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.