I recently re-read Bruce Sterling’s Zeitgeist, a book about “narrative,” consensus reality, language, and post-modernism, pushed to the point where it turns into magical realism. Sterling is usually slotted as a sci-fi writer – because that’s what he usually is – but in Zeitgeist he’s getting the “There’s nothing outside the text” thing off his chest. As a sci-fi writer Sterling is over-rated, but Zeitgeist is, to put it plainly, good. It’s Sterling’s best work that I’ve read, and I expect and hope that if he’s still read 25 years from now, this novel will be the centerpiece of his canonical oeuvre. Note I didn’t say that I take postmodernism seriously. What I’m saying is that this is a fun novel anyway.
It’s set in 1999, and the novel’s main character says the change to the twenty-first century will be a kink point in the consensus narrative, a moment that will induce significant narrative breaks from the past.
The intellectual context
The intellectual background of all this is postmodernism, which I define as the view that it is impossible to escape from various mental prisons, particularly language. This notion’s roots extend far back in time before the post-moderns; I’m talking about the lefty academic version that was extremely hip for a while in the twentieth century, and still is in some quarters.
The basic idea is summed up by a quote often attributed to Jacques Derrida, “There’s nothing outside the text.” This was actually a mis-translation of Derrida’s French. Wikipedia suggests that it is Derrida’s critics who attribute this view to him, but that’s an outrageous lie. It’s not his critics; it’s his fanbois. As an example, here’s a quote of one Alex Callinicos – who is defending Derrida here, note:
“Derrida wasn’t, like some ultra-idealist, reducing everything to language (in the French original he actually wrote ‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ – ‘There is no outside-text’). Rather he was saying that once you see language as a constant movement of differences in which there is no stable resting point, you can no longer appeal to reality as a refuge independent of language. Everything acquires the instability and ambiguity that Derrida claimed to be inherent in language.”
I added the emphasis to make it clear: The guy says Derrida wasn’t saying X, then in the next sentence interprets Derrida as saying X.
Here’s more:
“The only way to stop this play of difference would be if there were what Derrida called a ‘transcendental signified’ – a meaning that exists outside language and that therefore isn’t liable to this constant process of subversion inherent in signification. But the transcendental signified is nothing but an illusion…”
Again, this is a guy who’s supposed to be defending Derrida from a hostile misinterpretation that he claimed we cannot escape the prison of language.
Derrida was a deliberately obscurantist writer and his fanbois don’t like to let him be pinned down to making any particular claim – this is an infallible sign of an intellectual fraud. And in Linguistics the extreme version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that humans cannot break out of language is no longer taken seriously and is not the consensus view.
Is language actually necessary for thought? Obviously not; consider e.g. Douglas Hofstadter’s example of the dogs, the bone, and the fence: “Imagine you’re a dog, and someone tosses you a bone, but it lands in the neighbour’s yard behind a very tall fence. At your far side is an open gate that gets you out of your yard and into the neighbour’s yard. But a few feet in front of you, behind the tall fence, is a tasty snack. How will you get the bone?” In real-word testing some dogs fail to solve this; some see the solution and go through the gate and back toward the bone.
If the idea of thought without language bothers you, get over it: plainly dogs who solve the problem are doing something, and plainly that something does not involve language. If it makes you feel better, use the term information processing instead of thought.
On to Zeitgeist
The PoMo perspective doesn’t have to be as dour as its leftish political versions. It is bullshit, but it doesn’t have to be dour bullshit. It can be amusing reflexive meta-narrative bullshit complete with car crashes, drug runners, international mafia guys, breathtakingly beautiful nightclub chanteuses, etc. And in Zeitgeist Sterling shows this by incorporating a large measure of humor and magical realism with the more dyspeptic PoMo stuff.
The main character is Leggy Starlitz, who figured earlier in some Sterling short stories (which I haven’t read). Starlitz is a gray-market hustler who’s always working some semi-legal scam. (That’s how I described him here, if you’re wondering why that sounds familiar.) As Zeitgeist opens he is, as a result of a drunken bar bet, trying to create a successful all-girl pop band with absolutely no talent whatsoever. That’s the bet. No singing talent, no dancing talent – though they sing and dance anyway – and no individual character. The band is called G-7 and there is one girl from each of the G-7 nations, but they’re just called the American One, the French One, etc. When one American One quits, Starlitz just finds a new American One and the show goes on without a hitch. G-7 does not sell any music; the profit is 100% from merchandise: Official G-7 perfume, official G-7 platform shoes, official G-7 “energy drink,” etc. It’s easy to get black-market copies of their music, a fact which the band’s management (i.e. Starlitz) regards with benign approval. Aside from No Talent, the other G-7 rule is that it shuts down forever at 11:59 pm on December 31, 1999.
The novel starts with the band’s world tour swinging through the Turkish-controlled part of the island of Cyprus. Things first get dicey when Starlitz’s ex-wife, now a West Coast lesbian hippie, somehow finds out where he is, travels to Cyprus, and hands off their eleven-year-old daughter Zeta to him. Starlitz had been vaguely aware that he had a daughter but has never seen her before. She’s a mammoth G-7 fan, which is great… until Ozbey starts throwing his weight around. Ozbey is Starlitz’s local contact in Cyprus. He is connected every which way to everyone, including Turkish banks, which makes handling the band’s finances easier, etc. Ozbey is in general quite the personality: young, good-looking, hip, dialed in to the Turkish government, the Turkish financial sector, the Turkish organized crime scene…
Unfortunately, Ozbey’s girlfriend Gonca is radiantly beautiful and can actually sing. She reduces a roomful of Turkish men to tears by singing a patriotic Turkish song. (Even the Finnish guys in the room are so moved that they forget to drink. Sterling’s a hoot.) Ozbey wants Gonca to be in G-7, which is incredibly infra-dig for her and of course would violate the premise of the group that it contains absolutely no talent. At this point Starlitz learns his father is dying, and he has to return to the US immediately to see him one last time. With his daughter in tow he leaves G-7 in Ozbey’s hands, after extracting a solemn promise from Ozbey that he will guard the girls’ lives as carefully as he would Gonca’s.
For reasons that will be explained shortly, meeting up with Starlitz’s father requires Starlitz and Zeta to walk around in the New Mexico desert for a while. During this interlude Starlitz tells Zeta about his post-modern French semiotic post structuralist, etc. etc. notions. He also tells her that while this is all deep truth (a profoundly stupid thing to say about a notion that denies there can be any such thing as truth), it will all become unfashionable when the clock ticks over to the 21st century: post-modernism is too identified with the 20th century. So “true” or not, it will die as an intellectual movement when the century flips. It will be over, stale, done, yesterday’s thing.
Some fun PoMo-cum-magical realism stuff happens here. The highlight is that Starlitz’s father turns out to be temporally smeared across the entire 20th century. This is because, due to an accident, he was inside the first nuclear bomb when it was detonated in New Mexico. (Yes, he was physically inside it.) Because that moment was pivotal in the narrative of the 20th century, Starlitz’s father is smeared across the century. He exists at every moment from January 1, 1900 through December 31, 1999, because those are the consensus narrative dates of the 20th century. (I don’t think those are actually the consensus narrative dates, which seem to me to be 1/1/1901 to 12/31/2000, but whatever.) Somewhere in New Mexico, in the vicinity of that first nuclear detonation, Starlitz summons his father by means of an ad hoc semi-magical ritual. His father is of indeterminate age and can speak only in palindromes, presumably because of his temporal indefiniteness. Zeta gets to meet her granddad, Starlitz and his father speak one last time, and then the man fades away.
Some other stuff happens. Then Starlitz gets a phone call: one of the G-7 girls has died. And Ozbey has replaced her with an Islamic girl. Starlitz and Zeta hop on a plane to Turkey. Before they can meet up with Ozbey again another G-7 girl dies, and is replaced with another Islamic girl. Then the Japanese One apparently tries to commit suicide and is in critical condition in a hospital. Starlitz catches up with Ozbey in Turkey.
Ozbey, somewhat drunk on alcohol, and power, confesses that he broke his promise to protect the girls and doesn’t regret it. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a bad guy. We suspected that before; we were a little worried about Ozbey, but now we know. Exultant, Ozbey says he cannot be killed by someone like Starlitz; the narrative doesn’t allow it:
“I can’t be merely killed: I can be only martyred.”
Starlitz: “You’re spreading yourself way too thin here. You’re all over the map. The master narrative can’t take that cheap, gratuitous shit. You can be the Ascended Guru Master, or the Dapper Don with the showgirls, or the Secret Spymaster with the smack, but you can’t be all of those at once and stay sustainable.”
“That is your version of the narrative, not mine.”
“We are in my narrative, man.”
Ozbey: “No, we’re not. You are in my homeland and my culture, and this is my narrative.”
Starlitz: “We are speaking fucking English. You’ve got nothing more to say. You can’t argue with me because my language defines the terms. You can’t discuss it any further.”
Ozbey stared at Starlitz in rage. He opened his mouth, and struggled for his confounded words with a distant, muted squeak.
Something snapped in the realm of the unspeakable. Ozbey bent double in silent pain. He began to heave. A fifty-caliber bullet fell wetly to the carpet. Then came another. They were huge things, with thumb-sized slugs and big brass mil-spec cartridges. The big wet bags of heroin were worse. These weren’t the standard balloon courier bags. These were serious, tape-and-poly, kilo smack bags, big fat bricks. Ozbey was heaving them up from his visceral core.
Ozbey is quieter in the aftermath of this incident, but he’s not permanently defeated…
We get more magical realism, including an NSA guy who’s anywhere he wants to be, but invisible and inaudible, built into the fabric of things at the hardware level, just like the real NSA. At a crisis point, when Starlitz is out of options, the NSA guy pops into the scene and actually announces himself as a deus ex machina. The machina part of this is literally true, since the NSA’s power comes from computer and surveillance hardware, and the statement is also a wonderful piece of reflexive fourth-wall-breaking meta-commentary. What Sterling does here is chef’s kiss perfect.
Starlitz extracts himself from his peril with the NSA guy’s help. He does not defeat Ozbey, but he is there, as a kind of narrative witness, as Ozbey dies in an extremely twentieth-century-celebrity way.
Speaking of which, a key moment occurs near the end when Starlitz’s daughter tells him,
“The twentieth century was never as important as you thought it was, Dad. It was a dirty century. It was a cheap, sleazy century. The second the twentieth century finally went under the carpet, everybody forgot about it right away. [Notice she’s already speaking about the 20th century in the past tense, even though this is taking place in December 1999.] In the twenty-first century we don’t have your crude, lousy problems. We’ve got serious, sophisticated problems.”
When I first read this passage years ago I took it at face value. On a second reading I thought that Sterling is doing a bit of lecturing here through the mouth of this character. Now I think what’s happening here is more subtle than either of those things: Sterling is satirizing the entire human race. We always think those sheltered naifs from previous times had silly, low-level problems, and that we have serious, sophisticated problems. Of course that’s wrong: they’re always serious, sophisticated problems. (The French Revolution, for example, was a serious business, even though we might not feel that as we look at it from a safe remove of more than 200 years.) Here Sterling is simply continuing with the novel’s theme, the ubiquity of narratives in human life. The 20th century had its key narratives – the Cold War, etc. – and narratives narratives narratives will continue. Sterling, writing in the late 1990s, tells us that once the 20th century is in the books, its narratives – even its breathtaking, world-history-shaking narratives – will be boring historical artifacts, and people will move on.
And perhaps there’s one more little joke that Sterling slips in here: Recall that Starlitz told Zeta, while they were wandering around in the New Mexico desert, that post-modernism, a 20th century narrative, will die with that century. Now she is spitting this back at him, with complete sincerity! She’s giving him “Yer century is lame and outmoded; I’m part of a cool new modern century.” Thus ever youth to parents. And thus the 20th century, when it was young, to the 19th. And so it goes…
But I’m making too much of the “century” thing. In general the novel is Sterling having fun with post-modernism and magical realism. (For another attempt at this, but longer and with a lot more sex and drugs, try Shea and Wilson’s Illuminatus! trilogy.) Zeitgeist, if there’s any justice, will become Sterling’s flagship novel.
As to post-modernism, is there anything of value that can be extracted from that mound of horseshit? No, I don’t think so. But there is an important insight that is PoMo-adjacent: the importance of not taking any model too seriously. One should be able to switch back and forth between different models as is helpful in different situations. Physicists haven’t been able to reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics, though each model is extremely useful in certain problem domains. More prosaically, sometimes we ignore the curvature of the earth, e.g. in walking around at the mall, and sometimes we have to account for that, e.g. in flying across the Pacific ocean. Post-modernism, if one could squeeze out the 95% of it that is deliberately obscurantist bullshit, could be a useful handmaiden to the many intellectually serious people who remind us that “A model is just a model” and that no one model should ever be taken too seriously.
Neurotoxin 
