The Intuitionist and Pattern Recognition: A Response to Lauren Berlant

Abstract

Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist (1998) and William Gibson's Pattern Recognition (2003) are two contemporary novels in which the main characters' experiences first involve—and indeed are made possible by—specific technologies. For Lila Mae Watson in the former it is the elevator; for Cayce Pollard in the latter it is the Internet. In each novel this specific technology becomes not only the locus of a special mode of knowing but, as Lauren Berlant rightly insists, the space and trajectory of a research. Berlant, however, is concerned not with this technology but with the affective mappings that the experiences of these two female protagonists in effect adumbrate. These affective mappings, for Berlant, provide the key to how we may come to a new understanding of the historical present, in both its historicity and becoming-different or other as it nonetheless constitutes a shared historical time. Focused primarily, though not exclusively, on affective singularity, her theoretical framework and the reading it enables thus offer an alternative to “the dialectic of structure (explanation of what's systematic in the reproduction of the world) and agency (what people do in everyday life … )” which typically inform cultural analysis of the historical novel as primary text and archive. But beyond—or even before—the economic, political, and cultural determinations of structure and agency inscribed not only in the “experience” of the individual literary subject but in that of the larger human collective, to what extent does the technical per se participate in what Berlant describes as the “embeddedness [of these characters] in scenes that make demands on the sensorium for adjudication, adaptation, improvisation, and new visceral imaginaries for what the present could be”? More simply, to what extent is the technology at the heart of each novel also a determinant of the affective mapping each offers? That is the question I want to address before turning to Berlant's central underlying theme: the role or necessity of trauma in the “crisis ordinariness” the two novels depict.