William Gibson의 Pattern Recognition은 과학과 종교학의 담론을 반영하지만 전통적인 SF와는 달리 현재, 특히 9/11 테러사건 이후의 시대배경을 다루고 있다. 주인공 Cayce Pollard는 인터넷에 나타나고 있는 짧고 순서도 없는 동영상 시리즈(소설에서 "the footage"로 ...

William Gibson의 Pattern Recognition은 과학과 종교학의 담론을 반영하지만 전통적인 SF와는 달리 현재, 특히 9/11 테러사건 이후의 시대배경을 다루고 있다. 주인공 Cayce Pollard는 인터넷에 나타나고 있는 짧고 순서도 없는 동영상 시리즈(소설에서 "the footage"로 불림)에 사로잡혀 있는데, 이러한 집착은 9/11 테러 당시 사라진 아버지의 사망의 증거를 찾고자 하는 집착을 대신하는 것으로 나타난다. Footage에서 가상의 narrative를 찾고자 하는 그녀의 시도는 아버지의 죽음을 잊고자 하는 시도이며, 동시에 그녀의 삶에서 사라진 질서를 되찾고자 하는 시도이다. 소설 후반부에 footage를 창조하고 있는 자가 Nora Volkova라는 러시아 여성임이 밝혀지는데, 그녀도 테러 사건으로 부모를 잃었으며, 그 폭탄에 의해 자신의 뇌도 손상되었다. 결국, 이 동영상들은 순서도 narrative도 없으며, Nora가 사망한 부모를 무의식적으로 재현하고 있는 것이다. Nora를 만난 이후, Cayce는 footage에 대한 집착에서 벗어나고 아버지의 죽음을 인정하게 되며, 소설은 그녀와 그녀의 애인 Peter와의 동침으로 끝난다. 이 소설을 분석하기 위해 본 연구는 Andy Clark의 과학이론, Manuel Castells의 사회이론, James Nelson의 종교이론 등을 적용한다. Clark는 신경과학, 인공지능 이론, 언어철학 등을 접목하여 인간의 지능이 뇌/몸/환경의 상호작용의 산물이라고 주장한다. Castells는 모든 인간사회의 조직이 컴퓨터 네트워크와 유사하게 분산된 구조에서 중앙통제가 없이 효율적인 체계를 정립한다고 주장한다. Nelson은 고통을 극복하고 서로와 소통할 수 있는 능력, 그리고 인간으로써의 정체성 자체도 우리의 몸에서 비롯된다는 몸의 신학(body theology)을 이론화한다. 본 연구는 Gibson이 추상적인 담론이나 narrative를 거부하고 Nelson의 bodyself(몸을 정체성과 인관관계의 핵심으로 이해하는 자아)와 유사한 개념을 통하여 인간으로써 우리가 공유하는 근본적인 가치들에 호소한다고 Pattern Recognition을 분석한다.

My paper is an attempt to read William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition in connection to neuroscience, network theory and empiricist views of religion. Cayce Pollard is a "coolhunter" who tracks "the street-level emergence" of new styles by trying to rec ...

My paper is an attempt to read William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition in connection to neuroscience, network theory and empiricist views of religion. Cayce Pollard is a "coolhunter" who tracks "the street-level emergence" of new styles by trying to recognize the formation of "a group behavior pattern around a particular class of object." She is also obsessed with a series of video clips known as "the footage" to the on-line community for whom the debate over whether the clips are fragments of a work in progress (as the Progressives believe) or nonsequential segments of a finished film (as the Completists believe) has almost "theological" implications. This obsession with discovering logical order (or narrative) is another example of the impulse toward pattern recognition. Cayce’s search for her father and why he disappeared in lower Manhattan on September 11 can be seen as an attempt to discover a pattern where none exists. Andy Clark claims that the human mind is a "pattern-completing" system in which the simple functions of the brain interact with "complex, well-structured environments" to produce more complex behavior and "second-order" cognition. Patterns emerge from these interactions "without central executive control," as products of a distributed system incorporating brain, body and environment. Nora Volkova, after a terrorist bombing that killed her father and damaged her brain, has been producing the clips by editing video from the hospital’s security system. They are fragments without order or narrative, emerging from Nora’s fragmented mind. What drew Cayce to the footage is the pattern of trauma that she shares with Nora; she "began to follow the footage" after September 11 "to unremember" everything outside the disembodied space of the footage and the web community emerging around it. Network theory posits that computer and telecommunication technologies are increasingly creating a world in which individuals are functional nodes in decentralized, distributed networks. But Manuel Castells argues that the patterns ("assigned meanings") that emerge from such networks are inherently unstable, and produce a desire for "the anchoring in eternal values." One such anchoring is in the body, which is where September 11 and the footage ultimately converge. No pattern emerges from Cayce’s search for the meaning of September 11, but the compensation for her trauma and the resulting loss of order and stability is represented by clip #135 ("the Kiss") and enacted by the ending of the novel, where Cayce kisses her lover. The disembodied Parkaboy of the footage community has now become the flesh-and-blood Peter Gilbert, and through their physical union, Cayce’s "soul" returns to her, "warmly socketed." Ninian Smart claims that religion itself has become "empirical;" consciousness and meaning emerge from "matter" and personal, embodied experience. Our sense of self (or consciousness) emerges from our interactions with others and the world around us, and only in that embodied space can we find the patterns that complete us.

William Gibson's Pattern Recognition borrows from the discourses of science and religion but is set in the historical present, dealing in particular with the aftermath of 9/11. Its protagonist Cayce Pollard is obsessed with a series of random video c ...

William Gibson's Pattern Recognition borrows from the discourses of science and religion but is set in the historical present, dealing in particular with the aftermath of 9/11. Its protagonist Cayce Pollard is obsessed with a series of random video clips (known as "the footage") that are appearing on the internet, but this obsession turns out to be a substitute for her obsessive search for evidence of her father's death in the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center; her attempt to discover a narrative in the footage is both an attempt to "unremember" her father's death and a compensation for the loss of order in her life. The footage was created by a Russian woman named Nora Volkova whose brain was damaged by a terrorist bomb that also killed her parents; it is a subconscious representation of her parents that has no logical order. After meeting Nora, Cayce stops obsessing about the footage and accepts her father's death, and the novel ends with the physical union between Cayce and her new lover Peter. In order to make sense of the novel, I refer to Andy Clark's theory that human cognition is a product of brain-body-environment interaction, Manuel Castells' theory that all human institutions and organizations have the structure of decentralized and self-organizing networks, and James Nelson's "body theology" in which he argues that our bodies are central to our identities and our abilities to deal with pain and connect with each other. I argue that Gibson rejects grand narratives in favor of something like Nelson's notion of the "bodyself" and appeals to our shared humanity.

10월에 미국 Washington에서 개최된 American Studies Association 국제학술대회에서 연구원 3명이 한 session을 구성하여 논문을 발표하였다. 최종 연구결과물인 논문 3편은 각자 학술지에 게재였거나 2006년내에 게재할 것이다. 앞으로도 SF문학, 종교학, 과학이론 등을 ...

10월에 미국 Washington에서 개최된 American Studies Association 국제학술대회에서 연구원 3명이 한 session을 구성하여 논문을 발표하였다. 최종 연구결과물인 논문 3편은 각자 학술지에 게재였거나 2006년내에 게재할 것이다. 앞으로도 SF문학, 종교학, 과학이론 등을 종합한 연구를 계속 할 것이며, 이러한 interdisciplinary 연구의 활성화를 위한 세미나, 학술대회, 강연 등을 기회 및 개최할 것이다.