‘Time forks perpetually towards innumerable futures.’
Recently James Bridle sketched an outline of what he called ‘Network Realism‘; literature of and enabled by the network. His case-in-point was William Gibson’s latest novel, ‘Zero History’. Now I haven’t read Zero History so I can’t talk about that novel, but I can talk about a short story that Bridle’s piece got me thinking about. I’ll come to that. Firstly, though, it seems to me that there are two key issues here: the idea of the network and the concept of time. By taking the technological content of the novel and juxtaposing it with the time-related anxieties of its wider audience-reception, Bridle sets out a compelling position:
‘This writing exists on a timeline, but it’s not a simple line back-to-the-past and forward-to-the-future. It’s a gathering-together of many currently possible worldlines, seen from the near-omniscient superposition of the network.’
The network as an almost-panopticon, a mode of surveying and surveillance, interconnected and largely invisible unless you look for it. Both in the midst and out among of all these tendrils of possibility is the network, fundamental to how we live our lives today, and essential to any kind of fiction, that is to say realist fiction that thinks it has a chance of saying something significant about How We Live Now. What Bridle is suggesting is that we can detect in particular kinds of writing a new set of approaches for examining a very particular kind of cultural product, that can and is being produced in the very particular moment of Now. ‘Writing that is of and about the network.’
I want to begin to unpick the relationship between the network and time. Time, it seems to me, is prevalent in the conversations around Zero History, and around Network Realism, but I would argue that that’s not just because people are talking and thinking about a work of ‘science fiction’. Time and the network are indivisible, and by extension time and Network Realism are deeply entwined, the multifarious nature of the network demanding a flexible conception of time. Bridle embraces the opportunity to engage with non-linear attitudes towards time – ‘many currently possible worldlines’ – and as result, invoked a name inside my head: ‘Borges! Borges!’ Jorge Luis Borges’s 1941 short story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ is not Network Realism. But look at this passage from it:
‘In contrast to Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform, absolute time. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time.’
Time is the original network, and literature of and enabled by time’s myriad possibilities is where Network Realism is coming from. Network realism, indeed, networked living is developing out of an increasing realization that we don’t have to be doing just one thing at any one time, that time and lived experience isn’t linear and one-thing-after-the-other, but that it is a constant barrage of sensory data, a never-ending flow of cultural input and emotional output, a thousand and one impressions and connections and stimulations and ideas all at once. The way we use technology is beginning to reflect our cognitive processing of the physical world, and the way we build networks of contact and connection, of possibility and chance is increasingly mirroring the ways we exist in time, and the manner in which time acts upon us.
‘I imagined as well a Platonic, hereditary work, transmitted from father to son, in which each new individual adds a chapter or corrects with pious care the pages of his elders.’
Borges would have liked Wikipedia.
There’s that network-interface again. Networks of transferred knowledge, of inherited responsibilities, of layers of time and revision. Human beings have been building networks since beginning civilisation; networks of roads, of languages, of blood-ties, of postal services and computer servers and satellites and mobile phone masts. We have weaved our physical networks around ourselves and knitted them into the fabric networks of time. Connecting ourselves to the past and networking ourselves into the future is the inevitable result of being plugged into the present.
In ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, the titular garden is in fact a book that the protagonist’s ancestor, Ts’ui Pên, began writing; a book that he referred to as an infinite labyrinth. The book is never completed, but its manuscripts all aim towards a fiction that encapsulates all narrative possibilities, rendering the text a labyrinth ‘forking in time, not space’. Borges does not offer us any samples of this hypothetical literary web, but describes it thus:
‘In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pên, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He creates in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork.’
Technological networks still require us to make choices at the expense of others, and it’s a rare opportunity to ever be able to simultaneously choose all choices at once. But the greatest technological network of all, the internet, strives to offer up all of those possible choices if you ask for them. The sandpit nature of emerging network infrastructures increasingly encourages the kind of inventiveness and playfulness that leads to diverse futures, proliferating and forking ideas and possibilities.
In Gibson’s literary mode, hyperlinks, communication and interconnectedness are all innate qualities of the text. If that’s even something approaching what Network Realism could be – drawing on the branching, mitosis-like configurations of time and how it envelopes twenty-first century human life in the western world – then we have the potential here for an exciting and relevant new approach to fiction. Literary realism strives to reflect contemporary life and society, and a new realism that does so with a sensitivity to the ethereal force of time as well as to the electronic force of technology, will emerge a more nuanced, a more speculative, and an altogether more interesting cultural force.
