Whitmarsh ImagineMachineNarrative 2016

SF-TH Inc
“Imagine You're a Machine”: Narrative Systems in Peter Watts's Blindsight and Echopraxia
Author(s): Patrick Whitmarsh
Source: Science Fiction Studies , Vol. 43, No. 2 (July 2016), pp. 237-259
Published by: SF-TH Inc
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5621/sciefictstud.43.2.0237
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
SF-TH Inc is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Science Fiction
Studies
This content downloaded from

193.54.180.221 on Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:58:27 +00:00
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
NARRATIVE SYSTEMS IN BLINDSIGHT AND ECHOPRAXIA 237
Patrick Whitmarsh
“Imagine You’re a Machine”: Narrative Systems in Peter

Watts’s Blindsight and Echopraxia
A preference for meaning over world, for order over perturbation, for information over
noise is only a preference. It does not enable one to dispense with the contrary.—Niklas
Luhmann, Social Systems (83)
Introduction: “Point of View Matters”

“Imagine you are Siri Keeton.”—Peter Watts, Blindsight (21)
Thus begins the first chapter of Peter Watts’s science-fiction novel Blindsight
(2006). The text’s opening line (discounting its prologue) implicates its readers
in several ways: its ambiguous “you,” both singular and plural, adopts the
imperative; it commands the reader to perform an action. It is also a
colloquialism, suggestive of conventional dialogue. Furthermore, the
imaginative faculty is already closely associated with the readerly position; the
novel is about Siri Keeton (it is told from his first-person perspective), so why
would readers not imagine themselves as Siri Keeton? The second-person
opening sentence invokes a literary effect of the narrative as a whole: it
commands its readers to do what they would almost certainly do anyway,
consciously or otherwise. The book operates on a metanarrative level,
instructing its readers and even explicitly calling attention to its failure as a
novel. In the following essay, I claim that Blindsight and its sequel,
Echopraxia (2014)—collectively referred to as the FIREFALL novels—establish
a provocative and complex formal structure that simultaneously challenges and
expands upon the narrative possibilities of the modern novel. On one hand,
these texts challenge traditional narrative forms by undermining the implicit
components of those forms; on the other hand, they also present new
possibilities for narrative organization by compelling readers to think about
linguistic meaning in new ways. Watts accomplishes both of these tasks
through a dual critique of the subjective experience of consciousness and the
formal association between consciousness and narrative perspective.1
Unpacking the assumptions and expectations that accompany the reader’s
reception of the text, Watts puts pressure on readerly faith in narrative
meaning—not because he reveals his narrator to be unreliable, but because he
undermines the very possibility of reliable narration. Upon exposing these
assumptions—by which the reader fantasizes a meaningful connection with the
narrator—Watts reveals a subversive anti-narrative at work in his novels; that
is, he reimagines narrative as a machine, a complex system. Watts’s science-
fictional goal in these two novels is to expose an alternative and undermining
presence within the folds of conventional narrative practice.
I argue that Watts’s novels expose the choice between reliable and
unreliable narration as a false one because such a choice assumes an imaginary
access to the narrator’s interior thoughts and intentions, conveniently

193.54.180.221 on Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:58:27 +00:00
238 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 43 (2016)
communicated by the text. Unreliable narration is a redundant phrase by

Watts’s definition because all narration, due to its perspectival structure, is
unreliable. Watts unveils the unreliability of narration by juxtaposing
perspectival narrative with the concept of complex systems, repeatedly
introducing compelling episodes of purportedly meaningful content only to
subsequently dismantle them by challenging the process of distinction that
accompanies any manifestation of narrative perspective or any act of
observation—what Niklas Luhmann refers to as the paradox of observing
systems: “The operation of observing, therefore, includes the exclusion of the
unobservable, moreover, the unobservable par excellence, observation itself,
the observer-in-operation” (“Paradoxy” 44). Siri Keeton, the narrator of
Blindsight, functions as a conscious nexus of assumptions and expectations by
which the text continually calls its own perspective into question. “Point of
view matters,” Siri insists early in the novel; but rather than reinforce the
solidity of perspective, his intense self-consciousness undermines his ability to
provide an objective account (Blindsight 18; emphasis in original). As a hyper-
conscious narrator, Siri introduces the paradox of perspective and thereby
weakens the narrative structure of the novel. Echopraxia temporarily recovers
from its predecessor’s instability by assuming a third-person narrative strategy
that gestures toward a broader frame, that of vastly complex systems which,
readers come to learn, subsume the perspectives generated by the texts. In
other words, the two novels, taken together, illuminate an alternative structure
to that of traditional narrative—a structure that undermines the expectations of
readers and redefines what it means to “read” a novel, by reimagining
narrative as a form of intelligent system possessing no perspectival origin.
I do not want to suggest, however, that Watts embraces complex systems
at the expense of characters, or that his novels partake of what Tom LeClair
has called “the systems novel” in his In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the
Systems Novel (1987).2 While Watts offers compelling evidence for a systems-
theory reading of Blindsight and Echopraxia, he does so through an intense and
committed engagement with his characters, particularly Blindsight’s Siri
Keeton; only after entering the narrative of Echopraxia do the characters of
Blindsight finally unveil themselves as components of a system, although Watts
teases his readers with this knowledge throughout the text of Blindsight. In
other words, Blindsight and Echopraxia gradually reveal that what we, as
readers, interpret as Siri’s first-person narrative is actually an intelligent system
masking itself as narrative. Of course, such a claim is only one step removed
from paradox: Blindsight and Echopraxia present their trenchant critique of
narrative only by first succeeding as narrative. Science fiction offers a means
for navigating this dilemma; for Watts, sf serves as the most critical and
illuminating literary vessel for its capacity to work in a self-consciously
paradoxical fashion. His two novels set in the Firefall universe are not only
effective examples of cunning literary critique, but they also exhibit what
Darko Suvin in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979) calls a novum, or “a
strange newness” (4). In Echopraxia, the primary strange newness is revealed
to be Blindsight itself. The text that readers accept as the confessional first-

193.54.180.221 on Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:58:27 +00:00
person narrative of Siri Keeton manifests in the sequel as a transmission

received by the characters—a transmission from something that may not be
human. The novum of the text appears not merely at the level of content, but
at the level of form itself.
While narrative structure remains the central focus of this essay, several
critics have made the important assertion that the characters in Blindsight (and
many in Echopraxia) no longer qualify as normal human persons, and that
their ontological differences may condition the novels’ odd narrative patterns.
In his helpful treatment of Blindsight on his blog, Steven Shaviro suggests that
the novel’s characters “are nearly all sociopaths to one extent or another, as
well as being thoroughly ‘posthuman’.” Such a claim is no exaggeration. Jukka
Sarasti, the mission commander, is a vampire, rendered in Watts’s novel as an
extinct species resurrected through the miracle of biogenetics; Isaac Szpindel,
the ship’s medic and science advisor, is literally replaced partway through the
novel by his runner-up, Cunningham, kept conveniently in deep sleep; Susan
James, the ship’s translator, is a bona fide house of multiple personalities
(three other personalities live in her head, and other characters refer to
her/them as the “Gang of Four”); Amanda Bates, the ship’s security officer,
is a military commander whose past methods of battle strategy include combat
mind-control; and finally there is Siri himself, a “Synthesist” whose partial
lobotomy purportedly gives him the capacity to objectively analyze the other
crew members (Blindsight 46).3 The textual descriptions and imagery certainly
reinforce the ambiguous humanity of these characters; such posthumanisms are
not antithetical, however, to the narrative critique that I see at work in Watts’s
novels, nor are the two readings mutually exclusive. Questions of systems
imply questions of scale, and Watts’s novels dramatize an ambiguity of scale
by challenging humanist assumptions about narrative.4 The detached narrative
style reflects the alternative forms of existence depicted in Blindsight, and the
suggestion of narrative as an intelligent, nonhuman system presents a
theoretical complement to the posthumanism of both novels: a subjective
experience as ruthlessly self-aware as Siri’s actually begins to look system-like.
This paper concerns itself primarily with the structural relation between
Blindsight and Echopraxia, and how this structure reveals a concomitant
interrelation among systems theory, narrative theory, and science fiction. Watts
also provides numerous conversations and images at the level of content that
complement his larger narrative project. These diegetic details guide my
argument, which begins by identifying several moments in Blindsight that
gesture toward a concern about the possibility of literary narration and
semantic meaning; upon identifying and analyzing these moments, we can see
how Watts offers his readers textual models of the very relationship that
materializes between Blindsight and its sequel. The second portion of the paper
discusses Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage in relation to Watts’s
fiction, arguing that this theoretical construction is significant for understanding
how a system can use meaning. The essay then turns to Echopraxia in order
to demonstrate the importance of the formal relationship between the two
novels and the implications of this relationship for narrative theory and science

193.54.180.221 on Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:58:27 +00:00
fiction, drawing on the dialectic of cognition and estrangement theorized by

Darko Suvin. I claim that we can read Watts’s novels as displacing the implicit
distinctions and assumptions of any narrative act, resulting in the emergence
of a narrative told from no perspective: a narrative system. Echopraxia
recuperates itself as a conventional narrative by subsuming its predecessor, but
only to the extent that conscious human subjects (readers and characters) are
involved in the narrative process. In the end, both Blindsight and Echopraxia
participate in a complementary project: the realization of narrative as the effect
of an intelligent machine, not the intended message of a perspectival narrator.
“The System Understands”: Displacing Narrative Perspective in Blindsight.
Blindsight reflects upon the problems of perspective almost immediately. Siri
draws the reader’s attention to the conventional importance of narrative early
in the novel, associating it explicitly with his own mental capabilities. Siri,
readers learn, has had significant rewiring performed on his brain, as well as
a portion of it removed. This procedure is what enables him to function as a
Synthesist. In the simplest terms, Siri is the closest thing to an objective
observer; he has no perspective:
I may have grown up distant but I grew up objective, and I have Robert
Paglino to thank for that. His seminal observation set everything in motion. It
led me into Synthesis, fated me to our disastrous encounter with the
scramblers, spared me the worse fate befalling Earth. Or the better one, I
suppose, depending on your point of view. Point of view matters: I see that
now, blind, talking to myself, trapped in a coffin falling past the edge of the
solar system. (18; emphases in original)
Point of view matters, for Siri, because perspective is power; narrative is a
means to control readerly response. Following a vicious episode near
Blindsight’s conclusion, in which Sarasti attacks the narrator, readers learn that
the vampire’s goal is to shock Siri out of his objectivity so that the Synthesist
might communicate the pathos in their situation: “‘Get out of your room,
Keeton,’ it hissed. ‘Stop transposing or interpolating or rotating or whatever
it is you do. Just listen. For once in your goddamned life, understand
something’” (301; emphases in original). Any communication of certain facts
might imagine itself as an objective, impartial source of those facts; but in
order for any communicative text to convey meaning, its facts must register
with its audience on an ideological level. Narrative success depends upon the
guarantee of some form of perception, even if this perception appears
somewhat strange. Blindsight provides that guarantee in the form of Siri’s
narration, but Siri’s commentary on his own perspective undercuts this
guarantee, creating a textual oscillation between narration grounded in
perspective and a non-perspectival event that supersedes his account.
The full range of this oscillation manifests in Echopraxia, when Watts
introduces the text of the first novel within the diegesis of the second. Daniel
Brüks, the protagonist of Echopraxia, receives the text of Blindsight as a
communications transmission: Blindsight literally becomes a signal sent to the
characters of the sequel. In their analysis of the transmission, Brüks and

193.54.180.221 on Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:58:27 +00:00
another character, Rakshi Sengupta (who exhibits odd speech patterns of her
own),5 pick apart its nuances, participating in a pseudo-literary reading of
Blindsight:
“It just sounds wrong the way it talks there are these tics in the speech
pattern it keeps saying Imagine you’re this and Imagine you’re that and it
sounds so recursive sometimes it sounds like it’s trying to run some kind of
model ….”
Imagine you’re Siri Keeton, [Brüks] remembered. And gleaned from a later
excerpt of the same signal: Imagine you’re a machine.
“It’s a literary affectation. He’s trying to be poetic. Putting yourself in the
character’s head, that kind of thing.” (Echopraxia 293-94; emphasis in original)
As indicated by the quotation above, Blindsight’s “imagine” trope repeats
throughout the text, applying to multiple characters; but the imperative is
always subsumed by Siri’s voice, and the narrative privileges his voice over
those of other characters. While readers of Blindsight accept the repetition of
this trope as an aesthetic technique and “literary affectation,” however, it
becomes something very different for the characters of Echopraxia. As their
discussion continues, Rakshi confesses her skepticism regarding the
transmission’s origin:
“Siri Keeton’s male I don’t think this is male.”
“A woman’s voice?”
“Maybe a woman. If we’re lucky.”
“What are you saying, Rakshi? You’re saying it might not be human?”
“I don’t know I don’t know but it just feels wrong and what if it’s not a—a
literary affectation what if it’s some kind of simulation? What if something out
there is literally trying to imagine what it’s like to be Siri Keeton?” (294;
emphasis in original)
Rendered as transmission in Echopraxia, the text of Blindsight suddenly takes
on a terrifying new form. Removed from its generic instantiation as a novel,
readers are forced to reconsider the ostensible meaning of the earlier text and
to reconcile the relationship between Blindsight and Echopraxia, as well as
between the two versions of Blindsight that Watts presents to us: as novel
(form) and as transmission (also form, but represented as content).
This formal distinction begs the question: if Blindsight becomes a
transmission in Echopraxia, then who (or, more likely, what) is sending it?
The most obvious answer is, of course, Siri Keeton: Siri’s first-person account,
confession even, recorded and transmitted back to earth; but Rakshi’s
skepticism sends up a red flag. Her language not only makes explicit the
ontological distinction between Siri and whatever is trying to “imagine” him,
but it also illuminates a formal distinction between novel and transmission. It
is through these sets of parallel distinctions that Watts directs his critique of
literary narration: the signal in Echopraxia is also a signal to the reader.
Rakshi’s concern is that Siri’s narration may not actually be from Siri, but may
be some kind of nonhuman attempt to simulate narrative organization.
According to N. Katherine Hayles, the generation of such narrative

193.54.180.221 on Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:58:27 +00:00
perspectives closely resembles the process by which intelligent systems attempt

to observe themselves: “Before the cut—before any cut—is made, only an
undifferentiated complexity exists, impossible to comprehend in its noisy
multifariousness” (“Making the Cut” 137). All systems, in other words, must
make an observing cut in order to distinguish themselves from their
environment and to observe their own elements; narrative, Hayles suggests, is
one means of self-observation and self-organization. Narrative perspective
emerges out of an incoherent complexity, an intelligent system beyond the
comprehension of human cognitive faculties.
Watts dramatizes this model of systemic organization and observation
throughout Blindsight, although he withholds the final, formal twist until
Echopraxia. One of the more memorable examples in the first book occurs
when Siri explains, by means of flashback, the concept of the Chinese Room:
“It’s a fallacy really, it’s an argument that supposedly puts the lie to Turing
tests. You stick some guy in a closed room. Sheets with strange squiggles come
in through a slot in the wall. He’s got access to this huge database of squiggles
just like it, and a bunch of rules to tell him how to put those squiggles
together.”
“Grammar,” Chelsea said. “Syntax.”
I nodded. “The point is, though, he doesn’t have any idea what the
squiggles are, or what information they might contain.… Point being you can
use basic pattern-matching algorithms to participate in a conversation without
having any idea what you’re saying.” (Blindsight 115-16; emphasis in original)
The Chinese room, originally posited by philosopher John Searle, was intended
(as Siri notes) as a refutation of artificial intelligence as articulated by the
Turing test. Watts constructs an actual occurrence of the Chinese Room
scenario in his novel, however, and emphasizes an aspect of it that Searle and
his advocates fail to recognize. Intelligence, whether human or otherwise, need
not be a system of semantic content, or language: “People,” Siri tells us,
“simply can’t accept that patterns carry their own intelligence, quite apart from
the semantic content that clings to their surfaces; if you can manipulate the
topology correctly, that content just comes along for the ride” (115).
Intelligence, in other words, is not necessarily associated with linguistic
meaning, nor must it be associated with narrative perspective. It can derive
from the isomorphism between complementary patterns of information.
The Chinese Room model appears in Blindsight in reference to an unknown
entity (calling itself Rorschach) that begins communicating with the characters
onboard Theseus, the spaceship that serves as the primary setting of the novel.
One of the group’s translators suggests that the entity they communicate with
is nothing more than a Chinese Room; when Theseus attempts more invasive
maneuvers, however, the crew receives a startling transmission from the alien
object: “‘Oh, right,’ Rorschach said suddenly. ‘We get it now. You don’t think
there’s anyone here, do you? You’ve got some high-priced consultant telling
you there’s nothing to worry about.... You think we’re nothing but a Chinese
Room’” (122; emphases in original). Rorschach demonstrates its advanced
intelligence by exhibiting an objectivity toward the model James assigns to it;

193.54.180.221 on Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:58:27 +00:00
in other words, it appears to comprehend itself conceptually. In systems-theory

terminology, Rorschach exhibits the characteristics of a third-order system; that
is, it appeals to the formal structure of language in order to engage its
environment (Wolfe 29). This turn of events raises a pressing question: is
Rorschach capable of comprehending human language on the level of meaning
(making its statements semantically intentional); or is it an extremely complex
system, simply operating at a level of computation and pattern matching that
allows it to respond convincingly to linguistic messages?6
Rorschach, readers of the novel learn, harbors intelligent but non-conscious
alien life; it operates as a kind of hive mind that produces organic matter on
a massive scale, and it has acquired the capacity for complex mimicry. As one
character describes it, Rorschach is “rule-based,” meaning it collects data and
acts based on that data (124). Despite the underpinning of dense scientific
theory (as collected by Watts in his appendices), this model of intelligent
communication also bears resemblance to theories of language operative within
literary studies—perhaps most noticeably, Wittgensteinian rule-following. In
Philosophical Investigations (1953), Wittgenstein distinguishes following a rule
from consciously intending to follow a rule: “‘following a rule’ is a practice.
And to think one is following a rule is not to follow a rule. And that’s why it’s
not possible to follow a rule ‘privately’; otherwise, thinking one was following
a rule would be the same thing as following it” (Wittgenstein 202; emphasis
in original).7 For Wittgenstein, rule-following may be accompanied by
conscious thought, but thought plays no role in following the rule. In the
context of linguistic communication, meaning arises from the successful
correspondence of appropriate rules; one may interpret meaning even where
no intending speaker exists.
Without an intending speaker, there can be no choice in following a rule.
This is where Watts’s fiction begins to echo Wittgenstein’s rules: “When I
follow the rule,” Wittgenstein writes, “I do not choose. I follow the rule
blindly” (219; emphasis in original). Wittgenstein’s conceptualization of rule-
following as a blind act is analogous to the neurological phenomenon from
which Watts’s novel gets its title:
“‘Nothing wrong with the receptors,’ he said distractedly. ‘Brain processes
the image but it can’t access it. Brain stem takes over.’
‘Your brain stem can see but you can’t?’
‘Something like that.’” (Blindsight 170; emphasis in original)
In other words, blindsight constitutes a reaction to visual stimuli on a
neurological level, but not on a conscious level. The blindsight subject that
reacts to stimuli does not choose to react; the brain steps in and takes over.8
Like the Wittgensteinian notion of rule-following, blindsight subjects operate
on a subconscious level. One of the primary concerns of Watts’s novel is how
successful a non-conscious intelligent entity can be at faking consciousness.
Watts conveys this concern by challenging the hierarchy of human
intelligence, which places human consciousness at the apex. According to such
traditional humanist models, consciousness emerges as the crowning

193.54.180.221 on Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:58:27 +00:00
achievement of intelligent thought (some might say intelligent design). At high

levels of intelligence, however, complexity can sometimes be mistaken for
consciousness, or the comprehension of meaning on a semantic level. When
asked how the Chinese Room could function without a conscious and
semantically comprehending subject operating the controls, Siri explains that
comprehension exceeds the hypothetical subject of the experiment: “The system
understands. The whole Room, with all its parts. The guy who does the
scribbling is just one component. You wouldn’t expect a single neuron in your
head to understand English, would you?” (116; emphasis in original). The
Chinese Room scenario, as Watts depicts it in Blindsight, serves as a model
for his narrative project: the human figure inside the room is able to observe
the system from within, but it cannot comprehend the entirety of the system.
The human participant in the Chinese Room experiment is nothing more than
a node in the network, a single neuron in the computational brain. The system
does not need a conscious narrator in order to communicate; narrative
organization may only be the effect of a system’s increasing complexity, only
one form it deploys in order to observe itself and its environment.
At the novel’s conclusion, Siri conveys skepticism about his capacity as a
narrator, and toward the limits of his perspective:
“I’m Human again. Maybe the last Human. By the time I get home, I could
be the only sentient being in the universe.
If I’m even that much. Because I don’t know if there is such a thing as a
reliable narrator. And Cunningham said zombies would be pretty good at
faking it.
So I can’t really tell you, one way or the other.
You’ll just have to imagine you’re Siri Keeton.” (362)
Just as Rorschach exhibits a complexity that mimics self-awareness, Siri
acknowledges his own role as narrator and admits that, for all he knows, he
has been pretending to narrate reliably. It becomes difficult, when reading
Blindsight, to tell if a distinction between complexity and consciousness is even
possible. If narrators pretend to narrate reliably, do they not actually narrate
reliably? The idea of pretense may rely upon conscious deceit, but readers
have no access to any such interiority. We might feel inclined to believe that
some narrators intend to trick us, but Watts would remind us here that
narrators are not human beings; they are literary conventions, effects of
narrative organization. The premise of a narrator intending to deceive is beside
the point for the very same reason that Wittgenstein tells us one cannot choose
to follow a rule; just as intending to deceive is not the same as deceiving, we
cannot identify unreliable narrators based on their intention to deceive us. We
can only search for clues within the narrative and put the pieces together as
best as we can. We can only match the patterns.
Watts’s critique of reliability on structural (rather than psychological) terms
performs a complementary procedure to that of systems that generate their own
perspective; by the conclusion of Blindsight, the narrator has shifted from an
intending agent to an effect of organizing systems. For Siri (and, we might

193.54.180.221 on Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:58:27 +00:00
presume, for Watts), the distinction between reliability and unreliability

becomes a false choice. The question of reliability assumes a correspondence
between the information as it is given by the narrator and the actuality of
events (somehow secretly lurking in the narrative); we project cognitive
cohesion on the part of the reliable narrator. The projection of cognitive
cohesion is an illusion, however; readers have no access to a narrator’s psychic
state because no psychic state exists. The narrator is an effect of literary
expression. Barring access to this internal mental state, readers are forced to
discern a narrator’s reliability based solely on textual evidence. Unfortunately,
as Watts depicts it in the universe of the FIREFALL novels, complex systems have
no problem faking semantic communication. This is the revelation that
crystallizes in the text of Echopraxia. Siri’s narrative, rendered now as
transmission, betrays its true nature: that of a complex intelligence pretending
to be Siri Keeton. A crucial nuance emerges at this point. For Watts, the entity
that pretends to be Siri Keeton does not intend to pretend. In other words, the
purported capacity of the narrator to pretend is a result of the
anthropomorphism we project onto nonhuman agents. This is the brutally
scientific point that Watts wants to drive home: there is no intentional act or
meaningful deception being carried out. Rather, the complex manipulation of
language occurs in this case simply as an evolutionary adaptation. In this
sense, the phenomenon of narration in Blindsight is analogous to the
phenomenon of communication that takes place between the main characters
and Rorschach; Watts portrays the use of language in both cases as an
evolutionary system increasing its complexity.
There is a potential impulse here to suggest that the very conventions of the
novel form demand a certain degree of narratological conceit on the part its
readers. I would contend, however, that this is part of Watts’s subversive
effort. The novel is merely one example of a complex system capable of
eliciting committed belief on the part of its readers. The challenge lies in its
critique, once again, of intention (not of an author, but of a narrator).
Following the destabilization of perspectival intention—now shown to be
generated by a non-conscious system—readers are forced to reconsider what
the meaning of the text can be. This is not to say that meaning vanishes
entirely, but rather that Watts’s handling of the text necessitates a revision of
meaning at the formal level. The conditions of possibility that allow Siri’s
narrative to exist force us to interrogate, following Deleuze and Guattari, not
what the text means, but how it means (Anti-Oedipus 109).
“The System Moves”: Literature as Assemblage in Blindsight. How texts
mean, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is through their constitution as
assemblages. Through his configuration of Blindsight as an authorless
transmission, Watts approximates the Deleuze-Guattarian notion of an
assemblage: “A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously
formed matters, and very different dates and speeds. To attribute the book to
a subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their
relations. It is to fabricate a beneficent God to explain geological

193.54.180.221 on Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:58:27 +00:00
movements.... All this, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes an

assemblage” (A Thousand Plateaus 3-4; emphasis in original). Meaning
operates, for Deleuze and Guattari, not in the postulation of presupposed
semantic content, but in the act of communication itself; the text, or book,
expresses itself as a “regime of signs,” but there is no singular subject or
author intending the expression (504). Rather, the pure amalgam of parts
achieves the effect of expression.
Watts’s narrative, beginning in Blindsight and culminating in Echopraxia,
acts as a process of revelation from authorial (or subjective) narration to
asubjective assemblage—an assortment of linguistic signs lacking semantic
origin, but subsequently interpreted by characters (and readers) as an intended
message. Yet the fact remains that both novels have been written by someone:
by Watts, the man behind the curtain. We need not do away with the author
entirely, however, in order to perceive the effect at work in Watts’s novels; the
author as producer does not vanish, merely the author as expresser. As
Deleuze and Guattari remind us, the assemblage exists in both a material and
an ideal sense. They mark this distinction as that between content and
expression: “Inasmuch as they are territorial, assemblages still belong to the
strata. At least they pertain to them in one of their aspects, and it is under this
aspect that we distinguish in every assemblage content from expression” (504).
The relationship between Watts’s novels registers this “double articulation,”
as Deleuze and Guattari describe it, by reinforcing not only Blindsight’s
expressive capacity, but also its material constitution as a collection of signs.
Setting aside, for a moment, poststructuralist accounts of the death of the
author or of the author as a function of discursive relations, we might locate
Watts’s skepticism in a more scientific explanation: the neurobiology of the
brain as a complex—and asubjective—system. In Consciousness Explained
(1991), Daniel Dennett explores the complexity of language and how it
functions with respect to the speaking subject, whom he claims is less
important to the phenomenon of meaning than is popularly believed: “If there
isn’t a Central Meaner, where does the meaning come from? We must replace
him with a plausible account of how a meant utterance—a real report, without
any scarequotes—could get composed without needing the imprimatur of a
solitary Central Meaner” (231). Dennett does not reduce meaning to an
intending subject, but rather suggests that an interplay between speaker and
speech produces a meaning-effect, a “feedback process” through which
language effectively alters the content it purportedly expresses (247). In other
words, Dennett argues not only that speech utterances never perfectly express
intended content, but also that there can never truly be intended content in the
first place. The words chosen by a speaker retroactively alter the content
entirely, thereby effectively concealing it from the speaker’s consciousness.
Meaning, for Dennett, derives from a material experience—a sequence of
signs and sensations—but remains irreducible to this experience, and even
changes what the speaker believes her experience to be. Watts’s novels register
this model through their configuration: the narrative of Blindsight, through its
instantiation in Echopraxia as a “regime of signs,” signals a material

193.54.180.221 on Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:58:27 +00:00
experience but simultaneously obscures that experience through its constitution

as a linguistic utterance. Moving back into the field of literary theory, we can
associate this feedback between the expression of meaning and the obfuscation
of content with the dialectic between pattern and randomness as discussed in
N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999). For Hayles, the dialectic of
pattern and randomness registers a problematic antagonism, since both appear
to participate in that obscure entity known as information: “Identifying
information with both pattern and randomness proved to be a powerful
paradox, leading to the realization that in some instances, an infusion of noise
into a system can cause it to reorganize at a higher level of complexity” (25).
By “noise,” Hayles refers to disorganized information that remains
unstructured by a system. This passage registers a tendency among autopoietic
systems to react intelligently to external stimuli, even if these stimuli do not
exhibit pattern behavior themselves. Such stimuli appear to function as
information, since they effect change; yet they lack regular structure, thus
resembling randomness.
Blindsight offers a thematic example of this phenomenon in the figure of
the aliens. A Rorschach inkblot has no intention or purpose, but merely evokes
a meaningful response from its viewer. Likewise, the name that the alien entity
in Blindsight assigns itself does not reflect any conscious intention. As the
character Susan James explains when discussing Rorschach’s name, the choice
could have been made by a system actively observing human communications:
“Someone listening to all that chatter not only figures out the name and the
thing it applies to, but can get some sense of meaning from the context. Our
alien friends probably eavesdropped on half the registry and deduced that
Rorschach would be a better tag for something unfamiliar than, say, the SS
Jaymie Matthews” (100). The name “Rorschach” works in a delightfully
unexpected manner; the meanings it provokes among the human characters
(and likely readers as well) negates the intentionality of the aliens—like an
inkblot, they constitute a non-conscious assemblage of matter.
Also like an inkblot, Rorschach compels the human characters to intuit
patterns and meaning where there are none. Watts complicates this, however,
by raising questions about where exactly to locate the patterns that characters
claim to witness—in the alien ship or in their own heads. In one memorable
episode, when attempting to isolate the pattern, the ship’s medic, Isaac
Szpindel, denies that any intentional structure actually exists, claiming instead
that the characters have fallen victim to hallucinations. “‘It’s a Klüver
constant,’” he tells the others, “‘an artifact of deep brain structure. Even
congenitally blind people see them sometimes.... But there’s no information
there, eh? That wasn’t Rorschach talking, it was just ... interference. Like
everything else’” (Blindsight 176; emphasis in original). Without privileging
either randomness or pattern, Watts reveals how the interplay between the two
produces a meaning-effect. Rorschach is not a conscious entity, but neither is
it entirely random; rather, as a complex organism, it reassembles at higher
levels. Its matter reacts to external stimuli, but these reactions have no

193.54.180.221 on Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:58:27 +00:00
semantic content. Klüver constants are not even external phenomena in the first
place, but effects of neurobiological hardwiring. Watts introduces multiple
frames of potential meaning, only to subvert these frames by exposing how
non-intentional reactions can organize as pattern.
Even the model of evolution falls victim to Watts’s unyielding critique. The
theory of evolution is introduced near Blindsight’s conclusion when the
vampire, Sarasti, attacks Siri, inspiring a psychotic break accompanied (and
represented) by a narrative disjunction. Siri’s first-person account descends into
a second-person diatribe on the impotence of consciousness in an evolutionary
sense: “You’re not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn’t share living
space with the likes of you.... Do you want to know what consciousness is for?
Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels” (301-
302; emphasis in original). Following this, Siri (or whatever imagines itself as
Siri) provides a provocative scientific deconstruction of the first-person, worth
quoting in full:
Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas.
Brains—cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then
stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal
imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills
that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from
pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine
receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to
model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational
resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations.
Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and
proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer,
and awaken, and call themselves I. (303; emphasis in original)
This passage encapsulates the biological determinism of Watts’s novels. The
central self, the first-person narrator of a long novelistic tradition, manifests
as an effect of complex systems. It is no longer the perspective that generates
the narrative, but the narrative that generates the perspective. At this point, in
fact, the text becomes difficult to classify. A narrative functions by means of
a particular perspective, even if that perspective is delicate or troubled; but
when perspective is no longer the productive origin of narrative, then what
happens to narrative? The prospect of assemblage introduces the possibility for
textual production that generates, rather than derives from, narrative
perspective; in other words, the assemblage is an evolutionary metaprocess (to
invoke Watts’s term) that subsumes narrative.
The fact remains, however, that Blindsight works as narration; it toggles
the divide between matter and expression—between the body without organs
and strata—and even if the text reinforces a regression toward decentered
assemblage, the form must maintain its presentation as narrative. “Science
fiction has become more relevant than ‘Literature,’” in Watts’s opinion,
because only science fiction can confront the material logic that precludes the
possibility of narrative in the first place (“Margaret” 5). Blindsight interrogates
the divide between science and fiction, implicit in the genre itself; but despite

193.54.180.221 on Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:58:27 +00:00
its insistence on the scientific dissipation of narrative, it still operates in a

narrative fashion. In fact, we find an explanation for this phenomenon in
Echopraxia; midway through the novel, the protagonist ponders humanity’s
propensity for faith in illusory meaning: “And from [our] humble beginnings
we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency
in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid” (Echopraxia
181). This passage conveys, rather explicitly, the evolutionary underpinning
of what we might call the narrator effect, the tendency to attribute intention to
pattern, even if we are the ones who construct the pattern, who produce the
meaning. It is for this reason that Watts includes Blindsight in Echopraxia;
only by reformalizing the text can he actualize the ideas about which he writes.
While Watts renders Blindsight as transmission in Echopraxia, he is unable
to render Echopraxia as anything but novel. It remains to be seen what role
Echopraxia plays in this relationship beyond merely serving as a vehicle for
recontextualizing Blindsight. At this point, we must turn our attention to the
text of the sequel; whereas Blindsight critiques literature through the
deconstructive tendencies of science, Echopraxia critiques science through the
constructive tendencies of literature. In fact, the extreme self-reflective
capacity of both texts exceeds that of even the most hypercritical postmodernist
fiction by troubling the very focus of narratological perspective; both novels
function as part of a complex system that simultaneously weaves and unravels
the rationale that holds them together as literature.
“The System Triages Itself”: Echopraxia and the Paradox of Science
Fiction. In Echopraxia, the novel’s protagonist, field researcher Daniel Brüks,
finds himself dragged along unwillingly on an interstellar mission with a group
of advanced scholars known as the Bicameral Order—philosophers of science
who purposefully grow tumors in their brains so as to augment their thought
processes. Another member of the mission happens to be Jim Moore, Siri
Keeton’s military father who, unbeknownst to the group, is on a quest to find
his son. The novel’s primary question—that of the limitations of science—is
represented by the Bicameral Order, whose methods are so sophisticated as to
be indistinguishable from religion (it is uncertain whether Brüks ever truly
acknowledges their practice as scientific). Like a good scholar of science,
Brüks makes multiple attempts to convince Lianna, an observer among the
Bicamerals, that her faith in the Order is misplaced; however, Lianna always
reacts by noting the limitations of scientific discourse and experimentation:
“We’re long past the days when all you had to do was clock a falling apple or
compare beak length in finches. Science has been running into limits ever since
it started trying to get Schrödinger’s cat to play with balls of invisible string.
Go down a few orders of mag and everything’s untestable conjecture again.
Math and philosophy. You know as well as I do that reality has a substructure.
Science can’t go there.” (183; emphasis in original)
As the novel concludes, readers discover that the entire human race has met
its end at the hands of various complex systems (a combined evolutionary
effort by the alien scramblers from Blindsight, the vampire population, and an

193.54.180.221 on Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:58:27 +00:00
advanced virus) far beyond anything easily explicable or comprehensible,

hence the comparison with faith. If Echopraxia undermines Blindsight as
literature by dismantling the processes of meaning, it simultaneously salvages
meaning by subsuming all scientific developments to faith: “‘Science depends
on faith,’” Lianna tells Brüks, “‘Faith that the rules haven’t changed, faith that
the other guys got the measurements right’” (184). In this passage, Lianna
succinctly unpacks the aporias of scientific reasoning.
In his essay, “From Science to Literature,” Roland Barthes explores the
dynamics of language for both discourses, taking particular interest in the then-
recent (in the field of literary theory) phenomenon of structuralism. In short,
Barthes gestures toward the impending methodology of poststructuralism by
calling into question the framework of language itself:
For science, language is merely an instrument, which it chooses to make as
transparent, as neutral as possible, subjugated to scientific matters (operations,
hypotheses, results), which are said to exist outside it and precede it.... For
literature, on the contrary—at least for that literature which has issued from
classicism and from humanism—language can no longer be the convenient
instrument or the sumptuous décor of a social, emotional, or poetic “reality”
which preexists it and which it is responsible, in a subsidiary way, for
expressing.... no, language is the being of literature, its very world. (4;
emphasis in original)
The passage is a prescient commentary on the antagonism between the sciences
and the humanities that still continues today. According to Barthes, the ideas
that science expresses (according to science) exist beyond it, outside it, before
it; science perceives itself as a process of discovery through reduction.
Literature, on the other hand, is a process of discovery through production and
seduction.9 Concerning the methodology of structuralism, Barthes insists that
it cannot help but encounter its own criticism in its application: “structuralism
will never be anything but one more ‘science’ ... if it cannot make its central
enterprise the very subversion of scientific language, i.e., cannot ‘write itself’:
how can it fail to call into question the very language by which it knows
language?” (7). Literature must always produce, according to Barthes, because
language always contributes another level of critique by its application. It can
explain, but must explain by expansion, not contraction.
In this counterintuitive moment, Barthes locates what he calls the “paradox
of the reader,” or the fact that in any literary interpretation, the very act of
attempting to decode results in an overcoding: “[the reader] does not decipher,
he produces, he accumulates languages” (“On Reading” 42). While Barthes’s
notion of production may not perfectly align with Deleuze and Guattari’s, the
parallel is worth noting. Literature, interpretation, expression—all three are
forms of production because they automatically contribute to the objects of
their attention. Watts proceeds to conflate the epistemological capacities of
both science and language (or literature) by exposing their similarities: both are
cultural institutions, made up of various fields, that seek to understand the
world while simultaneously constructing models of the world. In line with
Watts’s overarching concern with narrative, his novels demonstrate that both

193.54.180.221 on Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:58:27 +00:00
literature and science can only proceed by generating perspectives on reality;

and these perspectives organize their material in a narrative fashion.10 Watts
engages a host of complex systems—linguistic, neurological, and scientific—by
exposing narrative perspective as a means of self-organization.
Early in Echopraxia, Brüks and Lianna debate the efficacy of the Bicameral
Order’s neurobiological augmentations. Lianna compares human existence to
navigating from inside an automobile, while the Bicamerals potentially possess
the ability to comprehend the universe “outside the windshield”; Brüks takes
issue with her propensity for binaries, however: “‘Reality went out the window
the moment we started mediating sensory input through a nervous system. You
want to actually perceive the universe directly, without any stupid scribbles or
model-building? Become a protozoan’” (65). The brain functions as the
original mediating apparatus for Brüks, filtering the world so as to make it fit
for human perception and representation; the Bicamerals, Lianna insists, have
discovered a way to augment their brains so as to achieve a more direct
connection between their perceptions and the world as it is.
The augmentation process, however, raises questions about whether or not
the Bicamerals still count as humans. Brüks refers to them as “post-Humans,”
although Moore disagrees with this assessment:
“They’re not post-Human. Not yet.”
“How can you tell?” It was only half a joke.
“Because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to talk to them at all.” (147)
One of the defining attributes that distinguishes posthumanity from humanity
is the latter’s potential for verbal communication. When the Bicamerals reach
the “post-Human” stage, they will have exceeded the bounds of language.
Their brains will no longer count as human brains, as suggested in the dialogue
between Brüks and Lianna:
“... transcendence is out of reach. For our brains, anyway.”
Lianna shrugged. “Change your brain.”
“Then it’s not your brain anymore. It’s something else. You’re something
else.”
“That’s kinda the point. Transcendence is transformation.” (65; emphasis
in original)
Along with cognitive transcendence, or transformation, comes communicative
transformation; human beings, according to Moore, would be unable to
communicate with post-Human beings. This incapacity for linguistic
communication engenders again the troubling paradox in Watts’s novels: that
of the irreconcilability between meaningful narration and meaningless
assemblage. As Echopraxia hurtles toward its conclusion, it rapidly dispenses
with any and all remaining human characters. While at the end of Blindsight
Siri ponders whether he is human again, or even the “last Human,” the end of
Echopraxia offers a frightening glimpse into the end of humanity entirely.
As Echopraxia concludes, Brüks contemplates his descent into alterity:

193.54.180.221 on Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:58:27 +00:00
I will stay here while the tables turn and fires burn out. I will stand still
while humanity turns into something unrecognizable, or dies trying. I will see
what rises in its place.
Either way, I am witnessing the end of my species. (346-47; emphasis in
original)
Brüks’s rigorous scientific dedication peters out at the novel’s conclusion as he
desperately searches for a means to counteract the alien virus sweeping through
the human race. As his final attempt at resistance, Brüks appeals to the
institution of narrative, calling up his capacity to write his own exit: “he was
so very fucking sick of scripts. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d made
up his own lines.... But he was not an automaton, not yet. He was still Daniel
Brüks, and for just this moment he was slaved to no one’s stage directions. He
would make his own fucking destiny” (352; emphasis in original). In other
words, Brüks abandons his commitment to scientific rationality and plunges
(quite literally, as readers of the novel will be familiar with) into the
determinism of narrative construction.
Ending with Brüks’s death, Echopraxia makes a powerful comment on the
conditions of narrative possibility: that when a system generates a narrative
perspective, enabling self-observation, it simultaneously generates a frame. In
Watts’s fiction, this frame constitutes the limits of human meaning and
understanding; beyond the frame, observation fails. Most crucially, it cannot
observe itself observing; a considerable amount of conditioning information
remains inaccessible to it. This paradox holds formal consequences for
narrative at large: as Brüks observes the extinction of his species the narrative
dwindles, culminating with his death in the final line. The novel does not end
here, however: a brief postscript follows and describes the zombie-like
resurrection of Brüks’s body as the virus compels its broken host onward (353-
54). In response to Brüks’s resistance—his self-narration, we might say—the
virus inside him pursues its own countermeasures: “The system triages itself,
focuses on feet and legs and the architecture of locomotion. Hands can be
replaced, if need be. Later” (353). This final closing image provides a chilling
metaphor for the paradoxical relationship between science fiction and the novel
form: science fiction operates as a ruthless and metacognitive viral infection
that urges its ruptured and lifeless host—the novelistic narrative—onward.
Pursuant with the logic of the metaphor, science fiction is dragging the
narrative into a post-narrative world.
The brevity of this final episode complements the paradoxical element of
the postscript: anaerobic microbes and complex interplanetary systems make
no narrative sense, at least not for human narratives. Whatever story the
posthuman era has to tell, it is not a story that human readers can understand.
The novel ends according to the conditions of possibility that Watts has already
laid out in the novels themselves. The novel form relies, Watts understands,
upon normative cognitive and linguistic functions that allow readers a
sympathetic association with the text—the rationale of narrative itself.11 These
are the functions that come under fire in Watts’s fiction. In league with one
another, science and fiction encounter similar difficulties: whether the

193.54.180.221 on Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:58:27 +00:00
experimental physicist or the observing narrator, both engender the paradox of

observing systems. Science fiction, for Watts, offers a means to navigate this
dilemma by dramatizing it at the diegetic and formal levels, and by exploring
the speculative possibilities (ontological and discursive) of what lies beyond the
narrative frame.
Conclusion: “Maybe the Singularity Already Happened.” The fragility of
meaning in science-fiction literature can be traced back to the original scholarly
studies in the field. In his groundbreaking Metamorphoses of Science Fiction
(1979), Darko Suvin addresses the relationship between literature and
cognition, calling science fiction a “literature of cognitive estrangement,”
meaning that science fiction operates according to a dynamic oscillation
between approximate recreations of empirically discernible environments and
what Suvin calls a “novum,” or “a strange newness” (4). Elaborating
somewhat on this, we can see that Suvin’s concern is how the human mind
participates in meaning-construction by adapting to the familiarity of certain
environments, and that science fiction challenges the efficacy of such
participation. It forces readers to attend more critically to the anticipations and
presumptions that shape how meaning is constructed. In a more recent but
equally valuable study, Critical Theory and Science Fiction (2000), Carl
Freedman expands upon Suvin’s original thesis by suggesting that science
fiction challenges not only its readers, but itself as well. In other words,
according to Freedman, science fiction exhibits an awareness of the internal
conflict that it stages:
Cognition proper is not, in the strictest terms, exactly the quality that defines
science fiction. What is rather at stake is what we might term (following a
familiar Barthesian precedent) the cognition effect. The crucial issue for generic
distinction is not any epistemological judgment external to the text itself on the
rationality or irrationality of the latter’s imaginings, but rather (as some of
Suvin’s language does, in fact, imply, but never makes entirely clear) the
attitude of the text itself to the kind of estrangements being performed.
(Freedman 18; emphasis in original)
The explicit awareness of Watts’s novels, and the paradox thereby
encountered, resides in the fact that the conflict being performed is the very
struggle, or oscillation, between cognition and estrangement. For Watts, the
entirety of narrative manifests as a cognition effect, an effect deriving from the
varieties of realism established by literary tradition. The subsequent
estrangement, as it emerges through the gradual unfolding of the texts
themselves, is the realization that the narrative has not been the narrative we
thought it was.
This paradox belongs not only to science fiction but to fiction in general;
science fiction merely addresses the paradox in an intensified manner. Through
its staging of familiarity and estrangement, the paradox of science fiction
compels us as critics to interrogate the dilemma of perspectival narration and
the consequences this holds for the meaningful act of reading. The production
of meaning can no longer derive entirely from the act of reading when the

193.54.180.221 on Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:58:27 +00:00
meaning produced by this act undermines the possibility of that reading, or at

least the possibility of reading in the traditional sense. In other words (to be
explicit about the paradox we are dealing with), Watts’s science fiction raises
the possibility that complex systems might achieve the capacity to fake
consciousness (and thereby fake narrative) by restructuring meaning as a form
in and of itself. I use “form” here not strictly in reference to literary form, but
in Luhmann’s sense of form in general, which emerges from the crossing of
boundaries, forcing the structures of meaning to adapt (Social 76). Narrative,
for Watts, encounters its formal limits when the effect it produces (i.e.
meaning) gets reconstituted at a higher level of complexity as form; and this
is why Moore tells Brüks that post-Humans would be beyond linguistic
communication. They might be able to fake human narrative, but their own
narrative takes place within a set of formal conditions that exceed our own;
complex systems are not linear, and they are not three-dimensional.
The science-fictional project of representing formal limitation at the level
of content has been significantly theorized by Fredric Jameson in his “Progress
versus Utopia: or, Can We Imagine the Future?” (1982). In this compelling
piece, Jameson provides an illuminating corollary in narrative theory for
thinking about the limitations of knowledge, particularly as such knowledge is
structured by the Kantian institutions of space and time:
in order for narrative to project some sense of a totality of experience in space
and time, it must surely know some closure (a narrative must have an ending,
even if it is ingeniously organized around the structural repression of endings
as such). At the same time, however, closure or the narrative ending is the
mark of that boundary or limit beyond which thought cannot go. The merit of
SF is to dramatize this contradiction on the level of plot itself, since the vision
of future history cannot know any punctual ending of this kind, at the same
time that its novelistic expression demands some such ending. (148)
According to Jameson, science fiction approaches literary narrative in a
nonconventional way by registering the limits of narrative—which I would also
identify as the limits of formal realism—within the text itself; furthermore,
science fiction conceptualizes these limits as the very impetus for science-
fictional (and scientific) experimentation. The driving kernel of science fiction
emerges as the incapacity of traditional realist narrative to accommodate the
content that it attempts to deal with. The paradox of science fiction is its
appropriation of the novel form despite the fact that the novel remains formally
incapable of doing justice to the imagined content of the genre.
Such a reading appears to contradict Istvan Csicsery-Ronay’s theory of
science fiction in his monumental work, The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction
(2008). Csicsery-Ronay argues that science fiction partakes of a strong realist
tradition, similar to that of the historical novel, in its portrayal of speculative
worlds or concepts: “Like realistic historical fiction, which projects a seamless
continuum of familiar private and public spheres into the past, literary sf relies
on its readership’s desire to see those divisions of experience continuing into
the future” (83). As Csicsery-Ronay notes earlier in his study, Suvin’s science-
fictional novum can yield “cognitive gain” only by registering an effect within

193.54.180.221 on Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:58:27 +00:00
the bounds of culture and history; it must provide some “insight regarding
historicity” in order to succeed not only as literature but as science fiction
(50). This assessment recalls Sarasti’s intervention with Siri near the end of
Blindsight, in which he urges the narrator to evince some kind of ideological
commitment to his tale; unless Siri is able to forge a meaningful relationship
with his readers, his account foregoes any “cognitive gain.” I am suggesting,
in other words, that Watts addresses the problem of realistic narration within
the content of the narrative itself; and it is this very capacity for realism that
the text challenges. If Blindsight itself functions as the broader narrative
novum, exposed in Echopraxia as a transmission emanating from a larger
system, then the very limits of formal realism begin to come into focus. Watts
certainly pursues the urgency for realism that Csicsery-Ronay identifies in
science fiction at large, but he also offsets this pursuit with a trenchant anti-
realist critique that emerges through his destabilization of narrative form and
perspective. At a certain point, or narrative limit, the imagined content either
fails completely in its representation, or it reemerges in a fantastical manner
as the subject of humanistic faith.
Faith, as Watts discusses it in Echopraxia, should not be understood as an
appeal to God or a nascent spirituality. Rather, faith in Echopraxia derives
from the realization of epistemological limitations—that meaning (typically the
constructed center and/or impetus of spiritual belief among human beings)
takes on a dense materiality, or form, that is only accessible beyond the
conditions of consciousness. Even more terrifying, the systems that appeal to
this form do so in order to gain the evolutionary edge on humanity; they
appeal to meaning as a form in order to pretend to be conscious. There is no
secret intention in this behavior; for Watts it is merely evolutionary, a selective
trait that allows complex systems to pass as—and surpass—humanity. As Siri
ventures early in Blindsight, perhaps “the Singularity happened years ago. We
just don’t want to admit we were left behind” (50). Conveniently, this line is
echoed in Echopraxia—the final twist of the posthuman knife: “Maybe the
Singularity already happened and its component parts just don’t know it yet”
(346; emphasis in original). The Singularity in this case is precisely what
exceeds narrative perspective by rendering the latter as one of its “component
parts.” By refiguring narrative as system, science fiction renders palpable its
own formal limits and possibilities. Watts’s novels register these limits by
incorporating Blindsight into its sequel, but they also echo them continually
throughout the second novel. The title of the sequel comments significantly on
its relationship to its predecessor.
Echopraxia manifests as a neurological condition in the content of the
sequel, specifically among Watts’s rendering of zombies, which he imagines
as lobotomized humans utilized for the purposes of a central controller; but this
imaginative detail also reflects a condition of the relationship between novel
and reader. The neurological condition known as echopraxia is constituted by
the involuntary (and unintentional) mimicking of another person’s actions, or
a submission of one’s own actions to the control of another. As a title,
echopraxia not only signals the sequel’s echoic quality; it also signals the

193.54.180.221 on Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:58:27 +00:00
narrative’s power to ensnare and capture its readers. Like Brüks’s puppet-like
body, coopted by a virus at the end of Echopraxia, Watts’s readers become
zombies in response to the persuasion of narrative; in both novels, he presents
narrative as a manipulative effect of higher intelligences beyond the purview
of narrative realism—higher intelligences which, by appealing to our
presumptions as readers, have generated a playfully cruel command:
Imagine you’re reading a narrative.
NOTES
1. The implication of consciousness and novelistic narration extends back to Ian
Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957), in which Watts claims that the verisimilitude of
consciousness “is characteristic of the novel; many novelists, from Sterne to Proust,
have made their subject the exploration of the personality as it is defined in the
interpenetration of its past and present self-awareness” (21). In other words, the
traditional novel simulates a close proximity, if not access, to the interior consciousness
of a character or narrator whose dictation implies an intention to communicate. Dorrit
Cohn expands upon the novelistic representation of consciousness in Transparent
Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (1978), where she
coins the term “narrative monologue” to describe the depiction of interior thoughts in
third-person narration (494). In a more recent study of narrative technique, Unnatural
Voices (2006), Brian Richardson describes the tendency of much twentieth-century
fiction to exceed the bounds of more conventional styles and to continually push the
limits of narrative possibility. In conjunction with Richardson’s helpful survey of
various narrative approaches, I claim that Peter Watts complicates the possibilities of
narrative by tying his concern with consciousness to a concern with perspective and by
forcing readers to question their own expectations of Siri’s first-person perspective.
2. LeClair suggests that the primary subjects of the systems novel are not human
characters, but “communications loops ranging from the biological to the technological,
environmental to personal, linguistic, prelinguistic, and postlinguistic, loops that are
both saving and destroying, evolutionary spirals and vicious circles, feedback variation
and mechanistic repetition, elegant ellipses and snarling complications” (xi).
3. Netty Mattar offers a helpful assessment of the posthuman elements in Watts’s
novel. Mattar argues that Blindsight emphasizes the posthumanity of its characters,
particularly Siri Keeton, whose lobotomy not only functions as a form of prosthesis but
also serves to accommodate his body more suitably to the demands of capitalist
production (75-87). Elana Gomel provides an alternative take on the novel’s trenchant
posthumanism, focusing primarily on the institution of language as a kind of posthuman
prosthesis (149-86).
4. Cary Wolfe makes the connection between systems theory and posthumanism
explicit, asserting that “posthumanism can be defined quite specifically as the necessity
for any discourse or critical procedure to take account of the constitutive (and
constitutively paradoxical) nature of its own distinctions, forms, and procedures—and
take account of them in ways that may be distinguished from the reflection and
introspection associated with the critical subject of humanism” (122). Adapting Wolfe’s
theoretical methodology for the purposes of this essay, I claim that the literal
posthumanism of Watts’s unusual cast of characters complements his project of formal
critique, in which his novels participate in a ruthless resistance to traditional humanist
narrative by introducing the element of complex systems.

193.54.180.221 on Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:58:27 +00:00
5. As the quotation demonstrates, Watts depicts the irregularities of Sengupta’s

speech by omitting punctuation.
6. The premise that Rorschach is “faking” consciousness and linguistic
communication has been challenged recently by Adam G³az. While G³az offers a
coherent and compelling critique of Watts’s portrayal of linguistic communication in
Blindsight, I would suggest that Watts is less interested in actual linguistic/semantic
content than he is in the capacity of incredibly advanced, self-organizing systems to
appear semantically engaged.
7. It is worth noting that a great deal of controversy and ambiguity surrounds these
foundational moments from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Roughly
speaking, what follows the comment in aphorism 202 has been famously referred to
as the Private Language argument; most critics, however, identify the beginning of this
argument in Wittgenstein’s text at aphorism 243. I agree with Saul Kripke, who notes
that Wittgenstein begins to gesture toward the argument as early as 202, and raises
several important queries prior to 243 (Kripke 3). Aside from the more superficial
disagreement over the location of the Private Language argument, the far more
interesting and productive disagreement concerns the interpretation of Wittgenstein’s
comments. Those interested should consult Kripke’s foundational study, Wittgenstein
on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition (1982). My own reading
of Wittgenstein tends to be rather anti-interpretive, or non-semantic. I insist that by
highlighting the paradoxes of rule-following (i.e., that following a rule would seem to
necessitate the following of a previously established rule, which would in turn
necessitate the following of a previously established rule, ad infinitum), Wittgenstein
presents the opportunity for a substantive dialogue with the paradoxical underpinnings
of systems theory. Language’s inability to establish any absolute rule by which it
operates mirrors the persistent destabilization by which systems achieve levels of
increased complexity.
8. Daniel Dennett discusses this phenomenon in Consciousness Explained: “The
interpretation of blindsight is controversial in many ways, but remarkably
uncontroversial in one regard: Everyone agrees that the blindsight subject somehow
comes to be informed about some event in the world through the eyes (that is the
‘sight’ part), in spite of having no conscious visual experience of the relevant event
(that’s the ‘blind’ part)” (326).
9. It should be noted that Barthes’s brief critique of science exhibits a tendency to
reduce science to a kind of naïve empiricism—a reduction that many in the sciences
and humanities may take issue with. While I believe that Barthes correctly identifies
an implicit propensity in scientific discourse, I would agree with critics who reject his
characterization as a description of the scientific mindset. Yet it remains true that a
certain discursive distinction occupies the divide between the literary and scientific
territories, and not always tacitly, as in Cleanth Brooks’s declaration that it is “the
scientist whose truth requires a language purged of every trace of paradox; apparently
the truth which the poet utters can be approached only in terms of paradox” (28).
William Rasch and Cary Wolfe offer a recent assessment of the situation and its impact
on the disciplines in the introduction to their collection, Observing Complexity: Systems
Theory and Postmodernity (2000): “The importance of emphasizing the textual and
rhetorical construction of scientific knowledge should not be underestimated.
Nevertheless, it has often tended to reinforce disciplinary boundaries rather than
encourage vigorous interdisciplinary dialogue about the nature of knowledge and the
problem of interpretation at the beginning of the twenty-first century” (14).

193.54.180.221 on Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:58:27 +00:00
10. Hayles is again helpful in this regard with her explication of the relationship
between systems theory and narrative: “The coexistence of narrative with system can
be seen in Luhmann’s account of the creation of a system, for his account is, of
course, itself a narrative. Its very presence suggests that systems theory needs narrative
as a supplement, just as much, perhaps, as narrative needs at least an implicit system
to generate itself” (“Making the Cut” 138).
11. Philip Weinstein provides a succinct gloss on what I am calling the rationale
of narrative, and which he calls “verisimilitude,” locating it as the primary impetus for
realist narration in general: “Rather than straitjacket realism into the binary of either
re-presenting the objectively real or remaining within an ideological web of words
alone, we can more flexibly characterize realism as a genre that proceeds by way of
verisimilitude. Verisimilitude invokes the reader’s growing sense of familiarity with the
nonverbal scene being put into words, but not by pretending belief in some ‘imitation
of the real’” (53; emphasis in original).
WORKS CITED
Barthes, Roland. “From Science to Literature.” 1967. The Rustle of Language. Trans.
Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986. 3-10.
))))). “On Reading.” 1976. The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. New
York: Hill and Wang, 1986. 33-43.
Brooks, Cleanth. “The Language of Paradox.” 1947. Literary Theory: An Anthology.
Ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. 28-39.
Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in
Fiction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1978.
Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Istvan. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan UP, 2008.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
1972. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. New York: Penguin,
2009.
))))). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1980. Trans. Brian
Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2011.
Dennett, Daniel. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Back Bay, 1991.
Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP,
2000.
G³az , Adam. “Rorschach, We Have a Problem! The Linguistics of First Contact in
Watts’s Blindsight and Lem’s His Master’s Voice.” SFS 41.2 (2014): 364-91.
Gomel, Elana. Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics of Posthumanism:
Beyond the Golden Rule. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,
Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.
))))). “Making the Cut: The Interplay of Narrative and System, or What Systems
Theory Can’t See.” Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and Postmodernity. Ed.
William Rasch and Cary Wolfe. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. 137-62.
Jameson, Fredric. “Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” SFS 9.2
(1982): 147-58.
Kripke, Saul. Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982.
LeClair, Tom. In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. Urbana: U of Illinois
P, 1987.

193.54.180.221 on Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:58:27 +00:00
Luhmann, Niklas. “Meaning as Sociology’s Basic Concept.” Essays on Self-Reference.

New York: Columbia UP, 1990. 21-79.
))))). “The Paradoxy of Observing Systems.” Cultural Critique 31 (1995): 37-55.
))))). Social Systems. 1984. Trans. John Bednarz, Jr. and Dirk Baeker. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1995.
Mattar, Netty. “Prosthetic Bodies: The Convergence of Disability, Technology, and
Capital in Peter Watts’s Blindsight and Ian McDonald’s River of Gods.” Disability
in Science Fiction: Representations of Technology as Cure. Ed. Kathryn Allan.
New York: Palgrave, 2013. 75-87.
Rasch, William, and Cary Wolfe. “Introduction: Systems Theory and the Politics of
Postmodernity.” Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and Postmodernity. Ed.
William Rasch and Cary Wolfe. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. 1-32.
Richardson, Brian. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary
Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2006.
Shaviro, Steven. “Blindsight.” The Pinocchio Theory. WordPress. 27 Oct. 2006.
Online. 7 Jul. 2015.
Suvin, Darko. The Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of
a Literary Genre. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1979.
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley:
U of California P, 1962.
Watts, Peter. Blindsight. New York: Tor, 2006.
))))). Echopraxia. New York: Tor, 2014.
))))). “Margaret Atwood and the Hierarchy of Contempt.” On Spec 15.2 (2003): 3-
5.
Weinstein, Philip. Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
UP, 2005.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. 1953. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe,
P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte. Ed. P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte.
Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2009.
Wolfe, Cary. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.
ABSTRACT
Peter Watts is a relatively new figure in the field of science fiction, and his recent
work has presented the literary community with a refreshingly innovative take on the
ontological question of the human. Watts’s critique of anthropocentrism, however,
exceeds the compelling and sometimes disturbing thought experiments he depicts in his
fiction; beyond the novelty of their content, Watts’s recent novels Blindsight (2006) and
Echopraxia (2014) attack the values of humanism at the level of narrative form. This
essay argues that the relationship between these two texts is far more complex than
prequel and sequel, and that their combined structure calls into question the rationale
of narrative theory (as it has been practiced in literary studies), and even the production
of meaning itself, by reconfiguring narrative as a super-intelligent evolutionary system.
Ultimately, Watts’s science-fictional project forces literary criticism and theory to
reconsider the following relations: a) that between perspectival stability and narrative
meaning, and b) that between narrative structure and the discursive demands of science
fiction.

193.54.180.221 on Mon, 27 Nov 2023 08:58:27 +00:00

Whitmarsh ImagineMachineNarrative 2016

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Whitmarsh ImagineMachineNarrative 2016

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

SF-TH Inc

This content downloaded from

“Imagine You’re a Machine”: Narrative Systems in Peter

Introduction: “Point of View Matters”

This content downloaded from

communicated by the text. Unreliable narration is a redundant phrase by

This content downloaded from

person narrative of Siri Keeton manifests in the sequel as a transmission

This content downloaded from

fiction, drawing on the dialectic of cognition and estrangement theorized by

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

perspectives closely resembles the process by which intelligent systems attempt

This content downloaded from

in other words, it appears to comprehend itself conceptually. In systems-theory

This content downloaded from

achievement of intelligent thought (some might say intelligent design). At high

This content downloaded from

presume, for Watts), the distinction between reliability and unreliability

This content downloaded from

movements.... All this, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes an

This content downloaded from

experience but simultaneously obscures that experience through its constitution

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

its insistence on the scientific dissipation of narrative, it still operates in a

This content downloaded from

advanced virus) far beyond anything easily explicable or comprehensible,

This content downloaded from

literature and science can only proceed by generating perspectives on reality;

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

experimental physicist or the observing narrator, both engender the paradox of

This content downloaded from

meaning produced by this act undermines the possibility of that reading, or at

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

5. As the quotation demonstrates, Watts depicts the irregularities of Sengupta’s

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

Luhmann, Niklas. “Meaning as Sociology’s Basic Concept.” Essays on Self-Reference.

This content downloaded from

You might also like