The Intuitionist and Pattern Recognition: A Response to Lauren Berlant

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.

As a mechanical device, the elevator instantiates what is known as a finite-state machine: that is, it can only exist in a limited number of states, with predetermined transitions from one state to another. In this instance: moving up with doors closed, moving down with doors closed, stationary at floor level with doors open (or closing). A call button outside the elevator and numbered buttons inside it send signals that initiate these transitions. A host of mechanical and electro-mechanical devices (and in modern elevators, digital microcontrollers) ensure that the elevator operates smoothly and safely in accord with these finite-state functions. Since all of these devices obey well understood physical laws whose actions are easily observed and tested, the discourse of the elevator assemblage—in both actual life and Colson's The Intuitionist—is one of empiricism. The novel, however, introduces two anomalies that contest this basic principle. The first is the Intuitionist counter-discourse elaborated by the elevator innovator and theorist James Fulton. Yet it turns out, in a complicating twist, that this counter-discourse is a simulation, albeit not necessarily false. Proffered by Fulton as a black man who has successfully passed as white, this feigned discourse initially expresses his hatred of the corrupt white order, but then, ambiguously, becomes the vehicle of a utopian desire.¹ The second anomaly is the catastrophic free fall of an elevator from the fortieth floor in the Fanny Briggs Building, just when the city mayor is showing it off to visitors from the French embassy. Lila Mae Watson, an avowed Intuitionist and the elevator inspector who had found it mechanically sound only a few days before, thus finds herself at the nexus of these two anomalies. Since the multiple safety systems that prevent such a free fall had all simultaneously failed, the elevator itself (number eleven) had done the physically impossible. From the empiricist perspective, the only conceivable explanation is tampering or sabotage. Hence Lila Mae falls under suspicion: either she did it or she was set up by other perpetrators. In either case, and from the novel's outset, she...