposition, not a choice) retreat into the unconscious where neither past

memories nor anxieties about the future torment us is the ultimate salvation?

In this chapter, I contradict such isolationist readings by looking at various

92
「僕には僕の責任があるんだ」と僕は言った。「僕は自分の 勝手に作りだした人々や世界をあとに放りだして行ってしま
うわけにはいかないんだ。」 (Vol. 2 408)
93
For further explication on the concept of Dasein, being human and being-in-the-world (especially within the
context of this dissertation), refer back to Chapter 1 on the archetypal ghost.

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components in the story that connect rather than segregate the I and the other, noting that the

concepts of narrativeness and responsibility are key to formulating our understanding of

individual and collective existence. I claim that the fragmented identities, transgressive shifts

between the spatial and mental aspects of these selves, and the impossibility of understanding

(thereby allowing the simultaneous coexistence of) the variegated modes of being in the story,

are an active embracing of the human condition as a present-progressive, incomplete yet

persistent effort to survive in an age of economic alienation, political disillusionment, and

technologically mediated communication. I will look at the historical and extra-textual

backgrounds that engender the isolationist, solipsistic, or nihilist understanding of the novel,94

and examine Wonderland’s structure, style, and key motifs. With these observations, I will

support my argument that, counter to critiques who view the novel as a passive acceptance or

an escapist avoidance of social responsibility and pressure, Wonderland is ultimately about

94
By “nihilistic,” I am referring to the common understanding of the term as “rejecting prevailing beliefs, laws,
etc” (OED). The focus within the context here would be on “rejection,” that Murakami refuses to conform to the
values and expectations of the society. Indeed, as noted in this chapter, Murakami’s protagonists are loners,
often devoid of social ambition an educated intellectual (often portrayed as such; with college education, a
fondness for reading, and occupations that require acute insight and a firm grasp on humanistic training, e.g. the
translator/journalist protagonist in A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance Dance Dance) is anticipated to harbor, and
stays away from the traditional family structure, remaining a reclusive bachelor. Murakami himself was a
maverick figure in that he opened and ran a jazz café/bar after graduating from one of the most prestigious
colleges in Japan (Waseda), instead of seeking employment at a reputable enterprise where success and security
would have been guaranteed. In short, Murakami’s literary world was, at least in his early stages, in itself a
rejection of the Japanese society’s norms and core values. However, I would like to redirect the focus to “belief”
or “value” rather than “rejection,” for mere denial without any alternative only leads to dead-ends. I concur to
the view that Murakami’s style and choice in subject matter have a strong strain of nihilistic tendencies as an
underlying current, but I see his nihilism more as a call for individual, agential, and autonomous stance towards
life than a straightforward display of an anti-social attitude, comparable to Nietzsche’s (or Zarathustra’s)
proclamation that “god is dead” and his subsequent proposal to replace the dead gods with the “will to power,” a
resolve towards an embodied, worldly autonomy that counters a presupposed and transcended order (such as
Christianity) in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. This particular phrase (“god is dead”) has been often misunderstood as
a categorical denial of all authority and order that lead nowhere other than “a void of nothingness” (62), as
Heidegger had noted in his essay “The Word of Nietzsche: God Is Dead.” The death of god—or the devaluation
of all preexisting values—is in fact the pathway to creating new values, values that are to be cherished for the
embodied individual rather than ones that serve as imperatives to be abided by: “into the position of the
vanished authority of God and of the teaching office of the Church steps the authority of conscience, obtrudes
the authority of reason” (Heidegger 64). Through this process of transposition and replacement, Heidegger
redirects our understanding of nihilism from a devaluation of all highest (dominant or imposed) values to a
“revaluing of all values” (67). Murakami’s turn towards the social from hermetic individualism, as I see it in my
observation of Wonderland, stands precisely at this juncture.

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how fragmented, incomprehensible, and transgressive aspects of individual existence become

a universally shared narrative through the recognition and acceptance of the

incomprehensibility of not only one’s own self, but also others, which constitutes and propels

the story of being through an interactive process. In this light, Wonderland tells us the story

of the birth of the archetypal ghost. Where Snow Crash shows us how agency and human

subjectivity are the ghostly forces that defy the Freudian death drive and catalyze the

emergence of the individual,95 Wonderland extends the ontological spectrum and socializes

the ghost, positioning its story as an archetype.

Multiverses, Multiple Selves

Friedrich Nietzsche believed that "our own principles, including the belief in

progress, will become as relative as all earlier principles had shown themselves to be" and

that "the only way out seems to be...that one voluntarily choose life-giving delusion instead

of deadly truth, that one fabricate a myth" (25).96 Wonderland, at first glance, appears to be

doing precisely this: creating a timeless fantasy land into which one may escape, hide and

eventually find permanent refuge. The unnamed narrator is split between two worlds, which

run side by side in alternating chapters. One is a combination of pulp-fiction style adventure

set in an alternate present Tokyo where a government-sanctioned cryptographer group called

calcutecs and their criminal counterpart semiotecs are engaged in information warfare. In it,

the human brain is a cryptographic system and storage unit for codified information, and

artificially constructed identities are bioengineered into the human neurological system.

As the word “wonderland” in the novel’s title suggests, this world is a hard-boiled and

95
Freud says “the task of which is to lead organic life back into the inanimate state” (92). From Death-Drive;
Freudian Hauntings in Literature and Art by Robert Rowland Smith.
96
Quoted from Leo Strauss’ "Relativism” in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism.

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action-packed version of Alice’s Wonderland, full of uncanny revelations that distort the

façade of rational order. The first chapter, fittingly, begins with the protagonist’s descent into

an subterranean tunnel, albeit via a dehumanizingly big and sterile elevator instead of a hole

in the earth. The “wonder” here is none other than technology; as a calcutec and the subject

of an experiment that transforms the human brain into an information processor, the

protagonist’s raison d’ être is defined by and conveyed through semiotic and visual

communications techniques. The motif of biologically transmitted data is heavily reminiscent

of William Gibson’s short story “Johnny Mnemonic” (1981), although Murakami has never

admitted any direct relation.97 The hard-boiled yet melancholic and lyrical voice of the novel

also bears stylistic affinity to Gibson, or on a larger scale the American noir tradition

pioneered by Raymond Chandler.98 Systematic corruption, the mean and ugly truths of life,

betrayal and disillusionment, and the threat of technology-gone-awry permeate Wonderland,

aligning its metropolitan space with the tradition of earlier cyberpunk works in the ‘80s.

The mirror side to Wonderland is The End of the World,99a fantastical land of

nowhere populated by mythical creatures (unicorns) and anonymous residents deprived of

past life memories and emotional connections. The stage is set in a town (in Alfred

Birnbaum’s translation, this place is simply called the “Town” with an upper case T) besieged

by formidable walls that completely cut off any and all contact with the external world. Its

97
Noted by Jay Rubin in Murakami Haruki and the Music of Words (121).
98
It is a well-known fact that Murakami was heavily influenced by Western rather than Japanese writers. Also,
unlike with the case with Gibson, Chandler had a definitive influence on Murakami’s style (Murakami
repeatedly notes this fact in numerous essays), as Murakami himself admits in his interview with Mainichi Daily
News: ““Chandler’s writing style really grabbed me,” he says. “There’s something special about his writing. For
years, I’ve always wondered what it was. Even after I’d translated him, though, I’m still wondering what it is
that makes him special … Murakami’s strong interest in the secret behind that writing style was also evident in
the long postscript he wrote for his translation of The Long Goodbye. In the afterword, Murakami writes:
“Chandler’s creativity lies in the ‘ego set like a black box’” (from the Translator’s Café, Wordpress.com).
99
Parallel universes, or liminal spaces that serve as otherworldly dimensions are recurring motifs (a gate for
accessing the hidden or repressed) in Murakami’s works: e.g. an isolated mountain cabin in A Wild Sheep Chase,
the well in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, the deep forest in Kafka on the Shore, and the world of two moons in
1Q84.

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inhabitants live in a suspended and protected eternal presence, whose mental state could be

concisely described as a kind of lobotomized nirvana. Remnants of the townsfolk’s earthly

memories and thoughts dissipate into the atmosphere, and are then absorbed by the one-

horned beasts that flock about the prairies. When the cold northern wind hits the land, the old

and weak in the herd quietly expire with the mind fragments of countless people nestled in

their heads. Their skulls, the virtual containers of “old dreams” discarded by the villagers, are

first preserved in the town library and then permanently dispersed into thin air by a

designated “Dream Reader” who scans and empties out the forlorn craniums.100 The Dream

Reader’s role is usually bestowed upon a new arrival whose transition from the outer world is

still incomplete. This in-between state grants the protagonist, who becomes a Dream Reader

upon his arrival to Town, an ability to establish sensorial connections with (hear, touch, and

see) the vestiges of dreams that clamor in the skulls, which seep out in the form of quiet

murmurs, scintillating lights, and streams of warmth.

To acquire residency, one must literally surrender his/her “dreams” (which is later

revealed to be none other than the foundation of the human “mind”), the act of which is

allegorically represented by “cutting off” one’s shadow and letting it waste away. The

“shadow” could be read as a Jungian reference, which corresponds to the Town’s motto of

releasing oneself from all painful and potentially negative desires. However, liberation

always entails the sacrifice of that from which one is liberated. Should the shadow represent

100
The unicorns play a key role in Wonderland, not only as a conduit of lost memories but also the bridge
between the two parallel worlds. The first incident of contact Watashi makes with his alter ego (Boku) is when
the counterfeit skull of a unicorn, a gift from the Professor in apology for the plight (no less than the prospect of
an unavoidable death) he had plunged Watashi into, emits soft, floating bits of light during the night Watashi
spends with his librarian girlfriend. Also, the fate of the unicorns (used as instruments that purge the End of the
World of memories and minds, the very elements that obstruct peaceful and unaffected existence and are
therefore equivalents to anxiety or sin in the Buddhist or Christian context) have been compared to that of Christ
or other religious, sacrificial offerings. This interpretation of the unicorn figure forms an interesting contrast to
sheep, another recurring beast motif in Murakami’s literary world, which signifies a secularized embodiment of
Nietzschian (or literal), will to power. For more on the unicorn, see Hisai Tsubaki and Kuwa Masato’s
Murakami Haruki No Yomikata.

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the incomprehensible realm and the uncontrollable aspect of the unconscious, its loss entails

the elimination of the non-conscious, from whence the ambiguous and transgressive force of

human agency arises as I pointed out in the previous chapter. In addition to its role as the

foundation of individuality, it must also be noted that the shadow is also an embodiment of

connectivity, for shades are reflections of the external world’s influence (namely light sources

of non-self origin), a testimony to one’s existence within a space where objects harbor

physical presence as perceived by others.

The consistency of the first-person narrative throughout the novel hints that the

protagonists in both settings are one and the same person, but Murakami also uses a clear

marker to distinguish the two. In the original Japanese, the “I”s in the alternating worlds are

in different pronouns. In the narrative thread that unfolds in Wonderland, the “I” refers to

himself as “Watashi” (私わたし), a more formal and distant way of self-address. In contrast, the

Japanese pronoun used for “I” in the End of the World is the less formal “Boku” (僕ぼく).

Alfred Birnbaum (the translator) makes a creative interpretation in reflecting this

untranslatable difference in nuance, converting Boku’s chapters into present tense while

retaining the past tense in Watashi’s world. Birnbaum’s choice can be seen as a precarious

move considering how the tense-change dulls the nostalgic undertone that flows through the

township part of the story, but given the suspended temporality the town is encapsulated in

and its nature of being a purely mental construct, the present-tense narrative can be

understood, alternately, as an accurate representation of the relatively greater closeness to

one’s self connoted by Boku connotes and the reassuringly familiar, suspended temporality he

resides in.101

101
Jay Rubin, another translator of Murakami’s novels, also approves of Birnbaum’s maneuver in his book
Music of Words, stating that the tense-change made “a distinction between the two narrators’ worlds that is

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 As the story progresses, our hero gradually becomes aware of the uncanny dual

existence he has been leading, for The End of the World turns out to be a fusion of an

artificially created narrative inserted into his brain and his pre-existent, self-imagery. He

eventually finds out that his days are numbered in the physical realm (Wonderland), as the

brain implant experiment that had been secretly conducted on his body malfunctions and

breaks his cognitive connection to reality. Professor, the scientist who had been assigned by

the calcutec organization to administer the neurological surgery in an attempt to develop a

bionic information scrambling technique for safeguarding data from the semiotecs’ corporate

espionage, explains the logic of the “human brain black box” concept in the following words:

“Each individual behaves on the basis of his individual mnemonic makeup. No two

human beings are alike; it’s a question of identity. And what is identity? The cognitive

system arising from the aggregate memories of that individual’s past experiences. The

layman’s word for this is the mind. No two human beings have the same mind. At the

same time, human beings have almost no grasp of their own cognitive systems”

(255).102

Memory and Identity: The Responsibility of Present-Progressive Being

The constantly morphing, ever enigmatic quality of the unconscious (which

constitutes the foundation of a fluid selfhood) is the optimum condition for producing a

personalized, hence unbreakable code structure. However, this strategy also carries the risk of

losing the decryption key (a fixed cue, impression or event that recalls certain memories)

natural in English. It also imparts a timeless quality that may be more appropriate than the normal past-tense
narration of the original” (117).
102
「人間ひとりひとりはそれぞれ の原理に基づいて行動しておるです。誰一人として同じ人間はおらん。なんというか、要
するにアイデンティティーの問題ですな。アイデンティティーとは何か？一人ひとりの人間の過去の体験の記憶の集積によっ
てもたらさせた思考システムの独自性のことです。もっと簡単に心と呼んでもよろしい。人それぞれ同じ心というのはひとつ
としてない。しかし人間はその自分の思考システムの殆んどを把握してはおらんです。」 (Vol. 2 93)

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itself amidst the arbitrary assortment of sensory input. The task of the Dream Reader

resonates with the idea that the combination of memory, the ceaseless influx of external

stimuli (in other words, interaction with others), and the resultant fluidity of identity are the

basis of an individual consciousness. In A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume writes that

the self and memory as its constituent are strictly empirical constructions of haphazard

“bundle[s] or collection[s] of different perceptions.” Should memories be experiences

specific to individuals and the cumulative total of one’s sensory perceptions, existing in an

arbitrary structure created by the possessor’s unique internal logic as well as the

unpredictable temporal progression in which one builds up the procession of worldly

experience by interacting with the ever-incomprehensible subject that is the non-I (others),

every human being on earth must be constantly forming different sets of impenetrable,

private memories and therefore unique constructs of the self. Aristotle shares this view of

memory as being the most intimate and unshareable quality of one’s existence in “On

Memory and Reminiscence.” He draws a clear causal connection between the dynamics of

memory as agent and the person who possesses a specific memory as the actor needed to

exert agency in materializing it:

For recollection is not the 'recovery' or 'acquisition' of memory; since at the instant

when one at first learns (a fact of science) or experiences (a particular fact of sense),

he does not thereby 'recover' a memory, inasmuch as none has preceded, nor does he

acquire one ab initio. It is only at the instant when the aforesaid state or affection (of

the aisthesis or upolepsis) is implanted in the soul that memory exists.

Should we consider the mind to be a data processor/storage, individual pieces of memories

cannot form a part of one’s present existence unless they are purposefully summoned to the

surface of consciousness: that is, “re-collected” or “re-called.” Although one may hold

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cherished memories of a deceased loved one—regardless of whether they are descriptive

memories such as the features of the beloved’s face or episodic memories such as the

recollection of a picnic out in the woods on a sunny afternoon—they can unfold in one’s

mind and thereby retain a semblance of life only upon being “recalled.”

Agential “recollection” is thus the very force that enables the process of preserving

memories and the identity one builds upon them, but it is also the mechanism by which one

affirms and realizes the crucial roles others play in constituting a present-progressive self, for

re-collected memories can be assembled into meaningful components of existence only

within the interactive social environment the I and the other co-inhabit and construct.

The Professor’s circuit breaker, which is used for precluding further external input

and thus keeping this uncontrollable aspect of human identity within a predictable range, is

the production and surgical implementation of what he calls a “core consciousness,” a

visualized, narrativized computer simulation of the test subjects’ identities. It fixes their

“cognitive system[s] on the phenomenological level” (262) and freeze-frames them in a

suspended temporality as a constant point of reference. The neuroscientific term for this

mechanism is “cued recall.” In cued recall experiments, subjects are presented with a list of

items and are later asked to remember them through designated sensory or cognitive

triggers.103 However, outside the controlled settings of the lab where the cues are limited to

elementary levels of direct signification, cued recalls are more often manifested in the form

of “involuntary memories,” spontaneous bursts of recollections resulting from random cues

that hold disparate significance to individuals depending on their experiences that construct

an associative cognitive chain as in the case of Marcel Proust’s episode of the madeleine, in

which a tray of tea and cake suddenly brings back long forgotten memories. The

103
For more on cued recall, see the Dictionary of Cognitive Science
(http://www.bcp.psych.ualberta.ca/~mike/Pearl_Street/Dictionary/contents/C/cued_recall.html).

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extraordinary pleasure the delicacies invoke makes Proust wonder “Whence did it come?

What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?” (61). He then continues, “And

suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on

Sunday mornings at Combray … my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own

cup of real or lime-flower tea” (61-63). In Wonderland, this process is called “shuffling” (as

in shuffling cards, connoting a sense of arbitrariness and unpredictability). The calcutecs who

carry a petrified version of their life-story incorporate given data into their memory structures;

the content and arrangement of which may seem illogical and random to (and therefore, safe

from) those who remain alien to the intimate structure of memory, but it can be readily

summoned through designated cues that activate the neurological pathways that compose

individual identity based on the unique succession of causalities and connections

accumulated throughout one’s life. David Hume, addressing this inherent originality that

underlies the logic of memory-identity, duly notes that it is on these unpredictable trains of

“resemblance, contiguity and causation, that identity depends; and as the very essence of

these relations consists in their producing an easy transition of ideas; it follows, that our

notions of personal identity, proceed entirely from the smooth and uninterrupted progress of

the thought along a train of connected ideas” (A Treatise of Human Nature).

This seemingly sound logic behind the Professor’s scheme, however, was destined to

fail (manifested in the form of the mental breakdown and eventual death of all the test

subjects) due to a paradoxical condition found in the “phenomenological fixing” process. For,

consciousness as the fundamental principle of phenomenology (meaning, within the greater

tradition of philosophy as well as the context of Wonderland, an inquiry into subjective

human experience and one’s being aware thereof) is always based on intentionality, an

interactive state that presupposes an external object “of” which one is conscious, which

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philosopher and psychologist Brentano explains as follows:

“Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle

Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might

call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction towards an

object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing), or immanent

objectivity … We could, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that they are

those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves” (88–

89).104

The “objectness” here, as Brentano notes, refers more to a conceptualization of objects rather

than the ontic quality of concrete things. Connecting this idea back to the fluctuating nature

of human identity (which, strictly limiting our discourse to the case of Wonderland, may be

conflated with the notion of “core consciousness”), one may see that the kind of fixation the

Professor envisions directly counters the interactive relation (“of”) between consciousness

and the objectness it intends based on subjectively construed understandings of objects,

which always remains in the ceaselessly changing (both in terms of temporality and spatiality)

world outside the confines of one’s mind. A closed loop system cannot incorporate external

input into its configuration, which would explain why the unfortunate calcutec test subjects in

the Professor’s experiment were doomed to mental breakdown and subsequent physical

demise.

Then how are we to explain the case of the protagonist (Watashi), who alone survives

and continues “shuffling” without any debilitating repercussion? Watashi also falls victim to

the experiment, but his downfall is due to a circuit malfunction rather than a systematic

conflict between the fluctuating formulations of inner identity and a forcefully imposed shell

104
From Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint.

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that blocks its interaction with its surroundings. The Professor explains that in the process of

investigating the test subjects, he had found a pre-existing fixture of a concrete identity

within Watashi’s mind, a detailed self-imagery and world view that remains segregated from

his daily dealings with the external world. This revelation, which is delivered to the readers

near the end of the novel, establishes the connection between the Wonderland and its uncanny

juxtaposition with the End of the World. We could say that Watashi develops an alternate

identity (dissociative identity disorder) that operates on its own beneath the sheath of

mundane reality, which functions as an ontological (and, given his role as a practicing

cryptologist, epistemological) bastion against the uncertainties of life.

The dual-processing mode of cognition Watashi embodies is hinted earlier on in the

opening chapter, in a scene where he practices simultaneous counting with the coins in his

left and right pockets in an ambidextrous fashion while descending to the Professor’s

subterranean lair, trapped in a claustrophobic elevator. (3) Watashi tries to ward off his

anxiety by analyzing this peculiar habit he has developed, pondering on how he tends to be

“one of those people who take a convenience-sake view of prevailing world conditions,

events, existence in general” (4); by convenience, he may mean a kind of instrumentalism

that condones falsity as long as it does not interfere with utilitarian cognition. One might say

Watashi’s philosophy verges on an actively embraced disenchantment of Plato’s cave analogy

that defines the fabrics of ordinary existence: “supposing that the planet earth were not a

sphere but a gigantic coffee table, how much difference in everyday life would that make”

(4)?105

Of course, having a clear sense of selfhood (or, in other words, a strictly subject-

oriented mode of cognition) does not always translate into a pathological problem, but

105
たとえば地球が球状の物体ではなく巨大なコーヒー・テーブルであると考えたところで、日常生活のレベルでいったいど
れほどの不都合があるだろう？ (Vol. 1 16)

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secluding oneself from social interactions could imply a relinquishment of responsibility

towards others, which in turn erases one’s place in collective existence. Watashi is a solitary

bachelor who leads an ascetic life, content with his current position. Traces of family ties,

close associates, and even friends are almost completely absent. His own self is the only

person to whom he is responsible. But can a person truly exist in such a social void?

Boku’s situation in the End of the World is quite different from Watashi’s. Boku’s life

in the Town is a holographic construct that depends on a myriad of other characters (e.g. the

librarian girl who assists his dream reading, his own shadow, the colonel who befriends him

and opens his eyes to the inner workings of the Town, etc.) as variegated projections of the

layers that comprise his complex psyche. As he gradually becomes aware of the fact that the

dystopian Town is none other than his own mentality, he realizes that responsibility is a

categorical concept that not only extends outward but also inward to one’s own self. For,

one’s own consciousness is—referring back to the nature of intentionality—the result of an

inter-subjective process, built upon one’s interaction with others who stand beyond the reach

of comprehension yet are key components of individual selfhood, a realization Boku

eventually arrives at and embodies by deciding to stay within the confines of the Town Walls

while urging his Shadow (the unknowable element, the otherness in his self) to escape. Boku

is clearly aware that his refusal to leave and remain exiled in the “forest” where those who

fail to cleanse themselves of their minds may mean enteral relegation to a purgatorial

existence, but he is ready to “see out the consequences of [his] own doings” (399).106 While

the Shadow finally accepts Boku’s decision and bids farewell, on the other side of the world

in Wonderland, Watashi quietly gives himself over to the big sleep, his last thoughts

resonating with Boku’s determination to find out why the river flows as it does, why the Wall

106
「… 僕は自分がやったことの責任を果さなくちゃならないんだ。」 (Vol. 2 408)

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stands its ground and the Town holds its footing in his own being, accepting what his mind

had repressed and denied, the necessity of unknowable others: “Now I could reclaim all I’d

lost. What’s lost never perishes” (396).107 The object of “loss” here takes on a dual-meaning,

for as the input/output channel between his mental world and the outer reality burns away, he

loses the others that are crucial to the story of his own being, and subsequently his conscious

self-awareness; yet, the imprints of the now unreachable others stand imperishable in the

mind as memories, a subjective rendering of alterity to which he claims responsibility.

Relegation as Revelation: Repositioning Wonderland

Many have interpreted the above finale as a passive acceptance of fate, a readiness to

depart towards (or remain in) the “end,” particularly as Watashi seeks a quiet and solitary

location to fade away while Boku intentionally turns down a long-awaited opportunity to

escape (which, in turn, could have meant Watashi’s survival in the outer world). Kuroko

Kazuo (黒古一夫 ), a Japanese critic known for his study of Murakami Haruki’s works, sees

Wonderland as an ode to the futility and despair in an age of peace and abundance.108 Susan J.

Napier echoes Kuroko’s interpretation by saying the protagonist “retreats into the security of

his own mind” (94) in her book The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature. Lee Jaesŏng, a

Japanese literature scholar in Korea, claims that in spite of the different structures of the two

worlds in the novel, they both converge upon the despair and futility.109 and Fukami Haruka

(深海遥) asserts that the appeal of Wonderland can be found in its existential and ethical

affirmation of a limited world.110 Praising the protagonist’s calm acceptance of his “end” as a

107
「私はこれで私の失ったものをとり戻すことができるのだ、と思った。それは一度失われたにせよ、決して損なわれては
いないのだ。」(Vol. 2 403)
108
See: Murakami Haruki: za rosuto wārudo, and Murakami Haruki to dōjidai no bungaku.
109
See Lee Jaesŏng’s Murakami Haruki ŭi chakpumsegye.
110
See Fukami Haruka’s Murakami Haruki no uta.

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display of ethical resolution to resist passive victimization, Fukami sheds a slightly more

positive light upon Wonderland’s closure, but the narrator’s life has still been snatched away

from his own hands without prior consent, which remains an undeniable, tragic fact. And the

Professor’s awkward attempt at consolation, his theory that our hero would lose contact with

the outer world (die) yet subjectively survive within the infinitely regressive-expansive

temporality one’s mental realm of existence inhabits.111 is in essence a mere euphemism for

the deadly truth that he would be moored in a state of being where there is no future.

Let us take a closer look at how the protagonist’s impending doom and his response to

its inevitability by revisiting Nietzsche’s concept of the “deadly truth,” which we (supposedly)

so strive to elude. That which we wish to turn our eyes away from may be construed in

several different ways within Wonderland’s context; impending death, the burden of the past

(Watashi is a single man who has nothing to hold onto other than his own work and meager

possessions in a cramped apartment, yet his unconscious desire to be frozen in an eternal

present as evidenced in Boku’s world alludes to an “evasion” of the past, rather than a lack of

one), or an individual’s helplessness in the face of systemic corruption and oppression. With

unicorn skulls mysteriously popping up along with fabricated historical records to validate its

111
The Professor uses the concept of the “encyclopedia toothpick” to describe the possibility of eternal life in
the realm of subjective consciousness:
“[Thought] is like an “encyclopedia toothpick,” [which is] a game theory devised by some scientist …
information, in this case the sentences in an encyclopedia, are all substituted with numbers. Each
alphabet is replaced by two digit numbers, such as A with 01, B with 02 and so on. Place a decimal
point in front of the line of numbers forming the sentence, and there is an infinitely small and ever
continuing figurative value. Like, 0.1732000631…. and on. Then, mark the exact point indicating that
number on the toothpick” (157).
In this way, the amount of information that can be inscribed on the toothpick becomes unlimited, as the numbers
to the right of the decimal point can regress toward infinity. If the time we live in the objective world is the
toothpick, the human mind that perceives each point along the toothpick is the numbers to the right of the
decimal point, eternally extending from any given point between the start and end of the toothpick, the 0 and the
1. “Even if our bodies die and dissolve into nothingness, the thought can capture the very precedent moment,
and eternally divide it on,” (158) just as the procession of the flying arrow can be measured forever in Zeno’s
paradox. By inverting the outward sequence of external time Watashi inhabits towards an endlessly ramifying
interior expanse of temporality, the Professor posits the possibility of multiple existences in time, as well as the
prospect of eternity, since “there is no time in thought … thought can view everything in any given moment,
experience eternity even, or perpetually revolve within a closed circuit” (156).

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existence, the subterranean structure of metropolitan Tokyo revealed to be brimming with

unidentified monstrous creatures called Yamikuro (meaning, utter darkness), and belief in

work ethics hopelessly destroyed as the conspiracy involving his company gradually unravels,

the narrator is faced with the horrifying realization that the principles that had governed his

monotonous yet stable lifestyle no longer hold. In fact, he may have been aware of this

devastating truth all along, for it is all these undesirable elements in the Wonderland that had

driven the narrator to create a fantasy land where time stands still, and emotions no longer

torment. Into which, in the end, he makes his final escape. Indeed, the scales may be tipping

in favor of the “life-giving illusion.”

The greater span (at least his works leading up to The Wind-up Bird Chronicle) of

Murakami’s literary cache seems to support this interpretation, for it is often characterized by

a general aloofness towards the society, instantiated through anonymous protagonists leading

professionally and socially independent (or even reclusive, one might say) lives, and fluid

settings that could qualify as almost any metropolis, devoid of cultural or national specificity.

Absurd events and characters nonchalantly insert themselves into the concrete texture of

reality: in A Wild Sheep Chase (1982), a cryptic sheep schemes to take over the world, while

a wind-up clockwork bird foreshadows critical historical junctures and a dry well grants

access to people’s suppressed desires and traumas in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

(1994). Wonderland harnesses all the above traits with a touch of cyberpunk, which

accentuates the sense of “distancing” from immediate social concerns that govern the lives of

his contemporaries.

This tendency to claim a solitary space of one’s own in Murakami’s works may lead

us to believe that Wonderland is a testament to Murakami’s isolationist, escapist or even

nihilist tendency, which has been noted as one of the main reasons why his work has had such

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wide-reaching appeal to the lost generation from Japan’s 1960s.112After the downfall of

radical political movements in the mid to late ‘60s, which aimed to purge Japan of its

totalitarian and oppressive militaristic legacy from the Empire days, and amidst the fastening

pace of the capitalistic economic development, Murakami’s generation (in particular, college-

educated intellectuals who led the student movements) was moored in a sense of loss (of

ideals) and failure (of their attempts to realize progressive ideology), either planted squarely

back in the mundane reality of the “sarariman” (salaryman [サラリーマン]: corporation

employees) lifestyle or incorporated into the system as the elite upper strata they had tried to

subvert.113 The recurring themes of loss and disillusionment in Murakami’s earlier works

aptly represent this undercurrent of melancholia. His debut novel Hear the Wind Sing (1979)

was about the irrevocable loss of youth and innocence, foreshadowing the pattern we would

see repeated in his later stories: ephemeral contacts and the symbolic death of a character

who is unable to face the drabness of reality. The companion piece that followed, Pinball,

1973, also retained the tone of nostalgia while attempting to ameliorate the banality of day-

to-day living as a cogwheel-like part of the societal machine by importing surrealistic

characters (like the alluring female twins that entertain the protagonist’s fantasies) and the

“search/quest” motif (in this case, an antiquated pinball machine). Until the publication of

Underground, Murakami’s gaze was always sidestepping the present, taking refuge in an

imagined world order or a lost integrity buried in the past.

The idea of a stand-alone identity residing within one’s psyche (in Wonderland) also

112
Often called the Dankai Generation [ 団塊の世代 ]. Dankai means “protruding,” in reference to the fact that
this particular age group was the result of a baby-boom that had occurred after WWII.
113
For further observations on how the socio-historical circumstances in the ‘60s~’80s had impacted
Murakami’s generation and his work, see the section on “Dankai Generation”in Murakami Haruki ron by
Komori Yoichi, the section on 全共闘 (Zenkyoto) in Haruki Munhaksuch’ŏp by Munhaksasangsa Charyochosa
Yŏnkusil), and Murakami Haruki munhak yŏnku by Cho Chuhi. Fukami Haruka’s Murakami Haruki no uta
provides photographic documentations of the student movements and protests along with a detailed explanation
on their connection to Murakami’s personal backgrounds, engagements and their literary representations.

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invited critique against solipsism. Advocates of this view can find ample evidence within and

without the text, for instance the fact that Murakami had decided that the protagonist’s alter

ego in Wonderland should voluntarily remain within its walls at the denouement of the story,

whereas in a novella titled “Machi to, sono futashikana kabe” (1980), which was the original

platform on which the End of the World part of Wonderland was later built, the protagonist

decides to escape. Boku’s choice, in contrast to the protagonist in “Machi,” marks a pivotal

moment whereby the fragmented subject willfully embraces his incomprehensible and

transgressive state of being, turning precarious conditions of existence into an

acknowledgement of responsibility towards others as well as his own self.

In this light, Wonderland may be seen as a prime example of narratives that run on the

principle of the metaphorical ghost I mention in Chapter 1. The present is surrendered in

favor of an illusory past or alternate reality that refuses to let go of past losses, sublating the

chance of survival for a fragmented identity (internal and external “I”s). Transgression (the

two “I”s’ interaction and eventual merger) is prohibited in the form of death, and the

incomprehensibility of the world is denounced as a cause for retreat and isolation.

Transgression, fragmentation, and incomprehensibility as the core attributes of the archetypal

ghost, the universally shared narrative of human existence, are seemingly denied their place

in Wonderland’s present (minus past and future)-oriented world, which may be why the

external (or alternately, real) “I” is condemned to death by the end of the story.

However, as I noted in the previous section by emphasizing “responsibility” as the

true momentum of Boku’s resolution to stay within the Town, I detect a positional shift in

Murakami’s approach to the relationship between the individual and the society in

Wonderland, which marks this novel as a point of transition that segues into his 1997-

1998 nonfiction work Underground (including The Place That Was Promised in the English

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translation). Underground, a collection of interviews with victims and perpetrators of

the 1995 Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, is widely regarded as the first

sign of Murakami’s initiation into a more socially conscious phase as a writer. We can see the

theme of a colossal evil force lurking beneath the placid facades of mundane everyday life in

his earlier productions, for instance with A Wild Sheep Chase and all the novels that

immediately precede and follow it such as Hear the Wind Sing (1979) Pinball, 1973

(1980),114 and Dance Dance Dance (1988), as they form a loose set of tales that chronicle

the life of the same protagonist. But active resistance to such forces emerge only after the

publication of Underground, as seen in the narrator’s struggle against the corrupting powers

of his politician brother-in-law in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the epic battle against evil

incarnate in the form of a giant worm in Kafka on the Shore, or efforts to dismantle a sexually

abusive religious cult in 1Q84. Wonderland has conventionally been read as a product that

belongs to Murakami’s “detached” years, understandably, given the way how the protagonist

passively accepts his demise on one side of the parallel universe he inhabits, and refuses to

escape the confines of his mind in the other.

Upon a closer look, however, we can see counter evidence planted all throughout the

narrative. The protagonist’s fragmented identity is in fact the very key to survival, as he is the

only one to bear the artificially implanted selfhood’s burden with the innate defense

mechanism that is his preexisting self-awareness. The transgression occurring between the

inner and outer “I”s in the later part of the novel may well be seen as the prelude to mental

deterioration, but we must also note that Boku’s decision to relegate himself to the forest is an

active, agential decision to bridge the static world within the confines of the Walls and the

114
Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball, 1973, and A Wild Sheep Chase are commonly referred to as the “Rat Trilogy”
for the recurring characters (the protagonist and his friend, nicknamed “Rat”) and the continuous narrative
thread that flows through the three works. Dance Dance Dance could be seen as a sequel to A Wild Sheep
Chase, but with Rat gone (he dies in Sheep), it is also considered as a separate story.

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illusive concept of the “mind.” Watashi’s discovery of life’s small joys and marvels, his

desire to know these inconsequential yet integral parts of existence within the concrete

fabrics of the world, (i.e. noticing the small snail in a flower pot, realizing that he had been

completely oblivious of its being as part of the world and the ensuing desire to know more

about it and incorporate it into his own life) is a life-affirming perseverance in the form of

expanding his presence beyond a self-centered lifestyle. In short, the nihilistic outlook of

Wonderland is a surficial device that masks the deep-seated yearning for connection, an

acknowledgement of the imperfection engraved in the world as well as one’s own selfhood,

which is the very drive that propels, and enables, the story of the archetypal ghost. Watashi

might never have known of the existence of the End of the World, had it not been for an

unfortunate error on the part of the Professor who forgot to put an override circuit in

Watashi’s brain (211).

Like two sides of a coin, the self and the other are inherently interdependent. The

agency in the process of identity formation is being transferred from the self to the other

when technologically fragmented selves are exposed to manipulation, but at the same time,

the others are those who trigger self-awareness to begin with, as remarked upon by Jacques

Lacan in his idea of the “mirror stage”115. Life is in, and is in itself, a constant state of flux,

and in its course, “identity” also undergoes ceaseless transformations in accordance with the

context of the here and now; a fixed “core” identity that does not communicate with (or is

subject to change by) the outside simply does not exist. The self is at once what oneself

perceives and believes it to be, and how it is seen and noticed in the eye of the others. “I am

thought, therefore I am” is as equally valid a statement, as “I think, therefore I am.” As in the

115
According to Lacan, a child forms his initial understanding of (an illusory) self upon encountering his/her
own reflection in the mirror. For more on the mirror stage, see Lacan’s essay “The Mirror Stage as Formative of
the I function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” in his book Écrits, and footnote 36.

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case of Snow Crash, the key to survival lies in agency, but Wonderland adds yet another layer

to the definition of agency by emphasizing the present-progressive act of holding on to the

diverse fragments of identity others provide to one’s own self while it keeps changing and

dispersing. This responsiveness, and the desire to not only exert one’s will but also take

responsibility for the uncontrollable aspects of one’s life as well as others as crucial

components of being-in-the-world compose a mode of being, one that denies a core or whole

that never existed or will exist.

Beyond Axiology, Beyond Hermeneutics: Others as that Which to Cherish

In this light, we may read Watashi’s decision to accept annihilation as an extended

gesture towards actively, agentially affirming the existence of the other as part of his own, for

as observed in Chapter 1, death is none other than the ultimate and unconquerable alterity,

which is ever inaccessible to the solitary being unless one reflects and projects its prospect

through the eye of an other. The traumatic awakening to mortality, therefore, is an

acknowledgement not only of the fragile and fragmented condition of existence, but also an

admittance of our inability to know—failure to decipher the mystery of what lies beyond the

threshold of bodily extinction, but also the incapability to know death itself, the other that

defines and constitutes one’s story of being. In Time and the Other, Emmanuel Levinas

asserts that the subject’s desire to master and control its being (in Wonderland, we may see

this tendency in the protagonist’s unconscious enforcement of order and stasis, a complete

state of “knowing” upon his own selfhood in the Town) is shattered by death: “Death

becomes the limit of the subject’s virility … It is not just that there exists ventures impossible

for the subject, that its powers are in some way finite … what is important about the approach

of death is that at a certain moment we are no longer able to be able” (74). Death is the point

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where agency itself becomes null, an impossibility; Stephenson’s vision of the arbitrariness of

individuality as the salvation for the subject becomes defunct in the face of the deep and vast

void where consciousness, the unconscious and non-conscious as well, in its tow, evaporate.

However, death as the “loss” of self is paradoxically a discovery and an acquisition, for the

“approach of death indicates that we are in relation with something that is absolutely other,

something bearing alterity not as a provisional determination we can assimilate through

enjoyment, but as something whose very existence is made of alterity” (74). Therefore, an

individual subject’s “solitude is thus not confirmed by death but broken by it” (74).

Watashi’s last day on earth supports this claim, for only when faced by the prospect of

death does he notice and appreciate the small joys, the wonders of other existences

surrounding him; the Watashi we see in the beginning of the novel was a hermit who refused

external input to the extent of building a self-sufficient fortress in his own mind. Becoming

an eternal exile in the perfect equilibrium in his mind space, free of all unpredictability and

impositions of uncontrollable forces from without would in fact be something of a wish

fulfillment. Yet, with less than a day of worldly existence left, Watashi realizes that the self he

dreamed of, the I he wished to be instead of being and inhabiting the here and now, is a mere

illusion: “A world of immortality? I might actually create a new self. I could become happy,

or at least less miserable. And dare I say it, I could become a better person. But that had

nothing to do with me now. That would be another self. For now, I was an immutable,

historical fact” (342). He wonders if his short-lived entanglements with the librarian or the

Professor’s granddaughter (who accompanies his adventures) had given them any joy, left

any imprint upon their lives. Perhaps so, perhaps not. There was no time left to “know.” The

hard-earned recognition of others as a viable component of his existence was about the slip

right through his fingers, forever gone. But he still feels “even if no one would miss me, even

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if I left no blank space in anyone’s life, even if no one noticed, I [he] couldn’t leave willingly”

(391), because the others that he tries to hold on to are and will always be part of his own self.

This steadfast adherence to life manifested in Watashi must be understood as a break-

through moment where the countless others not only without but also within the I finally

come to claim their voices. Indeed, no one may even notice Watashi’s absence. His cold body

may lie undiscovered at the waterfront for days after his expiration, just “Blowing in the

Wind,” as Bob Dylon sings in the car stereo (395), a perfect requiem for Watashi’s last

moments. Yet, despite the bone-chilling solitude, squarely in the face of eternal confinement,

Watashi sets himself down in a sense of contentment: “some limited happiness had been

granted this limited life” (395). Limited, indeed, for its end is just around the corner. But this

“limited” scope of his personal, individual existence extends beyond the tight-knit boundary

of the self at this very moment, for he wishes that he “gave the Professor and his chubby

granddaughter and my [his] librarian friend a little happiness” (395). Why be concerned with

others when their meaning, their being (to him as a conscious subject) would soon be

nullified anyway? Because they constitute a crucial component of his self. Because the very

“fragments” that constitute his being includes these very others, who have built, shaped, and

shared his life. And, because, they are none other than the realization of external existences,

or in Levinas’s terms, “faces” (of others)116 that eternally escape and reside outside of the

self, the ultimate difference that cannot be fully cognized by, ruled by, reduced to or

incorporated into the self by any means, like death. They are, in other words, fragments

within the I that shatter the solitude of the subject when even individual agency and will to

116
From Totality and Infinity: “If the transcendent cuts across sensibility, if it is openness preeminently, if its
vision is the vision of the very openness of being, it cuts across the vision of forms and can be stated neither in
terms of contemplation nor in terms of practice. It is the face; its revelation is speech. The relation with the
Other alone introduces a dimension of transcendence, and leads us to a relation totally different from experience
in the sensible sense of the term, relative and egoist” (193).

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life cannot stand to exert its power and reign over life in the “face” of death.

This traumatic realization of his fragmented (or to be fragmented, future tense, in that

the tie his mind maintains with the body will be severed any minute) state of being, in the

face of the great incomprehensible that awaits him beyond the inexorable threshold of

extinction, Watashi finally finds meaning in (or, to be more accurate, makes meaning of) his

life, for he thinks, “the world is full of revelations” (395).117 Revelations are cathartic

experiences that, in reference to the etymology of the word,118 unveil that which is hidden,

e.g. a religious or spiritual truth accessed through divine inspiration. Now, what truth might

this be in Wonderland?119 Levinas calls one’s contact with an “other’s” gaze “an absolute

experience,” a “revelation.”120 Watashi’s last good wish towards those he had come to know

117
世界はあらゆる形の啓示に充ちているのだ。 (402) Considering the sentence that immediately precedes this one,
“I thought about snails and suzuki in butter sauce and shaving cream and Blowing in the Wind” (395), and in
reference to Heidegger’s concept of the “world” and “earth” in his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” we
might understand how Watashi’s “revelation” (that responsibility/responsiveness to others is the very crux of
being) extends not only to the merely human but also functions as a world-building mechanism in a larger
context, its architecture heavily reliant upon inorganic matters, the earthly components of life here and now as
Nietzsche had emphasized in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Heidegger acknowledges the imaginative and empathetic,
world-building function of art by adding an agential component in this process, namely coining the verb
“worlding.” His explication appears to be effectively spelling out the revelation Watashi had reached here, that
things and people could have meanings (values as that which is cherished) without carrying any particular
meaning (hermeneutically): “By the opening up of a world, all things gain their lingering and hastening, their
remoteness and nearness, their scope and limits. In a world’s worlding is gathered that spaciousness out of
which the protective grace of the gods is granted or withheld. Even this doom, of the god remaining absent is a
way in which world worlds” (171). At the same time, Heidegger also underlines the importance of the craft and
material substance that constitutes the foundation of the worlds that are worlded; he uses the term “earth” to
refer to this particular quality. He reflects that, with the example of a sculptor, poet and painter, the materials
that are used for worlding (creating a work of art) hold onto their essential quality, their textures and value as a
“thing” remain tangible and recognizable in themselves with successful artistic rendering: as the “world is set
up,” the “earth is set forth” (172), brought to recognition. This valuing of the fundamental components that
enable world-building can be seen in Watashi’s appreciation of the “snails and suzuki in butter sauce and
shaving cream,” the trivialities of our daily dealings that are simply there, not necessarily hidden, yet firmly
constitute the fine-grained textures of life. I see this appreciation of the “earthly” components, seeing things in
themselves without trying to endow any metaphysical dimension (seeking a hermeneutic answer), as another
key aspect of Watashi’s revelation.
118
An instance or experience of disclosure or communication of knowledge by divine or supernatural means
(second half of the 12th cent. in faire une revelatiun), disclosure or exposure by a person of something
previously unknown or kept secret (c1300; rare before 1611), the last book of the New Testament, the
Apocalypse (14th cent. in plural in le livre des revelacions , 1553 in singular la revelation de Saint-Jean ),
enlightenment (a1419 in Anglo-Norman) (OED).
119
Which, ironically, stands at the opposite end of the Nietzschian “truth” aforementioned
120
In Totality and Infinity, Levinas maintains that “the dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face”
(78). We may read the “divine” here as a presence, a (transcendent) truth that defies human hermeneutics or the

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and appreciate throughout his short and ill-fated ordeal is none other than a recognition of

these encounters. The connection he had made and felt, and the sense of responsibility he had

grown towards them, are the very truth that reveals itself as the essence of being here; what

Heidegger might, alternatively, call “the unconcealment of Being.”

We must note that this “revelation,” the meaning or truth Watashi discovers in these

critical moments, transcends hermeneutics. He is yet uncertain of what lies ahead, whether he

would be plunged into a vegetable-like state of internal incarceration in his fantasy world or

simply expire due to the gaping chasm between his body and mind (strongly reminiscent of

the Snow Crash virus victims, as closely observed in the preceding chapters). Being or the

possibility of its sustenance beyond its own self (afterlife) still remains a mystery, and

incomprehensibility is firmly a part of life as it ever had been. Therefore, the truth that is

unveiled here must be understood more as a value than as a semiotic reference or information.

As such, it is something to be cherished rather than a criterion of judgment. And Boku in the

following (last) chapter in the novel acts out this value, agentially “cherishes,” in the form of

taking responsibility.

I find this reading of responsibility as the ultimate value most significant both within

the context of Murakami’s literary portfolio as well as the Japanese society at large. The

understanding of responsibility as social obligation rather than voluntary offering is an ethical

creed to be upheld in the Japanese society. Ruth Benedict, in her book The Chrysanthemum

and the Sword (1946), identified this sense of indebtedness (On [恩]; whether it be to the

society or existence as a whole) as a core element in the Japanese social conscious. Of course

fetters of individual and empirical existence, a value that is to be cherished in itself rather than interpreted. “A
relation with the Transcendent free from all captivation by the Transcendent [captivation as being ruled and
subjugated to through a subjective understanding] is a social relation. It is here that the Transcendent, infinitely
other, solicits us and appeals to us. The proximity of the Other, the proximity of the neighbor, is in being an
ineluctable moment of the revelation of an absolute presence (that is, disengaged from every relation), which
expresses itself” (78).

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her observations are dated and framed under a very specific circumstance (that of the U.S.

and Japan being enemies at war, due to which Japan was an object of strategic analysis)121

and limited by Benedict’s lack of personal experience with Japanese culture, yet her

observation may still be given credit particularly within the historical context Murakami

inhabited. As noted above, Murakami has shown a tendency to avert his gaze from the failed

legacy of political reform upheld by his generation in works that precede Wonderland, either

packaging the past in nostalgic disillusionment/coming-of-age narratives or squarely refusing

to inherit the legacies of the macroscopic ideologies that oppress individuality as in the case

of Hear the Wind Sing, Pinball, 1973 or A Wild Sheep Chase. With Wonderland, Murakami

hesitantly revisits his footings in the society, existence as cohabitation and interaction with

others, by admitting that responsiveness to, or responsibility towards others is the result not

of external enforcement but agential choice, and a crucial component of individuality.122

This turn also effectively signifies Murakami’s own coming-of-age, a true liberation

from the dual-failure his generation suffered. Considering the legacy of Imperial Japan’s

defeat and the failure of the newly arisen civil subjects (college students who led the student

movements, to which group Murakami belonged) to provoke systematic change, followed by

their relapse into a vicious circle of violence that only serves to reenact the previous

generation’s militarist follies, we may conjecture that Murakami’s alienated and ambitionless

121
Benedict was commissioned to conduct her studies by the U.S. Office of War Information. The book was
heavily criticized for its instrumental purposes and limited (or rather biased) perspective, yet its influence has
lasted over half a century.
122
We may describe this turn as a jump from the nihilistic to the absurd, for whereas Murakami’s refusal of
imposed societal values and others as their embodiments and actors had locked his pre-Wonderland characters in
a world where the uncertainty and ephemerality of being reproduce and amplify solitude in a closed-loop cycle,
Wonderland actively revolts against the “unreasonable silence of the world” (49), a notion Camus had proposed
in his view of existence in The Myth of Sisyphus, and affirms the Sisyphus’ eternal and fruitless ordeal towards
meaning (or in other words, an accomplishment, an understanding of the task of existence at hand)—a self-
resolve that defies mere hermeneutics. The agential act of toiling on despite or even because of its
meaninglessness, the “choice” to continue being, is the ultimate value one can hold on to.

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loner hero figures leading up to Watashi in Wonderland (e.g. the Rat Trilogy) were trying to

deny and reject the social bondages in favor of individual agency. By introducing Boku, who

decides to forego escape (solitary survival) through, inversely, the exertion of agency and

take responsibility for those around him despite and against the unjust violence perpetrated

upon the unsuspecting individual by a corrupt society, such as an unsanctioned and failed

neurosurgical experiment that had resulted from the conflicts embedded within a profit and

progress-driven system, Murakami reclaims the individual from its self-induced exile.

Watashi’s revelation (or, salvation) is thus the meaning and value of choice (the act of which,

in turn, presupposes different options, the existence of other factors and pathways that reside

outside the solipsist universe of the subject) itself, a responsive and responsible act towards

external conditions, and others. Signs of Murakami’s unique understanding of sociality as

individuality can be seen throughout his novels that follow Wonderland, each case displaying

a gradual process of opening-up. Whereas the “Rat Trilogy” all end with irrevocable losses

(youth, innocence, Rat himself who is the only real friend the protagonist has, and the

uncompromising idealism Rat had embodied), Wonderland leaves us with a glimmer of hope

that Boku and his world would, over time, regain their “minds.” Loss and melancholia

continue to occupy a key position in Murakami’s later works as dominant moods/motifs, and

the idea that “to know others or truly be one and whole with others (or even perhaps one’s

own self) is impossible” remains unshaken as seen in the tragic fate of the heroines in

Norwegian Wood, The Sputnik Sweetheart or Kafka on the Shore, but with each step,

Murakami reaches out for one person at a time, seeking connection. For instance, in The

Wind-up Bird Chronicle, the main character has a beloved wife for whom he is willing to

sacrifice everything (an unprecedented development in terms of familial associations in

Murakami’s narrative world), and the journey he undertakes to rescue her involves listening

133
to and engaging with the hurts and traumas of others. In 1Q84, a couple unites against all

odds, defying temporal and spatial obstacles, even bearing a child.

Narrativeness as Survival, and World-building

Another important aspect to note in Wonderland, in connection to the idea of

responsibility to others (and in turn, one’s own self) as a definitive truth of being, is

Murakami’s emphasis on storytelling as a world-building mechanism, and consequently, an

affirmation of being-in-the-world (being human). In this regard, Murakami’s afterword for

Underground, entitled “Blind Nightmare: Where Are We Japanese Going?”, is most

illuminating. Here Murakami examines the momentum that powered Aum Shirikyo’s sarin

attack, suggesting that the story of this tragic incident must be revisited and retold from a

fresh perspective in order to prevent it from fading into a mere urban myth: “what we need …

are words coming from another direction, new words for a new narrative. Another narrative

to purify this narrative” (197).123 Interviewing the victims of the incident, he finds that

seeing the perpetrators as people who are completely outside the reach of comprehension

could be a dangerous attitude. Noting that the society “will get nowhere as long as the

Japanese continue to disown the Aum “phenomenon” as something completely other, an alien

presence viewed through binoculars on the far shore” (197), he asks the readers to reflect on

how these “others” (he uses the term “them”) have arisen from within, from “us,” for

“encounters that call up strong physical disgust or revulsion are often in fact projections of

our own faults and weaknesses… “they” are the mirror of “us”” (199).124

123
とすれば、私たちが今必要としているのは、おそらく新しい方向からやってきた言葉であり、それらの言葉で語られるま
ったく新しい物語（物語を浄化するための別の物語）なのだ－ということになるかもしれない。 (691)
124
This particular quote could be understood in conjunction with Lacan’s “mirror stage” and Julia Kristeva’s
notion of the “abject”; the real is inherently fragmented, for one can only steel glimpses of body parts as objects
that stand apart from the “seeing eye” of the ego, whereas in one’s imagination, the ego is always a whole,

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 His subsequent analysis effectively reflects the change we see in Murakami’s

fictional world, a movement from the evasive attitude he had displayed towards social

concerns throughout the early stages of his career to the active struggle for justice against the

systematic evils he explores in later works such (e.g. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on

the Shore or 1Q84. Quoting the manifesto of the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, in which he

condemns the “system” (society)’s demands for conformity and homogeneity by asserting

that those who “pursue autonomy is seen as “disease” (199), Murakami observes that Aum

Shinrikyo believers are none other than those who have been persecuted for failing to find

their “right place,” to borrow Benedict’s conceptualization of the Japanese social conscious.

They are those who had been shunted aside as the sick or ill, unfitting within a sterilized

structure where each and every member must flawlessly serve their designated roles as

functional cogwheels. Yet, going back to his “mirror image” theory, Murakami points out that

“autonomy and dependency are like light and shade, caught in the pull of each other’s gravity,

until, after considerable trial and error, each individual can find his or her own place in the

world” (200).125 The sick and exiled, therefore, vacate their own individuality by seeking out

a prescribed form of a “hand-down self” that assures a place to be, a safe path to follow. In

Wonderland, the “hand-down self” takes on two forms: firstly, that of The End of the World, a

unified entity. The visualized identity one sees and feels with the mirrored image provides the child with an
imagined “wholeness.” In Lacan’s words, “the mirror stage manifests in an exemplary situation the symbolic
matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, prior to being objectified in the dialectic of
identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject” (76). In
short, the mirror stage is a primitive phase of self-formation, as an understanding “self” (here I am using the
word self in a generic sense, not in the Lacanian use) is formed by transposing the subjective on to its objectified
image. It is a discovery of “otherness” within the I. In contrast, when one sees a fragment (quality) of one’s own
self in an other, as with the case Murakami points out in this quote, the traction one exerts towards the other is
reversed, and the I is torn between the pull of both the other and the I, which leads to a liminal (therefore
unstable and revolting) state of being “neither subject nor object” (1), a condition Kristeva calls “abject”. The
imaginary wholeness one achieves by pulling the object (mirror-image of oneself) into the subject is shattered,
and both the other and the I are confined in a limbo where they are no longer what they are. Murakami’s
observation that seeing one’s mirror image (particularly properties one tries to suppress and ignore, which is in
turn reminiscent of Jung’s idea of the shadow) incites “disgust and revulsion” could be understood in this light.
125
それら [「個人の自律的パワープロセス」と「他律的パワープロセス」 ] は陰と陽のように自発的な引力で引かれ合って、
しかるべき所定の位置を－おそらくは試行錯誤の末に－個人個人の世界認識の中に見出すはずのものなのだ。 (697-698)

135
self-imposed identity Watashi creates to guard himself against the society’s “hand-down”

values; and secondly, the alternative “core consciousnesses” the Professor builds into his

brain. The latter is clearly a prescribed system to be sublated, but the irony is that later,

Boku/Watashi realizes that in fact the former is also a shackle from which he must break free,

for by blocking out external input (others), the Town has essentially become a reiteration of

the system it had tried to resist.

Let us delve deeper into this two-fold break from the “hand-down” selves. The

metaphor of pathology Murakami uses here is particularly interesting in comparison with the

Snow Crash virus, for we see how individuality and agency fall under a completely different

light depending on the social structure one occupies. In an anomic world such as the one in

Snow Crash where clashing values run amok, the “diseased” (the virus victims) are people

who fail to find their own stand and blindly subscribe to a collective initiative. In contrast, in

a society where order prevails (at least by principle if not in application), like in the hyper-

capitalistic, materially abundant and culturally hierarchic portrait of Japan as Murakami sees

it, the invalids are those who are unable to or refuse to be nameless, functional parts in the

social machine. As noted above, what critics have dubbed a nihilistic—denying domineering

values—tendency in Murakami’s pre-Wonderland works could be seen as a gesture of

defiance against the ruling system’s drive to vaccinate (put in order) its subjects by firmly

holding on to an autonomous self-agenda, the resolve for which is embodied through

Watashi’s unconscious creation of Boku in his closed-loop system called the End of the

World. Boku realizes that the world he (and Watashi) built in order to resist systematized

homogeneity is in fact a reproduction of its evils. The forest essentially serves as an asylum,

and his subsequent decision to rise against this pathology of conformity by joining the

renegades in the forest none other than he himself had condemned, is Murakami’s break from

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nihilism by taking responsibility as the value (something to be cherished, not that which rules

and dictates) that replaces and trumps all values.

The sense of responsibility towards others I have noted in Wonderland is all the more

important precisely because one’s resistance to this “vaccination” process is a way of opening

up the system towards symbiotic and heterogenetic survival, at once an admittance and

embracing of life’s incomprehensibility and incompleteness, thereby allowing the individual

to find its place (affirm its existence) through the acknowledgement of other entities. I call

this world-building, for being responsive to and responsible for others is an escape from a

solipsist universe into a true sense of “world” consisting of multiple nodes and actors-reactors.

And the mechanism for this act of building, the framing platform, is the narrative and

narrativeness of all things, for being-in-the-world is essentially a universally shared “story” to

be told, an archetypal ghost.126

In Chapter 2, I stated that the momentum that enables and propels the archetypal

ghost is technology; in Wonderland also, narrative—aside from all the direct imports of

futuristic apparatuses such as the brain-data processor convergence technique, neuroscientific

visualization methods and cyborg-like implantations—is the ultimate technology that

gravitationally pulls the unreal into the real, non-being into being. As in Snow Crash,

virtualization and information-processing technology serves to remediate the real and the

126
We must also note that “songs,” patternized and narrativized forms of music (as art, a form of world-
building and a recognition, thereby, of others) play a key role in the protagonists’ awakening to self-awareness
in Wonderland. Boku and the librarian girl in his side of the world open their eyes to the possibility of retrieving
their minds through songs, in particular “Danny Boy,” which in turn functions as a bridge and recall-cue for
Watashi in the Wonderland portion of the story. As discussed above, involuntary recollection arises from a
resonance with the undiscovered realm of one’s own mind (the unconscious), the process of which could be
seen as a contact with the other that resides within the I. Boku’s harnessing of the song is, in this light, a
response to and taking responsibility for the other as an undeniable presence that constitutes his own existence.
Understandably, and as pointed out by Jay Rubin in Music of Words, music and literature are the two pillars that
constitute Murakami’s artistic interface with the world; he ran a jazz café and is what one might call an amateur-
expert in both classical and jazz music (evidenced by numerous essays he wrote on the topic as well as full
volumes on Jazz).Various songs flow like ambient music throughout his novels, often becoming important
motifs (even titles, like in Norwegian Wood) in themselves. For a full guide on Wonderland’s BGM
(background music), see Iizuka Tsuneo’s Popularity no lesson.

137
unreal, the seat of agency and self-effacing conformity in Wonderland, but the crucial

difference between the two works lies in that the dialectic of being consists of different nodes

(at least in its focus) in the two works; the virtual-real in Snow Crash, and the virtual-

simulated in Wonderland. I differentiate the virtual and the simulated here, for whereas the

former refers to a hierarchic division between the virtual and the real based on a clear

awareness of the fictitious nature of the former, denoting the intervention of conscious

control, the distinction between the real and non-real lies only in the origin (who made this

reality? Is it artificial or not?) with the latter. That is, while the concept of the virtual

presupposes the subject’s self-awareness and footing in reality, and serves more as a

“representational version” of reality, those within a simulated reality may not necessarily be

cognizant of its construct, whereby the relation between the signified (real) and the signifier

(simulation) dissolves into nothingness. Baudrillard’s insight into the cognitive and semiotic

gap between representation and simulation may be of use here:

“Representation stems from the principle of the equivalence of the sign and of the real

(even if this equivalence is Utopian, it is a fundamental axiom). Simulation, on the

contrary, stems from the Utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radial

negation of the sign as value, from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of

every reference. Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting

it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation

itself as a simulacrum” (6).

Metaverse in Snow Crash, cyberspace in Neuromancer and the information network in Ghost

in the Shell are prime examples of virtual realities. In contrast, the Matrix in The Matrix and

The End of the World (all three versions, including its original construct Watashi creates in

his mind and the two core consciousnesses Professor later builds in) are simulacra, for its

138
inhabitants are by principle and in practice precluded from the knowledge of its artificial

nature.

This distinction is crucial in understanding narrative as a form of technology, in

particular the kind Heidegger sees as that which unveils truth (or Being),127 for the realm of

the simulacrum is where being is eclipsed by (or reduced to) signs, and the “world” set forth

precludes “earth” from being brought forth. We must remember that The End of the World,

although a self-sustaining closed loop system in itself, is ultimately grounded in Wonderland;

when the “earth” part of this dual-constitution (Watashi/Boku’s embodied presence) is

severed from the mind’s “world,” the whole construct (with its point of origin, the body of

Watashi) faces annihilation. The simulacrum, therefore, lacks the gravitational pull

technology as the “realizing” momentum exerts, and is an imposter rather than the catalyzer

of truth in being-in-the-world, for it negates and sublates the unreal (the “other” of the real)

as its ontological counterpart and consequently fails to be responsive/responsible; “the whole

system [of the simulacrum] becomes weightless, it is no longer itself anything but a gigantic

simulacrum—not unreal, but a simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but

exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference” (5-6). In

short, the simulated can never be a narrative, a world-building story, for it can never be told

(by definition it negates any external party to which the story of itself could be told).

When Wonderland was being conceived by Murakami, the internet was still far off the

horizon for the general public, but the visualized core consciousness the Professor envisions

effectively harbingers myriads of virtual or simulated selves we create and inhabit in

cyberspace, most notably through the proliferation of social networking services. The selves

and their stories we build and live in Facebook, Twitter, role-playing games, and various

127
A concept found in “The Question Concerning Technology,” and various other essays.

139
other telepresence/communication platforms mostly reside in the plane of the virtual, for

total-immersion is an impossibility. With the current level of technology, the experience of

digitized unreality is always mediated through an “interface,” a physical contact with an

externalized terminal of mediation (machines such as smart phones, computers). The kind of

convergence (data=being) described in Snow Crash and Wonderland has not emerged as a

tangible possibility as of yet, but the potential of a self-induced simulacra taking over the

virtual is definitely a phenomenon we observe in the social columns in the media: people

losing themselves in fictitious identities, becoming oblivious and irresponsive to the “other”

realm (reality) the body inhabits or literal others, people, who are in essence the very

constituents and listeners of the stories one lives. The virtual selves spread over the vast

expanse of the net must be effectively compartmentalized and recognized as fragmentations

of being, rather than self-sufficient “worlds” in themselves, in respect of their earthly

presence that is the body.

As present-progressive beings-in-the-world, responsive and responsive individuals

who actively inhabit the otherness within the I, we incorporate and interact through

telepresence technology in a state of heterogenetic symbiosis (as noted in Chapter 2). The real

and the unreal are ontological counterparts but also one and whole, coexisting in a symbiotic

relation.128 The tyranny of the real precludes the unfolding of Being, for the unreal is where

imagination and technology as its practice carries on the story (which, by definition, calls for

a progressive movement), and when the virtual turns to simulacrum, the other as the referent,

constituent and audience of the story of being, dissipates into the void.

Conclusion

128
The real and the unreal cannot be axiologically positioned in a hierarchical structure; they are two sides of
the same coin.

140
 The “responsibility towards others” Murakami comes to advocate in Wonderland and

the following works can also be read as a demand he directs to his own self as a writer, and

an artist—an awakening to his own responsibility in creating the stories he tells. In “The

Origin of the Work of Art,” using the example of Van Gogh’s paining of a pair of peasant

shoes, Heidegger maintains that a work of art must create, build and invoke a shared

experience whereby the viewers/readers/audience could enter into and be part of the milieu,

the story that unfolds and expands behind the presented façade, to encounter the truth of

Being: “Van Gogh’s painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant

shoes, is in truth. This being emerges into the unconcealedness of its Being” (164). This

cannot be possible without the inter-responsiveness among the artist, the work of art, and the

viewer/reader; it is a revelatory moment whereby the I and the other achieve a truly symbiotic

existence, which is the very truth of Being brought forth, that the archetypal ghost must and is

the product of interactive being in the world. Such artistic sublimation may take on a wide

range of forms, but storytelling, the narrative, is one that flows through the very essence of

this present-progressive mode of being.

I conclude this chapter with one more quote from Underground, in which Murakami’s

words most accurately sum up the argument I have so far parsed out through my observations

of Wonderland:

If you lose your ego, you lose the thread of that narrative you call your Self. Humans,

however, cannot live very long without some sense of a continuing story. Such stories

go beyond the limited rational system (or the systematic rationality) with which you

surround yourself; they are crucial keys to sharing time-experience with others.

Now a narrative is a story, not logic, nor ethics, nor philosophy. It is a dream you keep

having, whether you realize it or not. Just as surely as you breathe, you go on

141
 ceaselessly dreaming your story. And in these stories you wear two faces. You are

simultaneously subjet and object. You are the whole and you are a part. You are real

and you are shadow. “Storyteller” and at the same time “character.” It is through such

multilayering of roles in our stories that we heal the loneliness of being an isolated

individual in the world (201).129

129
もしあなたが自我を失えば、そこであなたは自分という一貫した物語をも喪失してしまう。しかし人は、物語なしに長
く生きていくことはできない。物語というものは、あなたがあなたを取り囲み限定する論理的制度（あるいは制度的論理）を
超越し、他者と共時体験をおこなうための重要な秘密の鍵であり、安全弁なのだから。
物語とはもちろん「お話」である。「お話」は論理でも倫理でも哲学でもない。それはあなたが見続ける夢である。あなた
はあるいは気がついていないかもしれない。でもあなたは息をするのと同じように、間断なくその「お話」の夢を見 ているの
だ。その「お話」の中では、あなたは二つの顔を持った存在である。あなたは主体であり、同時にあなたは客体である。あな
たは総合であり、同時にあなたは部分である。あなたは実体であり、同時にあなたは影である。あなたは物語をつくる「メー
カー」であり、同時にあなたはその物語を体験する「プレーヤー」である。私たちは多かれ少なかれこうした重層的な物語性
を持つことによって、この世界で個であることの孤独を癒しているのである。 (701)
Also, for an alternative approach to the importance and power of storytelling in Murakami’s works, see Iwamiya
Keiko’s Shishunki o meguru boken. Iwamiya offers readings of a number of Murakami’s novels from the
perspective of psychotherapy, an apt approach considering how speaking out and sharing one’s story plays a
critical role in therapy.

142
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 Chapter 5

The Remainder of Loss: Mediation and Its Failure in Kim Young-ha’s Quiz Show130

The previous two chapters on Snow Crash and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End

of the World each presented a kaleidoscopic vision of imagined history and nonexistent

present, a technologically augmented futuristic reality and an intertwining of actual and

virtual spaces. Snow Crash took us through a whirlwind of an archeological quest combined

with a brain-hacking cyber-venture, addressing the issue of language and its incompleteness.

Wonderland plunged the readers into a maze-like fantasy world where reveries take on a life

of their own, bringing our attention to the importance of storytelling (or, in the author’s own

words, “narrative”) as the archetypal ghost’s strategy to harness physical death and embrace it,

responsively and responsibly, as a legitimate part of survival.

With Quiz Show (2007, 퀴즈쇼), a Korean novel by Kim Young-ha, our journey from

an alternate to an augmented present spanning over the heyday of cyberpunk in the previous

century’s last two decades, now plants us squarely back in the new millennium, a timeline

that bears greater temporal proximity to our own. In Chapter 3, I described how the cultural

and historical characteristics of Korean history generate a particularly subject-centered and

present (temporal) based notion of reality and being as survival within it, which explains why

the rhetoric of the unreal has never quite appealed to the literary imaginary. Narrowing the

scope of observation to the 20th century and thereafter, I examine how the chain of traumatic

historical turns has generated a national sense of melancholia that pervades the greater body

130
As with the Japanese names in the previous chapter, I adhere to the Korean tradition of placing the surnames
(of people) before the given names. Quiz Show has not been translated into English. All the quotations are in my
translation. In this work “Korea” refers to the Republic of Korea (ROK), unless noted otherwise. References to
“Korea” that pertain to periods preceding the North-South division (officially 1948) indicate the Korean as a
people, cultural tradition, and in certain cases (before annexation by Japan in 1910), nation (e.g. Joseon
Dynasty).

147
of Korean-brand realism. This undercurrent of profound loss acquires yet another layer in the

‘90s, when the “lost beloved objects” (primarily political integrity and economic security) are

restituted, or at least are thought to be. Without an overarching narrative for the communal

identity, the literary circle in the ‘90s generated an ironic grief over loss of a shared sense of

loss. I assert that this inability to mourn (overcome and move on, in contrast to the lingering

malaise of melancholia)can be traced back to a failure of “knowing,” as with how the

protagonist of Quiz Show gradually finds out that all he had known about his relationships or

material possessions in fact betray his expectations. The “quiz show,” a hobby he later

develops and eventually engages in consistently, aggravates his anxiety of knowing (wrongly)

with its ground rule: the direct consequence of not knowing the right answer in a quiz show is

none other than removal from the game, a virtual death. Next I examine how our

understanding of life and human relationships can only be incomplete, fragmented, and

incomprehensible despite—or perhaps precisely because of—the quantitative increase of

interaction and information as evidenced by the permeating presence of various media (the

internet, in particular) in the novel. In addition, I observe how the “failure” in question here

does not involve incorrect knowledge or not knowing at all, but rather failing to grasp the

impossibility of attaining complete and absolute knowledge. The denouement of the novel,

where the protagonist finally arrives at this realization and is thus resurrected from his social

and cognitive death (financial and emotional bankruptcy, and elimination from the quiz show

contest), is where the archetypal ghost, the universal story of living and surviving, reveals

itself as an ever incomprehensive, constantly shifting and incomplete state of existence.

The events that take place in Quiz Show are not fantastical, nor do they import any

wondrous technological trappings that fall in line with the conventional tropes of science

fiction as was the case with Snow Crash or Wonderland. The only component that sets off our

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alarm as sober-minded denizens of the real is a bizarre adventure involving a company that

nurtures quiz show competitors for profit in an isolated boot camp, but the Kafkaesque

absurdity of this place is offset by the intricately weaved-in relationships, subterfuges and

power games among its constituents, turning the quiz show camp into a microscopic re-

creation of the world the protagonist has been cast out of. Put simply, Quiz Show may appear

to be an odd choice within the context of this overall project compared to the other two

novels I had examined in the preceding chapters, given that the archetypal ghost—either as a

technologically empowered, transcendental mind or a fortified body that intrudes upon

external entities—does not reveal itself in any perceptible form.

The seemingly sterile nature of Quiz Show, however, is precisely why this novel

serves as a most accurate representation of the Korean node in the transpacific triangulation I

set up in this dissertation, particularly in reference to the literary trends found in Korea

throughout the 1990s and thereafter. Also, Quiz Show effectively highlights the “knowing”

aspect in light of my thesis that being human is none other than realizing and surviving death

as the ultimately unknowable aspect of our life story: namely, the archetypal ghost. As noted

in Chapter 2, the three main constituents that bring the archetypal ghost forward are language

(communication), narrative, and knowing. We must know (realize) the prospect of death, be

able to share this knowledge and its meaning with others through various means of

communication such as language, and either individually or collectively survive the moment

of cognitive annihilation (realizing but not understanding death) by carrying on the story of

life-death-survival as a virtual form of continuance.131 I have observed how the transgressive,

incomprehensible and fragmented nature of language and narrative are embodied, made

131
I use this conceptual (in comparison to the cultural) scheme of triangulation to explain how the archetypal
ghost’s key properties—transgressiveness, incomprehensibility, fragmentation—have become the mode of life
and thus survival itself in our contemporary society through technologies that extend the reach of our body and
mind. For more details, see Chapters 1 and 2.

149
perceptible and empirical through the advent of computerized communication and visualized

storytelling. In this last chapter, Quiz Show completes the three-node cycle of knowing-

communication-narrativization that allows the archetypal ghost to emerge in our world of

digitally mediated existence. As the title itself suggests, Quiz Show directs our attention to

“knowing” (whether it be mere trivia or relational and interpersonal knowledge) as a

condition of survival in the game of life. The “knowing” here is of a particular kind that has

become a dominant mode of information consumption in the electronically networked yet

highly isolating environment we live in, an environment in which fragmented, episodic and

incomplete snippets of knowledge characterize web-surfing, mediated communication, and

multitasking among various gadgets. Another reason for bringing in Quiz Show to the

spectrum of literature I present in my dissertation is the need for contextualization. Quiz

Show’s “here and now” setting ties Snow Crash’s futuristic hyperbole and Wonderland’s

magical allegory down to a world that we as readers may more readily understand and

empathize with.

A Cultural History of Loss: A Double-layered Melancholia

In Quiz Show, Kim Young-ha methodically strips away objects, beliefs and people

that constitute the protagonist’s identity as a member and center of a connected community.

The degree of loss escalates, starting with family, lover and friends, moving on to material

possession, social status, a concrete grasp on reality, and even belief in his own self existence.

How can one survive, and how does one define life as the objective of survival, when left

absolutely alone without any anchors that attest to identity or existence? If Kim’s “stripping

away” is a device deployed to craft out the story that operates from without to within, the

protagonist’s failure to know what lies beneath the seemingly secure and stable surface of his

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surroundings (whether it be people, possessions or relational positions) becomes the inner

drive of loss. This particular strategy of “revelation by deprivation/unknowing” may be

understood as Kim’s attempt to pin down what is left for literature to say about life, which

was a pressing issue for not only Kim himself but many other young writers at the time.

Quiz Show takes place in the new millennium, but in order to understand the

recurring motif of loss in the story, there is a need to understand the social and historical

circumstances that gave rise to Kim’s stylistic traits. The ‘90s in Korea was a time when

macroscopic losses on the cultural, economic and historical level were either coming to

closure or simmering down. The new generation in literature was left to deal with a double-

layered melancholia, forced to tackle the irony of being liberated from, but at once losing a

safely reliable and appealable story in, an overarching motif of loss that had ruled the Korean

conscious. Kim’s generation (those who entered legal adulthood in the late ‘80s and became

functional members of the society in the ‘90s) is dislocated from the grand narrative of

national sovereignty and ethical, political creeds that had molded and safe-guarded both

individual and collective identities throughout the past century.132 With the establishment of

a democratic administration and the economic deterioration of the North, writers in the ‘90s

were, for the first time since the tumultuous beginning of modernization in the mid-19th

century, liberated from the compulsion to speak and care about greater societal concerns. In

discussing the legacy of the ‘80s (the “386 generation”133), cultural critic Taek-Gwang Lee

132
Korea (Joseon at the time) was colonized by Japan in the beginning of the 20th century (Japan’s annexation
of Korea, 22 Aug., 1910), and liberated in 1945, only to be immediately divided between U.S. and the soviet
union regencies. Five years later, the Korean War broke out (25 Jun., 1950), leaving deep physical and mental
scars on the peninsula. Economic inequality, political struggles, oppression and a long stretch of military
dictatorship mar the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, culminating in the massacre of more than thousands (a precise count
has never been made) of civilians and student protesters in the Gwangju Uprising (18 May, 1980). For a more
thorough overview of 20th century Korean history and its impact on literature, see: Kim Yun-sik and Chŏng Ho-
ung’s Han'guk sosŏlsa and Kwŏn Yŏng-min’s Han'guk hyŏndae munhaksa (Volumes 1 and 2).
133
Broadly refers to the generation that had gone to college and spent their 20s enmeshed in political student
movements in the 1980s, but this popular definition can be misleading. As Lee Taek-Gwang points out in his

151
says “the determining factors that divorce the 1990s from the 1980s are the economic boom

and the resultant cultural excess” (287). Indeed, going hungry or being censored by the

government was no longer a pressing concern. All of a sudden, it was permissible to talk

about more personal matters, to not worry about embedding a metaphorical undertone of

class struggle or political resistance. Literature, as a representation of and reflection on reality,

could now indulge in individual affairs as isolated incidents.134

This freedom opens up the gate towards a more universal discourse on various

lifestyles and the human condition in general, which is perhaps why we see a notable

diversification in the Korean literary sphere, spreading out from stark and stern realism and

social critique to an unprecedentedly wide range of other subjects or subgenres. In the realm

of popular culture, we see a sudden surge of fantasy fiction set in exotic (mainly Western or

Chinese, but the focus here is that these settings are not Korean) lands, spearheaded by Lee

Woo-hyuk’s The Soul Guardians135 (1993) series and Lee Young-do’s Dragon Raja136

(1998). The existentialist novel, which was sparked by writers such as Chang Yong-hak137 or

book Han'guk munhwa ŭi ŭmnanhan p'ant'aji, the expression “386 generation” was originally used by ‘90s’
students as a way of criticizing the legacy of student activism in the ’80s. “386” model computers were growing
obsolete by then, which is why this particular number denotes the outdated-ness of the preceding generation
(Lee 286).
134
Of course, the newly arisen focus on “individuals” was criticized by those who saw this trend as a
deterioration of socio-historical sensitivity. Kim Young-ha, a signature figure of this new generation, was no
exception. In his book Han'guk munhak kwa kŭ chŏktŭl (Korean Literature and Its Enemies), literary critic
Cho Yŏng-il uses a conversation between two critics (Choi Won-sik and Seo Young-chae) who each maintain
disparate views on the state of Korean literature to illuminate this point. Cho highlights Choi’s comment on Kim
Young-ha’s novel Your Republic is Calling You (Pit ŭi cheguk): “so, on the surface it [Your Republic is Calling
You] deals with the issue of [Korea’s] division, but I believe that it in fact just toys with stale existentialist
questions using division as a foil. Not that the story should lead to some unification symphony; it lacks the
struggle to overcome the fissure while still despairing of the possibility of integration … the disillusionment that
creeps about this piece is the monster that has been corroding recent novels” (174).
135
T'oemarok [The Soul Guardians] is actually the English title of its film adaptation (1998), but as there are no
English translations of the book as of yet, I use the film title here.
136
In 2004, Dragon Raja was added to the official list of literary texts studied in Korean high schools. A
commercial fantasy novel infiltrating the sanctuary of literary education—this incident effectively attests to the
changing tides in Korea’s cultural imaginary. For the actual news report, see:
[http://news.naver.com/main/read.nhn?mode=LSD&mid=sec&sid1=103&oid=001&aid=0000575776].
137
i.e. “Yohan sijip (Poems of John the Baptist).”

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O Sang-wŏn138 in the mid-20th century but soon died out with occasional revivals (by Ch’oe

In-hun139 or Pak Sang-nyung140), made a discernible return. Kim’s earlier works such as I

Have the Right to Destroy Myself or “What Happened to the Man Who Got Caught in the

Elevator”141 fall in line with this marginal tradition. We also see intense meta-fictional

inquiries that attempt to redirect the readers’ gaze to the craft rather than content element in

writing, as seen in Kim’s Arang ŭn wae (Why, Arang), Kim Yŏn-su’s Kkut ppai, Yi Sang

(Farewell to Yi Sang), or Pak Hyŏng-sŏ’s “Chajŏng ŭi p'iksyŏn” ( “Fiction of Self-

Cleansing”).142 Shin Kyung-Sook’s works set yet another trend. Notable examples include

Oettan pang (Solitary Room), a semi-biographical bildungsroman with a distinctly intimate

and lyrical style, and more recently Please Look after Mom, a blend of nostalgic reflection on

rural lifestyle and the tight filial connections that once characterized traditional Korean

communities but have visibly deteriorated with the rapid pace of urbanization.143

“Freedom” can however, as mentioned above, leave a gaping hole in the place of the

object, idea or entity from which one is freed from. Detachment from a powerful and

influential, therefore restrictive but also important force that takes up a central role in one’s

life can be extremely disorienting. The sudden onset of such liberty, then, implies that writers

in the ‘90s no longer had a secure topic or storyline to fall back upon, left to fend for

themselves. The good-old social critique was now washed out amidst economic prosperity

138
i.e. “Yuye [A Respite].”
139
i.e. Kwangjang [The Square].
140
i.e. Chugŭm ŭi han yŏn'gu.
141
“Ellibeit'ŏ e kkin kŭ namja nŭn ŏttŏk'e toeŏnna (What Happened to the Man Who Got Caught in the
Elevator).”
142
All three of the book titles are in my translation. Original Titles: Arang ŭn wae, Kkut ppai, Yi Sang, and
Chajŏng ŭi p'iksyŏn.
143
Shin Kyung-Sook won the prestigious Man Asian Literary Prize in 2011 with her novel Please Look after
Mom, the fact of which speaks to the recent rise of awareness regarding the importance of high-quality
translation, as well as greater thematic variation (that allows more space for narratives that hold a universal
appeal to the global audience) found in contemporary Korean literature. For further details, see the section
devoted to Shin on the Man Asian Literary Prize homepage: [http://www.manasianliteraryprize.org/kyung-sook-
shin/].

153
and political liberty.144The immediacy of the North-South division as a clear and present

danger considerably subsided as North Korea struggled in a hopeless pit of chronic

depression. Tales of political resistance to government oppression lost their appeal with the

downfall of military dictatorship, its remnants having been at least ostensibly swept out with

the inauguration of a democratic civilian government. Of course there still were plenty of

residual narrative ores to mine in nostalgic reminiscences, behind-the-scene or trauma-post-

processing tales. Often called “postscript novels,”145 such stories retained a certain appeal as

evidenced in the works of well-known writers such as Kong Chi-yŏng or Hwang Sŏg-yŏng.146

But again, the hard times was old news. The ‘90s was, in this sense, the very first time

Koreans squarely and collectively faced the issue of subjectivity as alienated individuals.

External problems were either resolved or exhausted, and it was now time to turn one’s eyes

inwards—to the self, and the self alone. What one found there differed case by case, but

underneath the surface of this welcome bloom of multiplicity, Korean literature was suffering

a major identity crisis. Survival through an extension of the self into the social sphere was no

longer a functional strategy, for emphasis on or necessity for the communal aspect of

144
The foreign currency crisis in 1997 undermines the sense of stability and triumph the Korean society was
basking in, but considering how the economy accomplished a remarkably fast recovery in the following decade
while Japan still suffers the aftermath of the bubble burst in the ‘80s, I see the years following 2000 as an
extension (or perhaps, a revival) of the ‘90s boom. For more details on the foreign currency crisis, see: The
Post-Financial Crisis Challenges for Asian Industrialization (Eds. Richard Hooley and Jang-Hee Yoo); The
Asian Financial Crisis: Origins, Implications, and Solutions (Eds. William C. Hunter, George G. Kaufman and
Thomas H. Krueger).
145
The focus of postscript novels (“Huildam Sosŏl”) is usually trained on experiences of student resistance
movements and political upheavals in the ‘80s, and the mental, social traumas to be dealt with in their wake.
Postscript novels can be categorized into those by writers who paint a nostalgic picture of the ‘80s as a time of
idealism and solidarity, and others written from the perspectives of the post-‘80s generation who had to at once
succeed, yet deny and overcome their predecessors’ legacy. The latter reflects the double-layered melancholia I
identify as the characteristic trait of Kim’s time. “A Study on “Hu Il Dam” of Gong, Ji-Young and
Kim, Young-Ha”provides an accurate summary of these two contending tendencies by comparing the two
writers. The authors of the article calls the ‘80s a time of “us as a community,” with heroes like Chŏn Tae-il (a
social activist who burned himself to death in protest of corporate and government tyranny); the ‘90s was for a
healthier, brighter Chǔn Hye-rin, who was the signature figure for a romantic, albeit depressed and self-
conflicted intellectual.
146
Gong Ji-young’s Kodǔngŏ (Mackerel), Go Alone Like A Rhino Horn (). Hwang Sŏg-yŏng’waOraedoen
chŏngwŏn (The Old Garden). Also, many of Kim Young-haels ( Peoplem Sospublic of Korea (DPRK). with
her nove

154
existence or identity disintegrated when the ideological doctrines and economic hardships

abated. Life was more affluent than ever before, but a sense of directionality was gone, and

the individual minus societal values and doctrines was an ever elusive subject. Who am I

without others’ presence and ideas? How can one write about—aesthetically represent, reflect

on and inspire—life in a subjective yet universal way,147 when life itself now consists of

equally demanding heterogeneous subjects that all remain an enigma to the self as the solely

confirmable and identifiable being?

In Chapter 1, I laid out the premise that the ghost and its story, which I call the

“archetypal ghost,” is the original narrative of human survival. I further supplemented this

statement by elaborating on how technology, and in particular technologies that extend the

human body and mind as seen in mechanized bodies and personified information or

intelligence that become potential subjects, have fundamentally transformed the definition of

the human by incorporating transgression, incomprehensibility and fragmentation into the

structure of survival itself rather than condemning these properties as the obstacles in or the

objects of survival. Placing this discourse in a cultural-specific context, I assert that

objectification, and in turn the subjectivization of “other” (non-I) subjects is the mechanism

of collective survival in Korean culture. Put simply, the simultaneous existence of

incomprehensible “other” subjects, once they are acknowledged and accepted as part of one’s

life, is taken as an extension and part of the “I.”

Retracing the religio-cultural tendency found in how various religions of foreign

origin have been adopted and localized in the Korean peninsula, we find a tendency of

obliterating the boundaries between the hither and yonder with death as the insurmountable

147
Here I am invoking Kant’s notion of beauty as a value that requires “subjective universal validity” (115) in
his Critique of the Power of Judgment; I am questioning the latter part of this formula, “universal validity,”
within the context of the ‘90s, when the communal structure of value has fallen apart and the “subjective” aspect
of taste has risen to the fore.

155
barrier between reality as lived-experience and afterlife or the fantasy thereof. Shamanism, as

the core thread that runs throughout the ways in which people have attempted to understand,

communicate with, and incorporate the rhetoric of the unreal in Korea, exerts a gravitational

force that brings the ghostly matters residing beyond the threshold of the incomprehensible

and unreachable “into” the fabrics of life as elements that explain and tangibly contribute to

the here and now. In Korea, shamanism takes on the role of transforming the conditions of

reality or its rules with the magical power of human will, action, mediation and language

(which is in itself the embodiment of epistemological breaks and changes that endow objects

with meanings and thus illuminate/create new components in reality thereon). Korean

shamanism [무속신앙 (巫俗信仰 )] calls out to the non-human, the deity, and pulls in their

force in service of a given agenda. I call this “secular shamanism.” Without exception,

imported religions such as Christianity and Buddhism have been reengineered in their

acculturation processes. In Korea the invocation of divine forces for wish granting (instead of

seeking grace or salvation, i.e. liberation from the fetters of earthly life) takes a central role in

religious practice.148

In this process, the concept of being as an archetypal ghost discards the linear

narrative structure embedded in the primeval story of “nonexistence–birth–life–death–

perseverance in a mutated or incomplete form” within the greater sphere of the macroscopic

communal life cycle, and rounds out the sharp edges of trauma inherent in individual

annihilation as every individual’s ultimate fate. What I pin down here as the markedly

“Korean” strategy of survival is the mechanism of expanding individual subjectivity by

conceiving of “other” subjects (including other human individuals or life forms with

independent agency, such as other community members or even livestock, as well as

148
I discuss this further in the chapter conclusion. I will elaborate and present further reflections supported by
religio-historical sources in the book I plan to base on this dissertation.

156
immaterial ideas in the form of such “other” beings’ spirits) as “part” of one’s own

subjectivity, thereby erasing the boundary between the “I” and the “other” and transforming

the latter into contributing (whether adversely or favorably) components of the former. The

crucial step that precedes the merger, is a cognitive inversion whereby “other” (non-I)

subjects are rendered objects (parts, rather than independent wholes) that can be utilized and

incorporated into the I as the governing subject, which is why I characterize the Korean brand

of survival as “subjectivization via objectification.”

The fragmented condition of a central self then, amplified by and consisting of

various other incomprehensible yet identifiable subjects in the society, is a natural and

contributing factor for survival rather than a deterioration to be feared in the cultural

imaginary.149 The problem one sees in Korean literature of the ‘90s comes from the fact that

this “extended I” is no longer there, for the key parts that constitute the spectrum within the

subjectivized objects have been near-petrified into nation, class, or political doctrine. With

these prescribed layers rendered defunct, or shall we say “lost,” the first and foremost task for

storytellers of the time was to find new layers that would resonate with disparate bodies and

minds scattered throughout infinitely diverse life conditions. They had to figure out what it is

to “be” in a solitary state of survival without the assistance of external entities (shared

community objects or values that bring “others” and “I” together), and had to pin down the

actual subject that temporally precedes and conceptually constitutes the “ghost” in the story

149
I consider this acceptance of incomprehensibility, fragmentation, and transgressivity as the principle of
being to be a kind of disenchantment, in line with the objectification/subjectivization process. Take body parts:
as long as I know that my hand is unquestionably mine, that I can make it function in a way that serves whatever
purpose I assign it, I don’t feel insecure about not knowing its anatomical structure (for instance, I don’t have to
wonder how many blood vessels I have, how the muscles work, and why they move the way I want them to
move.). Knowing the intricacies of its mechanism becomes a secondary problem. Likewise, as long as I can see
other community members or even the concept of community itself as extensions of my own self (for example:
this is “my/our” mother who cares for me, this is “my/our” country, the place and values I subscribe to and
embrace as my/our own), the fact that “I” as the central subject consists of disparate entities and ideas, the
knowledge that I don’t exactly know every detail of other people’s thoughts, or the way how the nation is run,
does not pose any existential threat.

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of being and its continuance beyond physical and conceptual extinction.150

Korea Goes Online: Community Restored or Distorted?

An attempt to reinstate lost communal connections can be seen in the way the Korean

public embraced media technology, in particular internet culture, with blinding speed. The

‘90s is a memorable decade in Korea’s telecommunication media history, for this is when the

three leading figures in the modem-assisted computer network sector, Nownuri (1994),

HiTEL (1991) and Chollian (1985, initiated WWW service in 1995), firmly stamped their

presence in the daily businesses of the general public. These virtual platforms provided the

disoriented youth, who no longer had a community driven by core values, with a place for

congregation based on interest rather than imposed agendas, as well as a channel for easy,

affordable, and accessible interaction,151 The “net,” through this process, came into the

public conscious more as a medium of interpersonal relations than a vast trove of information.

Moreover, the earlier PC communication services or various portals on the world wide web

from the late ‘90s and thereon served as actual “places” where disparate individuals could

150
So, how should we respond? The displacement of a very culture and nation-specific formula of loss
generates a need and opportunity to explore stateless and less culturally specific form and content. Korean
literature had for the first time a chance to break free from its cultural and linguistic binds and branch out
towards a wider audience. Japan’s case is a good example: the course of development found in Japanese modern
literature bears a great degree of similarity to that of Korea’s, but Japan succeeded in appealing to the world-
wide readership (as attested to by the Nobel laureates Oe Kenzaburo and Kawabata Yasunari, or more recently
the international renown of Murakami Haruki), whereas the presence and impact of Korean literature within the
global context has been negligible. A consoling phrase often deployed in this light is that “what is most Korean
(traditional) is most global,” which implies that “local color” can have an exotic appeal. This logic partially
explains why Mishima Yukio and Kawabata Yasunari were so highly received outside Japan. However, this
particular strategy of cultural diplomacy requires a systematic support in the form of thorough and artistic
translation and effective dissemination, which in Korea’s case have been absent. The few exceptional writers
who have grasped the attention of non-Korean critics and readers, such as Choe In-hun, Ko Ŭn or Yi Munyol,
write about matters that indeed do resonate with non-Korean audience, such as existentialist takes on political
conflict, mystic renderings of the transcendental theme of aesthetics, or Buddhist philosophy. But again, Choi,
Yi or Go’s cases are isolated incidents rather than parts of a consistent trend.
151
Note, for instance, how the fantasy literature—a prime example of diversification and a certain distancing
from conventional realism in the literary scene in the ‘90s—boom began with the rise of these so-called “PC
communication” services; Yi Yŏng-do and Yi U-hyŏk, two pioneers in this field, both built up their prominence
through HiTEL before entering the mainstream publishing market.

158
effectively meet and interact, under the (if desired) safe shield of anonymity but also with a

necessary level of intimacy. A relatively small portion of the population that had the

adaptability and motivation (a desire to connect, paired with a strong resolve to preserve

autonomy) required to become active users. These were mostly young and unmarried people

who were free from the burden of familial responsibilities or social pressure, lived apart from

their families at the time. The demographics of shared and single residences have gone under

drastic change during the past decade as evidenced in the proliferation of “officetels” in the

real estate market, but in the ‘90s, people had a severely limited range of spatial options

outside of family residences. Under such circumstances, the cyberspace was an ideal place

and pathway to connect and commune. Naturally, the “social network” was present from the

onset of the net culture in Korea. Korea’s leading portal service Daum.net (1995) successfully

positioned itself by facilitating in-service communities (called “café”s), and the school

reunion site iloveschool.com became a social phenomenon. Naver.com (1999)’s Jisik-In

(translated into “knowledge-in,” its features similar to Yahoo Answers or Ask.com) is even

now the go-to search engine thanks to the Korean netizen’s enthusiastic response to and

engagement with responses based on localized and personalized insights. Cyworld.com (1998)

was a live testimony to the “networking effect” before Facebook (2011) took over with its

global user base. The spotlight on online communities even began to adopt a strongly

political tone around the turn of the century. The media celebrated voluntarily formed and

operative internet forums, calling them the embodiment of a self-motivated, socially

conscious, and progressive generation. The political function of social networks reached its

peak with the election of President Rho Moo-hyun in 2002 and the candlelight demonstration

marathon in 2008.152

152
For more opinions on how the digital grassroots (internet based democracy) brought forth a diastrophic shift

159
 Of course “Korea Online” had its share of downsides as well, for solidarity can

backfire when a member is ostracized, in which case the embracing and inclusive features of

the extended “I” quickly transform into the exclusive and aggressive stance of a threatening

crowd, as social psychologist Gustave Le Bon had noted: “It [the crowd] forms a single being,

and is subjected to the law of the mental unity of the crowds” (Le Bon 2). The tightly knit

structure of online communities, the relatively limited number of popular communication

channels (given the size and population of the country compared to other major IT nodes

throughout the globe such as the U.S. or Japan), and the public’s thirst for approval and

belonging, can spread like wildfire once a persecution or rumor takes off. “Malicious replies”

are good examples. Literally, they mean strings of replies people post in response to news

articles or blog pages, characterized by personal insults and slander. Empowered by a sense

of security under the cover of anonymity, the replies display a raw outpour of malice and

offence. Unfiltered online communication is by no means a problem limited to the Korean

peninsula, but what is notable here is that akpǔl ([악플]. Ak[악] means malice or evil, and pul

[플] is an abbreviation of “ply” from “reply”) became a social phenomenon, alerting the

entire nation to how fast, how dangerous a turn the faceless crowd can take when the

extended “I”s are granted magnified power and a diluted sense of responsibility by the sheer

force of number. A representative incident is the suicide (2007) of a female entertainer named

U;Nee, who chronically suffered from akpul. More recently, we saw the public persecution of

in Korea’s politics, see Hyŏn Mu-am’s No Mu-hyŏn sidae wa tijit'ŏl minjujuŭi (The Time of Rho Moo-hyun and
Digital Democracy). The 2008 candlelight demonstration (initially formed to protest the government’s FTA
decisions concerning U.S. beef importation) lasted over three months, illuminating the changes Korea’s
“demonstration culture” had undergone with the rise of the post-dictatorship generations. Media responses were
mixed, some focusing on the aspect of festivity and spontaneity, and others more on the persistence of violence.
For more details on the candlelight demonstration, see: Kim, In-yŏng’s 2008-yŏn ch'otpul siwi wa p'ŭreim
chŏnjaeng (The Candle Light Demonstration in 2008 and the Frame War); Ko Kyung-min and Song Hyo-jin’s
“Protest Using the Internet, Political Participation and Its Democratic Implications: The Case of the 2008
Candlelight Protest in Korea,” Kim Wook’s “Candle-light Demonstrations and the Change in the Korean
Demonstration Culture: A Micro Explanation for a Macro Change,” and Paik Wook-Inn’s “Candle
Demonstration and Information Mass: The Formation of the Mass in the Age of Information.”

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the rapper Tablo (Daniel Armand Lee), whose educational background as a Stanford

University alumnus fell under suspicion. Tablo’s example is particularly of note, for it

showcases how the accessibility, paired with the limitations, of superficial information

gathered on the net becomes a feasting ground for the Janusian turn of the masses.

Kim Young-ha himself is fairly adept at using the electronic media to his benefit, as

literary critic Kim Sŏng-gon pointed out in his book Kŭllobŏl sidae ŭi munhak: segye sok ui

han'guk munhak (Literature in the Global Age: Korean Literature in the World ):

The two writers who represent visual and electronic media in Korea’s literary circle

in the 2000s are Kim Young-ha and Kim Kyŏng-uk … having debuted with an

internet novel, Kim Young-ha attracted attention by writing works that convey a new

breed of sensitivity, ones that strongly resonate with the generation familiar with

electronic media … The young people who interact through the internet and

encounter reality via computer windows found a new kind of literature for the

electronic age in Kim Young-ha’s novels, and were fascinated (106).

But Kim also holds reservations towards the internet’s glorious image as the infinite treasury

of information or an open plaza for unrestrained and therefore candid interaction. In an essay

collection titled Post-It, he declares that “the internet, where people say one can find

everything, in fact has nothing” (61) and is merely full of rumors of things rather than the

things themselves. According to Kim, the internet is a “space for exhibiting what one has

produced rather than exploring what others have made” (62). It is our “Id,” for easy and

anonymous clicks take us to unfiltered sites of desire, free of any intervention from the

superego: “We shuttle between being a model citizen, an ugly old man lusting for young girls,

a sophisticated artisan and a voyeuristic porn addict. These are all one, and at once all apart.

Our alter egos, our avatars can coexist even as we loath one another. Why? Because it is a

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dream. The Internet is our collective unconscious” (63). Over a short span of three pages,

Kim offers a sweeping coverage of the key problems I have addressed above: incomplete or

unsupported knowing, the uncertainty of reciprocation in mediated yet disembodied and

therefore unverifiable interaction, and the dangerous liberty of being removed from reality.

Such an environment, Kim implies, easily leads to a disregard for core values that tie the

community together, and ironically undermines the virtual mass’s solidarity. In Quiz Show,

Kim’s insights are given flesh and context through the protagonist, whose encounter through

and with various forms of media and mediated relationships or experiences tell us what

survival is in an age of virtual loss, uncertainty and isolation.

Life is a Rigged Quiz Show: You Can Never Know, and Are Therefore Bound to Lose

Among many of the new-generation writers who were set free to roam and explore

but at once disoriented and uncertain, Kim is a rare figure in that he tried his hand at almost

every single alternative trajectory. In the beginning of his career he made a foray into the

absurdist tradition which became his signature style. In “Isa” (Moving), for instance, an

episode of Kafkaesque absurdity rudely disrupts the security one expects from mundane

transactions such as moving (one’s residence). Kim also tries to reconstruct peripheral threads

of history that eluded the attention of mainstream literature in Black Flower, chronicling the

life and expiration of Korean farm workers forcefully transplanted on Mexican soil during

annexation. He adeptly fuses scholarly endeavors and subgenres in popular culture to parse

out the craft component of literature in Arang ŭn wae, which can be read as a mystery or a

historical and meta-fictional novel. In I Have a Right to Destroy Myself, Kim draws a

caricature of the new morals (or rather, the amorality) of the ‘90s generation in the stylized

manner of hard-boiled crime fiction. Kim even ventures into the territory of the spy novel

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with Your Republic is Calling You, inverting the key traits of this sub-genre such as intrigue

and adventure by focusing on the excruciatingly long wait for a brief moment of action, and

the banality of survival as civil subjects in a stable society. Through Kim’s hands, we see the

sad reality of a seemingly glorious ideological devotion that defines espionage in the world’s

only remaining divided country.153

A consistent theme that flows through these variegated attempts to diversify his

literary reach is Kim’s fascination with the undercurrent of absurdity that lurks beneath the

surface of contemporary—consumerist, democratic—Korea. With grand narratives gone, one

sets out in search for personalized meaning, beauty, and identity. But can we really take

comfort in such things we find as the result of an isolated quest for self-discovery or

personalized values? In material affluence, relationships, ambition, or a sense of security

nestled in the cogwheel-like repetition of daily engagements or routines the system imposes

upon us? What happens when these answers are proven wrong, or taken away?154

Quiz Show is Kim’s attempt to push this strategy of “stripping one’s life bare,

showing how things are never what they seem to be, and seeing what is ultimately left” to the

extreme. In this novel, Kim disassembles the traditional, “communal” structure of survival,

erasing out the things and people that give meaning to, or delineate, the individual on the

social and personal level. The hero Minsu is a graduate dropout, unemployed and orphaned,

and struggling to survive the financial disaster his late grandmother left him stranded in. In

fact the entire course of his life appears to be nothing but a series of losses and uncertainties.

The opening suggests that he lost his father (for he was a “bastard,” which is still a

153
For a more thorough list and description of Kim’s works, see the “books” menu in Kim’s homepage, at:
http://kimyoungha.com.
154
The motif of uncertainty and the impossibility of knowing have deeper roots in Kim’s works, for at the age
of 10, he suffered an accident and lost all memory of his childhood. This sense of homelessness and lacking a
past permeates his work as “uncertain memories of the object of narrativization” (Stay 56).

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considerable stigma in the Korean society) before he was even born and thus is unaware of

his ancestral origin (a crucial factor in securely positioning oneself in the community, which

should be an extension of one’s own self). The whereabouts or fate of his mother who

abandons Minsu and consigns his custody to her own mother is never known. The flow of

unfortunate events that run real-time with the narrative progress begins with the demise of his

only surviving blood relation, his grandmother, succeeded by the loss of his house, his lover,

academic status, and the meager dwelling, a room of several square meters, that he had

managed to retain.

The only thread of hope he holds on to amidst all this ugliness is a friend turned

romantic interest called “fairy in the wall,” (whose offline world—or real—name is later

revealed to be Chi-wŏn), whom he met in a quiz show themed online chat room. But even the

fairy is eventually lost, for he begins to question the integrity of their relationship after

realizing the gap between their social statuses, him being a loser-drifter and her the daughter

of an affluent intellectual family and a successful scriptwriter for a major broadcasting station.

Whereas the “fairy” was safely in the “wall” for him to fantasize and idealize, the girl “Chi-

wŏn” in the real world and the facts surrounding her keep reminding him of how shabby he

himself is. The pattern of repeated losses, and the frustration with his own inability to detect

aspects of objects or people that had brought forth the loss, appear to have been engraved in

his veins by the time he decides to abandon Chi-wŏn. Or perhaps he automatically anticipates

losing what he cherishes and takes a leading role instead of passively waiting to be victimized,

for it must be noted that Chi-wŏn’s case is the first where Minsu actively “lets go” rather than

helplessly watches while the beloved object slips away through his fingers.

This proactive anticipation of loss or disappointment springing from the failure to

know is precisely the spirit in which Kim carries out his experiment of “stripping,” which is

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foreshadowed in the very first episode of the novel. His grandmother tells young Minsu,

when he asks where his mother was, that she “died and became a pigeon” (11). Minsu

reminisces that this white lie had in fact done more harm than good, since he had to grow up

as a boy who feared pigeons; “there were too many pigeons, and … [he was] reminded of a

mother whose face he didn’t even know whenever he saw a pigeon” (11-12). This is also

when Minsu learns that he doesn’t have a father, or rather, that her grandmother doesn’t know

where or who his father is. Years later he comes across the word “love child,” which he takes

as an essence that defines his existence without even fully understanding its lexical

description: “Love Child: noun. A child born between a man and woman who are not legally

married. He or she becomes a bastard upon obtaining the father’s recognition” (13). His own

words used to explain the theory of his bastard-essence to Chi-wŏn are; “I think the word

bastard was lying latent inside me. At any rate, I am a real bastard” (14). What Minsu says

immediately before and after this statement is even more revealing. Wondering “how words

or sentences we don’t understand may influence us,” (13) he concludes after noting his

“bastard status,” that such words and sentences are “like influenza viruses … [that] become

active when the cold wind strikes and the body grows weaker.” That, “certain words are

activated when the right time comes. The same applies to phrases like “bastard,” which is

why I had this sense of foreboding the moment I saw it” (14).

Failed mediation plays a crucial role in the pattern of uncertainty and loss in Quiz

Show. Nothing is what it seems. Perceived form is not necessarily in correspondence with

content. A pigeon may look like a simple bird, but in fact it is his mother. This is an epiphany

that constantly repeats itself as he undergoes the process of stripping. The woman he thought

of as his mother was in fact his grandmother. His girlfriend, whose name means

“incandescent” (Pitna) turns out to be more of a black hole, leeching on his help when needed

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and then trampling on his self-esteem upon discovering his uselessness as a cherished,

displayable object.155 The house he grew up in, the last safe haven that was unquestionably

his territory and possession, was in fact mortgaged for more than its worth. The signified is

never completely in line with the signifier, especially so when the latter is a yet another form

of mediation while the former is physically absent. For instance, Minsu perceives (rather than

cognizes from a detached perspective based on newly found facts) how the image of his

grandmother was but an illusion only after her death, when he seeks out and sees the film she

performed in during her younger days. Her exaggerated acting as an evil North Korean

military officer, the shoddy props, and the simplistic plot are ridiculous, but Minsu cannot

readily laugh at the vulgarity he witness on the screen, for that is the only image of her he has

left with his version of “silver-haired Mrs. Choe [grandmother]” (19) gone. Disillusionment

with Pitna begins with her inconsiderate and inappropriate text message in response to, along

with her physical absence throughout, the death of Minsu’s aunt: “your aunt passed away? Ah,

ᅲᅲ [a Korean emoticon indicating sadness, its shape resembling closed eyes with tears

flowing down in comics-style]” (21). Revelation of her unfaithfulness also arrives through a

phone conversation, when she calls from a motel room and taunts Minsu while his best friend

is in the shower behind her.

The last blow comes when Minsu’s “groundless conviction” that the fairy in the wall

is “connected to me [him] in some form” (39) is betrayed. The fairy comes out of the wall

and materializes not as an ephemeral soul mate or an infinite receptacle of fantasy-induced

perfection, but as an upper class girl who engages with but can never become part of his

barren reality. Minsu’s email to Chi-wŏn after their first face-to-face encounter is telling: he

155
The metaphor Pitna uses to describe the likes of Minsu is an imitation handbag; “Do you know what women
consider most important in choosing handbags? … that it shouldn’t be embarrassing to carry around. That’s the
first thing. Functionality? Quality? Design? These all come later. … the same goes with choosing a husband”
(88).

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says that even while she sat right next to him during their first meeting, he “couldn’t picture

her face at all.” He turns his head and she’s right there, but the moment he averts his gaze, the

details of her face elude him. (223) Why, he asks, was it so? “perhaps it was something like

how Orpheus felt, finding his wife and bringing her out of hell? Like, how he ended up

turning around to look at Eurydice? Could it be that I couldn’t believe how you as a human

being actually existed so close to me? Could it be that, I felt as if you were like a phantom, a

ghost” (224)? Indeed, Chi-wŏn had come to him as the “fairy,” or an electronically mediated,

ghostly flicker of light and sound. When he only knew the surface, the shell, he was able to

safely and contently fill it in with his own expectations and desires. Now that he sees the

actual content of the form, and once again realizes the incongruence between the two, he

reverts to the life lesson he is bitterly familiar with. This particular revelation of form/content

disparity naturally entails the loss of the beloved object’s integrity followed by the loss of the

object itself, as was the case with all his former relations and possessions.

One consoling way to think of such betrayals and losses is that since the beloved

object was never what it seemed to be, it is not really lost, but simply made defunct. Extended

logic results in the notion that there never can be a loss at all. All there can be is simply

absence, for what is lost never was. That which is lost, is the extended parts of the self, the

disparate modes of existences in which one identifies with objectified (made use of), and in

turn subjectivized (incorporated into the self as one conceives of it) “others.” But such

complete denial of loss in turn indicates no prior possessions and extensions, leaving one to

stand utterly alone and consequently aggravating the sense of desolation the above reasoning

tries to redeem. With no social and emotional prostheses, one is left with bone-chilling

solitude. Alone, it becomes impossible to prove one’s existence or identity at all. To whom,

with what, and most importantly, for what would one prove it? The solitary entity is a brain in

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the vat, cut off from external inputs that stimulate and enable the realization that being

someone is a present-progressive mode of existence. Without the external factors that set the

grounds for a temporally and dynamically certifiable self, even reality becomes a mere

illusion.

This sense of absolute futility may be why Minsu is able to plunge into the surreal

world of the quiz show boot camp without much reservation, apart from the monetary

benefits. Eventually, even this fantastic space of nowhere proves to be a microcosm of

deceitful relational webs, and one by one, Misnu loses its inhabitants, his comrade in arms,

through various conflicts. When he escapes the boot camp while trying to fend off another

fellow competitor’s attack and finds himself stranded in a rural mountain ridge, hundreds of

miles away from where the boot camp was supposedly located, his final loss occurs—the

refuge he has found in the unreal is shattered. The boot camp is the culmination of loss and

deprivation, as well as the consequence of ignorance, where even a concrete hold on reality

(one’s grasp on his/her physical body, save societal connections) is taken away. In P'ujukkan

e kŏllin kogi: sin su-jŏng p'yŏngnonjip (Meat Hanging in the Butcher Shop), literary critic

Sin,Su-jŏng describes the labyrinthine structure of un/realities in Kim’s fiction as follows:

Kim Young-ha’s take on art replaces reality, which sits as the foundation and origin

point of all texts, with another text that is exchangeable with any other … reality,

transformed into falsity the next moment, even loses the meaning the sign “reality”

signifies in Kim Young-ha’s works. We only get to witness an inversion in the plot

whereby literature, which had once reflected disillusionment with reality, turns into

disillusionment itself through his network of sign-plays. (122)

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Here again, defunct signs and failed mediation drive Minsu’s losses:156 a misalignment of

actual physical location and a misinformed understanding of it, failure to connect with others

despite the absence of social barriers such as class or wealth. Moreover, given that the boot

camp is an extension of the quiz show chat room and therefore is quintessentially an allegory

of the internet, his failure to survive within it may be attributed not only to the mere

incongruence between the social and personal or ideal and real, but also the limitations of

mediation itself, and going a step further, the limits of “knowing” through mediation.

Minsu’s disappointment with the boot camp is doubly ironic in that the quiz world

had initially appealed to him as a space where pure knowledge and accurate (or at least

satisfactory) mediation rule, in contrast to the inauthenticity he saw in people and their self-

representations. We must remember that Minsu’s first involvement with the quiz show

business begins immediately after his disillusionment with his grandmother following her

death. Solace in certainty, but also acknowledgement based on individual performance, are

the conclusions to his self-posed question of why such a simple mechanism of asking and

answering proves so addictive: “exchanging quizzes gives you a sense of respect … the

secretive feeling of liberation coming from shared narcissism, a slightly unsavory indulgence

that probably wouldn’t hold up outside the quiz room” (37). A world where purely cerebral

interaction is sanctified, minus the disappointing aspects of relationships. No wonder why

Minsu never hesitated to choose “Bill Gates’ window, Microsoft’s Windows over the real

window” (72).

As misguided as Minsu’s choice may seem, preference of the electronically induced

156
Failed mediation is also a stylistic strategy Kim employs throughout his work. Literary critic Kim Yun-sik
criticized Kim Young-ha’s tone in his short stories, characterizing it with “high-handed tonality, sophisticated
pace, and a disrespectful attitude towards the readers” (143) in “Metachŏk kǔlssǔki ǔi tu pangsik: kim young-ha,
kim kyŏng-uk ([Two Ways of Meta-style Writing].” However, recalling Shin’s analysis above, we may see this
“distancing” in Kim’s style as a way of “playing” with the readers, a manipulation of his text’s mediatory
function.

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mirage is a general tendency to be found throughout the Korean society nowadays. This

novel, in fact, can be seen as a satire of the contemporary society’s media addiction and the

trend of obtaining and consuming information primarily through technologically assisted

mediations. As noted in Chapter 3, everyday life in Korea is heavily saturated with

telecommunications media to the extent that its presence is no longer any kind of novelty.

Jump on the subway, and one sees almost everyone holding and immersed in some kind of

digital device, most commonly cell phones or mp3 players and more recently tablet PCs.

People reading books on public transport have, to my wistful regret, become a rare sight.

Walk the most crowded streets frequented by youngsters such as Kangnam / Samsŏng Station

area, Apkuchŏngdong or Hongdae Ipku, and one will find free wi-fi in nearly every cafe and

restaurant. The sidewalk is surrounded by giant high-resolution flat panel screens, in some

cases even in 3D, that make Time Square pale in comparison. Pedestrians come across

“camera poles” that snap digital photos of them and send it to their cell phones. The degree of

integration one sees in the use of telecommunications media technology in people’s daily life

activities in Korea (at least in urban areas) is truly remarkable. This in turn means that the

phantasmagorical presence of digital media is a part of banal reality, a device that undergirds

mundane actions and therefore remains less than conspicuous even in fiction. Of course, a

similar level of telecommunicative immersion can be seen in U.S. and Japanese cities, but as

observed in Chapter 3, the “subjectivization of object” culture found on Korean soil helps one

embrace such technological apparatuses as at once a mere tool and an extension of one’s own

self, leaving less to be discussed along the ontological vein.

The Korean brand of inconspicuous yet omnipresent telecommunications media can

be detected throughout Quiz Show. At every turn we encounter some form of mediation

platform playing a critical role in Minsu’s interaction with or understanding of the people

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around him, as well as his own self. His grandmother (playfully referred to as Mrs. Choe after

her true familial tie to Minsu is revealed) was a movie actress. After she passes away, and as

her material articles—the mortgaged house, more than ten credit cards, expensive cosmetics,

and thirty four handbags—begin to disappear one by one into the gaping hole of debt, the

only tangible trace of her memory is the film she starred in as a young actress (49). While the

“clothes spread on the floor looked like the shell her soul had discard and left behind,” (49)

her image on the screen remained alive (19). Then comes the online quiz room, which is the

central and ultimate media presence. It is where he meets his fairy in the wall, and also the

channel through which he eventually enters the quiz show boot camp.

The quiz room and boot camp, as pointed out above, turns out to be where mediation

ultimately and critically fails. The “failure of knowing,” or, the innately fragmented way in

which we know, again destroys Minsu’s hope in accurate representation. Interactions in the

quiz battles capture the way in which information is consumed in Korea’s contemporary

society, showing that data can in fact never be neutral once deployed within the context of

human relations. Knowledge is inevitably submerged in the capitalist ownership structure;

what matters is who has and effectively uses the right information at the right moment. The

quiz show (both the online chat room and the boot camp version), in this light, becomes a

microscopic reenactment of this societal trend. Know the answer, voice it at the right time,

and one survives. Unknowing, meanwhile, leads to loss—a conceptual death in quiz

competitions. Information, and knowledge as its practice, becomes a tool in an exhibitionist

contest, for knowing depends on others’ acknowledgement.

“Information and knowledge as survival” becomes an actual directive once Minsu

enters the quiz show boot camp. All depends on what sits in one’s brain, the body becoming a

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mere hull the mind rides in. This is not a problem according to Yuri, a member of Minsu’s

quiz show competition team at the boot camp. Yuri’s theory that the camp residents are in fact

aboard a spaceship,157 their “consciousness wandering through a simulated labyrinth” while

their “bodies lie in the square-shaped building of the boot camp,” (415) sounds like absurd

rambling, but in fact effectively embodies the implied conclusion Minsu’s quest approaches.

Conceptualizing his presence in the boot camp as a mental construct light years away from

the corporeal element of his existence, his absolute objective the pursuit of knowledge (his

occupation here is “knowing” things to win quiz battles), Minsu’s journey appears to have

reached its final stage, with the conclusion that existence is none other than information and

conscious knowledge of it.

In Yuri’s understanding, consciousness is a crucial element that bridges information

and knowledge. Yuri hypothesizes that as long as the information that constitutes one’s

consciousness is intact, the body can be switched around (415). We may understand his claim

by recalling the theme of “stripping” in relation to the notion that loss is a mere illusion, that

things that can be taken away are not integral parts of one’s identity. Where identification

with the parts stops, consciousness begins, for the discarded rinds of the self revert to mere

“object” stage from the “object rendered part subject via utility” process I had delineated as

the mechanism of gravitational present-progressive communal existence in the Korean

context,158 turning into things to be conscious “of” rather than being a component of one’s

own consciousness. This line of logic corresponds to the notion that alienation can in fact be

liberation, as seen in post-‘90s Korean literature.

157
The name of which according to Yuri is, most tellingly, “Aleph”—the first letter of the Hebrew Alphabet
and the one language (form) that carries the absolute meaning (content): the name of God. Aleph is the force of
creation, the enabler of being, as attested to in the Golem myth (see Isaac Singer’s The Golem, for instance), and
one which all beings converge upon (see, for example, Jorge Luis Borges’ “Aleph.”)
158
For more details, see Chapter 3.

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 At this point of the narrative, the story seems to be taking on a trajectory that bears

an uncanny resemblance to that of Wonderland, reached through the Cartesian method of

infinite doubt with a hint to the “disembodied consciousness as the core of being” version of

posthumanism that Hayles cautions us against in her book How We Became Posthuman. To

Minsu’s rebuttal (“what, so even this table here is an illusion?”), Yuri responds by asserting

that “when you were on earth … you sit on a chair and drink coffee and stuff, don’t you? …

Of course. The chair exists. But we know that the chair exists only because of our seh, seh,

senses. By fooling the senses, one can be made to believe in the existence of the chair.

Likewise, this table here clearly exists. Even in our dreams, we sit on chairs and drink booze,

right? Because what ultimately reaches our buh, brains is only sense, sensory information”

(418).159 Addressing Minsu’s sarcastic remark that their bodies might be gone by the time the

ship returns to earth, Yuri maintains that finding a body to inhabit shouldn’t be a problem

when even with the current degree of technological achievement they (Minsu and Yuri) are

granted such realistic virtual bodies. Yuri concludes: “Have you seen Being J, J, John

Malkovich? We’re like that. The only difference, if there is one, is that instead of being in J, J,

John Malkovich, we are in our own selves, self images” (419). It would be difficult to take

Yuri’s theory at face value, but again, this seemingly farcical dialogue reveals the penultimate

stage of self-stripping Minsu had arrived at. The only thing he is left to grasp onto here is the

information he knows and demonstrates as a competent member of the boot camp, and the

conscious knowledge of his being there, regardless of where the boot camp actually is

(whether it be outer space or Paju, the city near Seoul that is the presumed location of the

camp). All ties to the social world outside broken and lost, and now even his physical

presence in doubt, Minsu’s existence or identity comes down to the knowledge of information.

159
Yuri has a stutter.

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 This belief is also hinted at earlier on in the novel, when the recruiter (named Lee

Ch’un-sŏng) comes to lure Minsu into the boot camp after Minsu fails to enter the final round

in a TV quiz competition, which had been the last desperate attempt on Minsu’s part to

resolve his financial predicament. Lee says losing a quiz battle is not a defeat, but “a kind of

death. Dying for a moment” (281). The context in which Lee uses the metaphor of death

pertains more to the nature of quiz shows as fierce combats in the Roman gladiator fashion,

where the loser’s life (not success) is at stake. But considering how the factor that determines

life and death, being and non-being in the world of quiz shows is information and one’s

conscious knowledge of it, Lee’s statement may well be understood as an ontological

reflection. Knowing and providing the right answer is what wards off or enables perseverance

beyond death. The “stuff” that constitutes the archetypal ghost, then, is information and one’s

conscious knowledge of it.

Lee also acknowledges the role “luck” (or “fate,” an alternative translation of the

original Korean word “운”) plays in the course of information duels; “luck/fate is what’s

problematic. Only when luck/fate interjects, things begin to wear the scent of death” (284).

Why luck, or fate? According to Lee, people pretend to like things fair and square, but in fact

they prefer the fancy or comforting label of fate or luck in serious competitions. “Humans

want to revolt against fate,” (285) but doing so oneself entails too much risk—hence, the

popularity of spectator sports (an equivalent to the quiz show mechanism, in this case), where

one may identify with the surrogate players and enjoy the thrill in the unpredictable turns of

events from a safe distance. The quiz show, likewise, “is a world governed by the law of

luck/fate. That very moment, we get a taste of death” (285).

The meaning of luck/fate here is twofold; first, training our focus on “운” as luck, we

may revisit Minsu’s belief that meaning lies latent in form, which comes to crystallization

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upon encountering the right circumstance. The word “bastard” has been lying latent in

himself, Minsu reflects, waiting to rise out and take part of his legitimate identity when “the

proper time comes” (14). Secondly, looking at “운” as fate, we cannot but recall the fact that

the ultimate fate of any conscious, living being is none other than death, which serves as the

momentum and determinant of the archetypal ghost narrative. The quiz show as an industry

and a mode of life may carry on thanks to information and the contestants’ knowledge of it,

but luck and fate also strongly contribute, for they are crucial components of the

unpredictable and brutal, and therefore entertaining, show structure.

Is this “being as information-consciousness-knowledge” formula capped off by

luck/fate, Kim’s idea of identity and existence in Korea’s newly emergent era of alienation

and individuation? A solipsistic world view retaining a tenuous link to external forces through

the “fate” component? How does this formulation work, when—as I pointed out earlier with

the case of Pitna and Minsu’s grandmother, or Minsu’s relationship with the “fairy”/Chi-

wŏn—digitalized, fragmented, and mediated identities abound, making “knowing” an

impossibility? Is Kim saying all attempt at connection is simply doomed to failure?

Journey Back from the Underworld, and Unknowing as Survival

Had Kim concluded the story with Minsu’s expulsion from the boot camp, Quiz

Show might have ended as a nihilistic response to the double-layered melancholia Kim’s

generation was condemned to. However, with Chi-wŏn coming to Minsu’s rescue in the

denouement of the novel, the uncertainties and losses he had suffered begin to take on a

slightly different hue. Is incomplete knowledge necessarily damnation when knowing itself is

never a possibility?

As seen in Minsu’s identification with the word “bastard,” meaning lies latent in

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form, which comes to crystallization upon encountering the right circumstance. And inversely,

meaning (in language) or content in the form holds a presence of its own apart from its utility.

In other words, a being in itself is neutral, and is firmly present (even latency is a kind of

presence, although perhaps less visible) regardless of whether it is acknowledged or not. The

“right circumstance” here cannot be equated to “utility,” for the former is a fortuitous and

incontrollable occurrence, whereas the latter—specifically in the context of language—is a

fixed, albeit arbitrary, one-to-one relationship. These beliefs underlie Minsu’s reaction to his

“fairy,” the initiative he takes in abandoning before losing, which falls in line with the notion

that there exists an incongruity between form and content, hence the loss embedded in the

illusion of knowing or possessing anything or anyone. But on the other hand, the realization

that whatever is under the surface has a legitimate presence regardless of its false guise also

means that the content, even if it doesn’t correspond to the form and therefore cannot be fully

known, has its own right to be—the only obstacle is the unfitting shell it wears.

Crystallization, the unconcealment of what lies beneath, can in fact emerge out of the

traumatic experience of seeing the representation (form) of “that which is hidden” (content)

shatter. In that sense, “unknowing” is the overture to a kind of knowledge, that knowing is

bound to be incomplete and fragmented but fluid and sustainable precisely because new

additions can be inserted, old notions removed. Stripping of the disparate selves, which one

identifies despite them being provenabsent causes, is in fact the making of an identity that

exists in the form of relational connections rather than absolute definition. It is creation

through destruction.

Minsu bonded with and loved his grandmother thinking she was his mother, yet the

statement that “she is his mother” is not true (language as utility fails). Nevertheless, what her

role and their relationship meant to him does hold true to what the word “mother” means.

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Likewise, Minsu’s house is in fact not his house but merely a tentative abode he is granted

during his cohabitation of it with his grandmother/mother. However, it is still the place where

he was raised laid his head to rest every night—it may not be his house in terms of his

possession, an extension of his self, but it still was and is home, and a house, its semantic and

physical presence intact. Although Pitna may no longer be his girlfriend, Minsu’s knowledge

of her gives him a new insight into his own self—that he had already known how spoiled and

selfish Pitna was. In a sense, then, the loss is not a loss, for the lost beloved object never

really harbored the qualities one had loved. Loss is merely un-knowing what one had known,

recognizing the otherness of others.

Recognition of the “other” is the first step in building and realizing one’s existence

within a relational setting, but seeing the other as a decodable body of absolute information,

focusing on the “knowing,” implies a dangerous supposition that knowledge is an

autonomous and absolute entity in its own. Minsu’s salvation lies in knowing that there will

always be an incomprehensible aspect (“otherness”) to others, or in other words knowing that

one can never really know. Sitting with Chi-wŏn after having escaped the quiz show boot

camp, Minsu answers her question as to whether all the problems involving “that side”

(meaning the boot camp) have been resolved with the following words: “Well, I don’t really

know. I don’t even know where “that side” actually is. But I did learn one thing … in this

world, there’s nowhere to run. People don’t change, problems recur and the world remains

the same. Perhaps not at first, but once I got adjusted, nothing was different there” (507). The

tone of disillusionment still laces Minsu’s statement, but as he says himself, one realization

does change the nature of his disillusionment: the realization that knowing is not the answer,

or in other words, a world in which knowing is the answer does not exist (he does not know

where the boot camp is). Despite all the incomprehensibility he finds amidst the people he

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encounters, despite how little he knows them, the fact that they “are” doesn’t change.

Chi-wŏn’s response to Minsu’s explanation about why he had to suddenly abandon

her and take off to the unknown “that side,” a response he thought she would never

understand, tells us why Chi-wŏn could in the end become Minsu’s true fairy: “Minsu, it’s

not that I understand because I can understand you, I understand because I love you. Isn’t that

how people who love each other communicate” (509)? Indeed, she may not understand who

Minsu is, for identity is an ever elusive concept. Chi-wŏn’s affirmation of unknowing is still

shaky, as she herself confirms: “The more we spend time together, the more I see you, I feel

like I don’t really know you. Isn’t that weird? When we first met in the chat room, when we

didn’t even know each other’s faces or names, that was when I thought I knew you best. But

later we really meet, eat together and talk together, the more I do this I get this strange feeling

that I really don’t know you. Why can’t I do what I was able to do with the keyboard and

monitor when I see you face to face? Is it just me? Is there something really wrong with me”

(523)?

Minsu’s comforting words in response to Chi-wŏn’s admittance of ignorance tells us

that he had finally resurfaced from his journey to the underworld: “It’ll be okay, it’ll all be

okay” (524). It really might be all right, for now he has acknowledged that what makes the

world livable is the unknown components within it. According to Minsu’s earlier experience

with Pitna, his grandmother or other people whose hidden truths wounded and betrayed him,

Chi-wŏn’s comment would register as the ultimate failure in a relationship. But having

survived his journey to death and back, he now comforts Chi-wŏn with his newfound

understanding—that life is inherently fragmented and incomprehensible. That there cannot be

absolute knowledge, for nothing is absolute, but simply is. And that the process of knowing

the previously unknown is what makes life a presence, in the present-progressive mode of be-

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ing: “We’ll still have so much to tell each other. We can do that as we go. Then we’ll get to

know each other better. I also have a lot of things to figure out, stuff I wasn’t able to ask you”

(524).

Deep down, Minsu might have already known this hard-earned lesson. In his first

email to Chi-wŏn, he had said: “I know that it’s hard for “two people to understand, accept,

and open up to each other.” But I don’t think it’s some mission impossible. Wouldn’t our lives

be too meaningless if it weren’t for such adventures we embark towards each other’s souls”

(225)? Adventures are journeys, present progressive in the sense of “adventuring.” To

“understand, accept, and open up” it is thus not a static state but an ongoing process, and the

company one finds in it is the ultimate reward. After all, adventures and relationships based

not on knowing but rather on simply being, and the questions they bring forth, are what Quiz

Show is all about, according to Kim himself: “basically, [Quiz Show] discusses the adventures

and love affairs of young people who meet one another though a “quiz”” (Azalea 30).

Conclusion

The experience of isolation and emotional alienation that characterize life in the boot

camp is a form of death from the perspective of the outer society, as even the superficial layer

of communal sustenance the camp offers is under constant threat of termination in the face of

the contestant’s potential defeat in the quiz battles. In this light, Minsu’s adventures and the

subsequent misadventure (symbolic death in the boot camp) can be seen as Kim’s attempt to

pin down the bare-bone structure that constitutes the story of life stripped of its ornaments

(external factors that define the self not by being the self, but by being conceived of as part of

the self). What Kim presents us with at the end of the novel is the archetypal ghost of our

time, that which carries over after the process of stripping, its ultimate stage being death as

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the loss of one’s physical body. In Chapter 1, I noted that literature is itself a ghostly medium,

for it conveys the disembodied thoughts of a physically disparate (as in not being the book

itself) entity and transgressively infiltrates the minds and lives of others (readers), bringing

the thoughts of the dead and the latent meanings in static letters back to life. But this

simulacrum is not an escapist haven, and literature as yet another form of the archetypal ghost

is never a denial of death. The virtual space of the boot camp had to fall apart because it stood

against reality, but the novel Quiz Show itself brings us back to reality through the realization

that the conditions of death—transgression, incomprehensibility, and fragmentation—are in

fact the momentums of life. In Kim’s own words: “Literature makes mankind stand against

death, and does not shy away from its essence. Literature is not a simulation. On the contrary,

literature stands as an antithesis to simulation … tells us life cannot be explained, and that

one day death will approach you like an assassin and terminate your journey of desire” (Post-

it 173).

I noted that Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is a tale of the “birth”

of the archetypal ghost. In it, the protagonist’s story of life preexists in a set form (the “core

of consciousness” according to Murakami), which emerges out of the unconscious and

acquires infinity in time as a regressive, immense, and inwardly expandable measure of

existence. The present-progressive mode of being (which Murakami sees as a consciousness

of the self whose presence is certified by connection to others) is brought to the fore in this

process, but the unconcealment is more of a spatial and temporal shift (from “Wonderland” to

the “End of the World”) than a creation. Quiz Show, meanwhile, tells us of the “making” of

the archetypal ghost. If Wonderland is about how one may be, Quiz Show is an inquiry into

what one may be, or perhaps even how one cannot be anyone at all, in a society where

nothing can be safely identified or identified with.

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 Closing Words

Theoretical Framework

The emergence of electronic technology in the past century has redefined mankind’s

understanding and lived-experience of being as a fragmented, incomprehensible, and

transgressive mode of present-progressive existence from a non-axiological standpoint. As

the baseline of this argument, in Chapter 1, I look at how the unconscious, traumatic

experience of awakening to one’s own prospect of death is a universal story of being human,

a conscious subject ceaselessly pushing and defined against its mortal fate. I see this

overarching narrative of mankind’s self-awareness as an archetypal ghost: a shared imagery

(and story) that resides within the realm of the unconscious across cultures and times.

The archetypal ghost, in essence, comprises the diegetic elements of existence, death

(as an ever-unempirical yet looming prospect that delineates life), and the desire for and

belief in the thereafter. This inherent narrativeness of being human is the main reason why I

chose to focus on the novel form in my subsequent close-reading sections, aside from the

short stories, film, animation, and other genres or mediums of storytelling I introduce

throughout my analysis. All three novels I chose as representative cases from the U.S., Japan,

and Korea were chosen in consideration of their length, scope, and topic-specificity, in

conscious acknowledgement of their potentials to fully demonstrate my trans-

cultural/historical approach.

Given my focus on electronic technology and narrative structures that are particularly

indebted to the contemporary lifestyle, emphasis on visual culture and the apparatuses that

constitute the fine grains of daily interaction through digital mediation such as game

storyboards, hypertextual and graphic narratives, or social network platforms, would be the

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next targets of inquiry in my future endeavor to amplify and revise this dissertation into a full

monograph.

In Chapter 2, I find the momentum that propels and realizes the above mentioned

desire to carry on, or transform the unreal (non-being) into real (being) in technology. I

emphasize the present (the here and now)-progressive (connoting a constant process of

transgressive change) nature of the archetypal ghost by looking at how technological

innovations constantly pull the unreal towards or into the realm of the real and thus non-being

into being. I place this observation in a historical context by proposing three different

paradigms: the pre-modern stage in which technology was mainly craft (tools); the advent of

the modern age when human-machine interfaces came to blur the boundaries between the

human and non-human; and the post-Turing (i.e. contemporary) vision of human-machine

convergence whereby the very seat of reality, the very definition and making of the human,

undergoes a fundamental transformation.

In the following three chapters, I conduct close readings of literature, film, and other

mediums from the U.S., Japan, and Korea, bringing my observations on the interrelation

between technology and ontology into the context of represented reality. The three cultural

traditions dealt with in these chapters call for further scrutiny (beyond mere comparison or

juxtaposition) in terms of their world views, and in particular, the notion of being that

undergirds the cultural productions. Each tradition has conceptualized the boundaries

between the real and the unreal, being and non-being (or I and the other) throughout history

in ways that are noticeably different, despite the prominence the three countries share as

leading forces in the field of information, communication and telepresence technology at the

present juncture. These varying notions of reality, and the “human being” in its tow, had in

turn a profound impact on the way in which the literary worlds of each country reflect and

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inspire social discourse. I therefore lay out the dialectical process of the ghost-human

dynamic in three different cultural frameworks as a way of diagnosing the variegated

(fragmented), indefinable (hence incomprehensible), and transgressive (the present-day

convergence and intersection of these traditions) modes of the archetypal ghost.

The Unrelenting Subject in the Western Intellectual Tradition: Grounds for Snow Crash

I believe that, while rejecting all forms of reductionism, we can still acknowledge that

there exist certain culture-specific tendencies in viewing and understanding the world, and

humanity as its perceiver and dweller. In the greater span of Western intellectual history, the

issue of subjectivity, or in other words a clear divide between subject and object, has been a

recurring motif. For instance, I see a persistent trend of “border-ing” between the I and the

other, whether it be polarities concerning the human-divine, human-Nature or human

(organic)-machine (inorganic). In chapter 1, I noted that a desire for the lost, endogenous

ideal haunts the fallen state of presence from the antiquities of philosophical and religious

reflections. With the advent of Enlightenment, the “fall” is redressed as an “awakening,” and

the refractory irregularity of the human mind that condemned Plato’s reality as mimesis to a

state of imperfection becomes the champion of self-affirming agency. Impossibility becomes

unnecessity; the “real” desk Plato disdained is not, and will never be the “ideal” desk, but the

point then is that the former does not have to be the latter, for each individual’s ability to

reason the elementary formality of the desk and produce a version of it is a power of creation,

not incapacity to imitate. In her book How We Became Posthuman, Katherine Hayles uses the

term “liberal subject” to characterize the condition of the Enlightened being. With it, the

focus in one’s relation with the beloved lost object shifts from the loss of the other to the

persistence of the self, from what’s gone to what still remains. Descartes’ proclamation that

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the only thing one can be sure of is the existence of the “thinking I” is, in this light, a cause

for celebration, for the I is the ultimate survivor and the protagonist of the universe.

This unrelenting persistence of the subject has been dismantled and reclaimed in

many different critical approaches throughout the past century, ranging from psychoanalysis,

race, gender, and ethnicity studies, deconstruction, post- or transhuman theories and

ecocriticism. However, all such attempts retain (whether they push against it or propose

alternate options) the basic hypothesis that although what is “real” (or what “being,” in

particular, a human subject is) changes and morphs, a clear-cut boundary persists, even (or

even more so) in instances of border-crossing/blurring.

The U.S. is undoubtedly one of the few countries that stand at the forefront of

technologies that serve to expand the reach of human understanding and the breadth and

reach of human presence, including but not limited to telepresence media, information

technology, machine intelligence and biological enhancement, falling in line with the

unrelenting demand of the subject to affirm and comprehend itself. No wonder speculative

fiction thrives in the literary tradition of the American cultural imaginary, as grounds for

thought experiments free from the fetters of the object world that restrain the physical and

mental capacity of the subject. Here, I have presented a cursory exploration of the intellectual

and cultural background from which Snow Crash’s agential subject arose; a more in-depth

study of the topic (the culture-specificity of the archetypal ghost and its literary

representations) will be the first priority in the book project.

Multiple Othernesses in the Japanese Imaginary: Grounds for Wonderland

The parallel world structure in Wonderland, in which “otherness” within and without

the self is seen as a basic condition of survival, is in fact a familiar motif in Japanese culture.

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“Border crossing” (which means, in turn, borders are still there, only flexible and malleable)

would be a good way to describe the ontological structure that enables transvalent and multi-

layered view of reality and being. Different realms coexist, interacting with one another yet

remaining separate and mutually respectful, which is the fundamental foundation of the

Shinto tradition. People or animals die, cross over to the sphere of the semi-divine and

become gods. Lifeless, inanimate objects acquire sentience and mobility after prolonged

exposure to human engagements (e.g. the pots and pans marching on in the legend of

Hyakkiyakyu 百鬼夜行 ). The “modern subject” did make inroads during the period from mid-

19th to early 20th century when Japan was undergoing radical transformation through its

encounters and interactions with the Western world, but the tragedy of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki in 1945 served as a breaking point at which the sovereign “self” (in Japan’s case,

more on the collective level than the individual) utterly failed. Since then, Japan has

reclaimed its hold on material progress, opening a way towards reharnessing and

incorporating the fearful potential of technology into one of the countless “othernesses” the

Japanese cultural imaginary had been able to juggle. The transformation of nuclear power

from destructive to live-giving force in Tezuka Osamu’s Astro Boy (鐵腕アトム ), the evolution

of Gojira (ゴジラ ) from monster to hero, the animist vision of symbiotic harmony in Miyazaki

Hayao’s animes such as Naussicä of the Valley of the Wind (風の谷のナウシカ ) or Princess

Mononoke (もののけ姫), the resigned acceptance or even active embracement of

transhumanization as seen in Ghost in the Shell (攻殻機動隊 [Kōkaku Kidōtai ]), Akira (アキラ),

and the TV series Neon Genesis Evangelion (新世紀エヴァンゲリオン ) can be read as an

example of the multivalence the society is able to balance within its construct.

Boundaries exist, not as exclusions or definitions, but as distinctions, whereby the

spectral (ghostly matters, but also spectrum-like coexistences of different levels of being and

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reality) is a natural element of the world. This attitude can be observed in how the use of and

attitude towards technology is represented through the literary lens, for example in symbiotic

lifestyles/entities including artificially expanded or hybridized bodies and minds (the internet,

cybernetics, robots, etc.) as seen in Wonderland. Again, like the previous section, what I have

proposed so far is merely a rough blueprint of the cultural background from (or against)

which Wonderland sprang forth. I will expand on it in the book.

The Mechanism of Boundary Obliteration: Grounds for Quiz Show

In chapter 5 on Quiz Show, I speculated on the reason behind the surprising lack of

non-realistic fiction in Korea’s literary spectrum, despite the thorough penetration of cutting-

edge digital media technology and its apparatuses (both in terms of software and hardware)

into the fabrics of daily communication and interaction. I trace this divorce between practice

and representation to what I call “secular-shamanism,” deeply ingrained in Korea’s religio-

cultural history; the human, here and now, simply takes priority over any other concerns, and

all other “others” are gravitationally pulled into its force field in service of human intention,

desire, and will. Not because humans are graced by, or resemble a higher being as in the

Judeo-Christian vision, or possess a distinctive property that enables us to better understand

or rule over other species and objects as in the case with the Enlightened subject. In the birth

myth of Korea as a nation (and people), deities and animals alike admire and aspire to

humanity, either descending to or striving to ascend toward the ranks of man (the motto of

this tale is humanitarianism [홍익인간 弘益人間]). Imported foreign religions, after a period of

assimilation and acculturation, tend to gravitate towards a focus on “service” rather than

“revelation” or “salvation.” Buddhism, Confucianism, and even Christianity take on a secular

hue, in this light; the “three thousand bows (삼천배 [三千拜])” or “one-hundred-day-prayer

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marathons (백일기도 [百日祈禱])” in the Korean Buddhist and Christian customs are distinctly

unique additions, which expressly aim at bringing the yonder to hither and invoking “other”

beings (the divinity) to serve one’s own purpose, is a human-centered, gravitational

transformation religion tends to undergo in the peninsula. I described this as an

“objectification-subjectivization” process in Chapter 5: the subject-object divide is blurred,

for “others” (whether it be deity, people outside one’s own community or simply other

entities that are not I) must first be objectified in order to be instrumentalized for a purpose,

and then in turn subjectivized and considered part of one’s own self, sharing the same agenda

and desire.

The use of collective pronouns in the place of individual in denoting possessive

relations is a notable mark of this objectification-subjectivization mechanism. In referring to

other constituents of groups and communities one belongs to, such as family members,

Koreans use the first-person plural pronoun uri (우리: we/us/our) instead of the singular ne

(내: my): it is “our parents,” not “my parents”. The “we” here points to an ontological

boundary obliteration, for the “we” at once refers to the “possessing I” as the referrer, but

also the sister or parents who are the referent, the object of possession (objectified) as well as

the possessing subject (subjectivized), one and whole with the “I” as members of the

collective unit that is the family.

Secularized shamanism, along with the succession of traumatic historical events that

demanded rigorous attention throughout the past two centuries, can therefore be understood

as the driving force behind the dominance of realism in literary representation. The spectral is

banished, but not because it transgresses or is incomplete/incomprehensible. It simply cannot

and is not a priority, at least in the context of the immediacy of life. Technology is part and

parcel of reality, not its momentum or transformer, as we see in the case of Quiz Show. Again,

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in line with the previous two sections above, the cultural dynamics of Korea’s culture-specific

ontological foundation will be studied in greater depth in the book project to follow.

Future Research Proposal

In this dissertation, I focus on the importance of both human and non-human agency,

and the imperfect present-progressive mode of survival exemplified by digitally mediated

lifestyles. My aim for the book I envision based on this work is to expand the scope of my

readings from novels to the broader use and effect of digital and visual media in

contemporary societies and their literary expressions. Audio-visual media illuminate and

embody the transgressive state of being the audience is pushed into. The spectacles on the

scintillating screens render them abject, neither object nor subject; the sensations evoked by

film and animation (as a medium itself, but also works that expressly deal with boundary-

crossing entities or experiences such as thrillers, horror films, and science fiction narratives),

especially those of extreme import such as horror, terror or wonder, rely on a cathartic

sensorial empathy accompanied by a cognitive and spatial disassociation with the dying,

disfigured, and persistently haunting objects on the screen.

Another topic I wish to explore further, as a way of expanding my conceptual inquiry

into the question of ontology, is the issue of forms of im/mortality and ideas of human

consciousness structurally created by novels and other cultural productions (e.g. ghosts,

zombies, vampires, and clones) to overcome the fear of death within the reach of

technological innovations on our visible horizon. The understanding that someday our

existence will be inexorably terminated is a fearful prospect, for it not only runs against every

grain of our biological instinct but also undermines the construct of reality as a consciously-

perceived plain of self-affirmation. Immortality, naturally, has been an abiding desire

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throughout history, as humanity has struggled to prolong its physical and conceptual integrity

beyond the point of individual annihilation through religion, science, and culture. Modern

technological breakthroughs have in fact succeeded in holding death at bay by expanding the

scope of our bodily and mental presence in various ways, for we now live in a time when

mechanical augmentation, extension, and even replacement of the body is a realistic venture,

and the properties of the human mind are expected to be reproduced, preserved, and emulated

in the form of digital codes. However, extended or reinforced life is not exactly equivalent to

ultimate triumph over death itself. The variegated modes of being brought forth by

technological apparatuses may well be mere redefinitions of death as life’s other side of the

coin.

Specific topics I wish to explore include artificial life and its limits, technologically

enabled afterlife, and virtual resurrection seen in digital avatars or memory constructs. In

addition to literature, I will actively import animation, film and game narratives to capture the

cultural imaginary surrounding the issue of immortality and consciousness. Key texts will

include Richard Morgan’s novel Altered Carbon (U.K.), Gainax Production’s anime Neon

Genesis Evangelion (Japan, both TV series and theater releases), Joss Whedon’s TV series

Dollhouse (U.S.), Max Brooks’ fictional documentary collection World War Z (U.S.), and the

Korean film Doomsday Book. Another text of particular interest will be Alvin Lu’s Asian

American novel titled The Hell Screens, in which multiple strata of individual, national, and

physical identities effectively consolidate the cultural topography I sketch out in my

transpacific spectrum of comparison. In the novel, a Chinese American computer engineer

visiting Taipei as a collector of tales of the strange ceaselessly suffers from hellish visions

when his contact lens becomes contaminated in Taipei’s humid climate. I read the disfigured

lenses, which literally form a “screen”—in reference to the novel’s title—and conduit

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between his sensory perceptions and the external world, as a subjectivized means of

technological mediation that grants access to deeper layers of a fragmented identity. As the

story unfolds, the ghostly legacy of Taiwan’s colonial history, the protagonist’s dissociative

identity disorder, and tales of reincarnation come together to form a transversal entity that

defies, or perhaps can be instantiated only through, death. Drawing on Abraham and Torok’s

notion that memory and historical trauma are “transgenerational phantoms,” I will explore the

motifs of boundary infringement and the resultant subjects who arise up from and against the

gap between cultural, mental, and physical barriers.

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