Paranoia in Spook Country: William Gibson and the technological sublime of the war on terror

Abstract

After September 11, American writer William Gibson turned from the science fiction with which he had made his name to the realistic. Gibson’s recent novel Spook Country turns towards GPS technology and its potential to track terrorists and containers to any point of the globe, using it as an entry into a post‐9/11 milieu in which private companies are not so easily distinguished from the government. Spook Country presents a version of what Fredric Jameson has called a “technological sublime”, in which the ungraspable nature of electronic communications in global late capitalism produces an awe akin to earlier romantic notions of the sublime. Spook Country traces the paranoia of the war on terror across the world, in which the virtual and real have merged in the form of ever‐present technologies of surveillance. The terror in the war on terror, I argue, has become technology itself.

Keywords:

• war on terror
• William Gibson
• Spook Country
• technological sublime
• GPS

Notes

1. This phrase is spoken in Spook Country by Hollis Henry, who is herself quoting another character, Reg Inchmale, quoting Faulkner.

2. In Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, Suvin argues that a Brechtian‐style “cognitive estrangement” (11) from the present was necessary for science fiction. Such a defamiliarization effect is only possible if the present is stable enough to extrapolate and exaggerate from.

3. Butler takes the term “Face” from French phenomenologist and Talmudic scholar Emmanuel Levinas.

4. Notably Society Must Be Defended and Security, Territory, Population, which develop Foucault’s conceptions of bio‐politics most clearly. In his 1979 lectures at Collège de France, The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault declares the necessity of understanding the link between liberalism and biopolitics, saying “only when we know what this governmental regime called liberalism was, will we be able to grasp what biopolitics is” (22). Amusingly, Foucault becomes absorbed in the analysis of liberalism and neo‐liberalism and rarely returns to explicit discussion of biopolitics through the year’s lectures; however, the failure nevertheless seems to point to the historical entanglement between the two.

5. See Butler’s Precarious Life on this, especially the chapter entitled “Indefinite Detention” (110–50).

6. While it is perhaps too early to evaluate the Obama administration on this score, as Slavoj Žižek has suggested, it would be disturbing indeed if the legal legacy of that administration were to remain largely intact (Borrowed Kettle).

7. The reference here is to German former Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt.

8. The Los Angeles Times blog has reported that up to a million people are on the no‐fly list (Neuman np), a staggering number if true.

9. “Do people still do that?” (107), wonders Hollis – that is, store data on iPods, a knowing wink to Spook Country’s own certain obsolescence.

10. See David Pallister’s article in the Guardian, “How the US Sent $12bn in Cash to Iraq. And Watched it Vanish”.