"Soul delay": trauma and globalisation in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition (2003)

This chapter reads William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition as an exemplary text of an increasing entanglement of discourses of apocalypse and globalization: on the one hand, apocalyptic fictions rely on ideas of global networking and interconnectedness in order to portray some actual or impending catastrophe attributable to connectivity of bodies, machines, or events, whereas, on the other, globalization has been theorized in terms of a series of “ends” (of imperialism, the nation state, etc.). Pattern Recognition is read as an apocalyptic text in three senses: in its status as a narrative of “psychological singularity,” in its preoccupation with individual and cultural trauma, and as a “liminal” text between two centuries and two political realities—that of the Cold War and of globalization.