(Literatures of The Americas) David Laraway - Borges and Black Mirror-Springer International Publishing - Palgrave Pivot (2020)

LITERATURES OF THE AMERICAS
Borges and
Black Mirror
David Laraway
Literatures of the Americas
Series Editor
Norma E. Cantú
Trinity University
San Antonio, TX, USA
This series seeks to bring forth contemporary critical interventions within
a hemispheric perspective, with an emphasis on perspectives from Latin
America. Books in the series highlight work that explores concerns in
literature in different cultural contexts across historical and geographical
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is rooted in traditional approaches to literary criticism but seeks to in-
clude cutting-edge scholarship using theories from postcolonial, critical
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David Laraway
Borges and Black

Mirror
David Laraway
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT, USA
Literatures of the Americas

ISBN 978-3-030-44237-8 ISBN 978-3-030-44238-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44238-5
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Contents
1 Possessed by the Mirror 1
2 Forgetting and Forgiving in an Age of Total Recall 21
3 Nostalgia, the Virtual, and the Artifice of Eternity 49
4 Executable Code 77
Works Cited 109
Index 117
v
About the Author
David Laraway received a Ph.D. in Romance Studies from Cornell Uni-

versity and a Ph.D. in Philosophy, Art, and Social Thought from the Eu-
ropean Graduate School. He is the author of American Idiots: Outsider
Music, Outsider Art, and the Philosophy of Incompetence (2018) and co-
author (with Merlin Forster) of Árbol de imágenes: nueva historia de la
poesía hispanoamericana (2007).
vii
CHAPTER 1
Possessed by the Mirror
Abstract A discussion of Borges’s early tale “The Mirror of Ink” and the
title sequence of Brooker’s Black Mirror series lays the groundwork for
the introduction of some of the key themes to be addressed in the volume.
These include the materiality of forms of written and visual media, the
nature of self-awareness as it takes shape in the works of both authors,
and the concept of remediation as an interpretive strategy for bringing
Borges and Brooker into dialogue. Some attention is also given to the
challenges posed by “anachronistic” approaches to reading Borges as well
as the danger of failing to attend to the ways that the vision of Black
Mirror is grounded not just in recent technological developments but in
the broader literary and philosophical tradition.
Keywords Media · Materiality · Borges · Brooker
Borges’s IPad
In one of his earliest narratives, “The Mirror of Ink” [“El espejo de
tinta”], Borges tells a story he attributes to nineteenth-century British
adventurer Richard Francis Burton, who claimed to have heard it from the
Sudanese warlock Abderramen al-Masmudı̄ (CF 60–62/OC 1.341–43).1
Al-Masmudı̄, whose brother had been put to death by Sudan’s capri-
cious and cruel governor, Yaqub the Afflicted, had been taken captive but
© The Author(s) 2020 1

D. Laraway, Borges and Black Mirror, Literatures of the Americas,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44238-5_1
2 D. LARAWAY
managed, through his divinatory talents, to ingratiate himself with the

tyrant. The two came to participate regularly in a ritual which, the nar-
rator tells us, was always the same: al-Masmudı̄ would pour ink into the
cupped hand of Yaqub and burn incense that had been carefully prepared
from coriander seed, benzoin resin, and Quranic invocations written upon
strips of parchment. Yaqub would declare to al-Masmudı̄ the subject of
the vision that he desired to see and then gaze into the pool of ink he held
in his palm. Wild horses, exotic kingdoms, angels, prophetic visions of the
cities of the future: all were magically revealed to Yaqub’s eager gaze as he
peered into the ink. At first the images were static but, with practice, al-
Masmudı̄ learned to animate them according to his host’s desires. As the
visions became increasingly elaborate, an enigmatic veiled figure began to
appear time and again in these vignettes, which increasingly took on a
violent cast.
The narrator tells of one particular occasion when the governor, in a
fit of bloodlust, demands to be shown some scene in which justice would
be unsparingly meted out. The sorcerer conjures up for him an animated
diorama featuring Yaqub’s own royal executioner. Yaqub notices that the
victim is slated to be that same veiled figure who had appeared in earlier
scenes. Just before the stranger is to be executed, Yaqub demands that
al-Masmudı̄ remove the mask. The sorcerer initially resists, fearing that
to reveal the figure’s identity would unleash some kind of terrible divine
retribution. Dismissing al-Masmudı̄’s fears, Yaqub persists. The sorcerer
finally acquiesces and the victim turns out to be, perhaps unsurprisingly,
Yaqub himself. Trembling at the realization that he has unwittingly con-
jured up a representation of his own demise, the despot watches in horror
as the final preparations are made for his execution. “He was possessed
by the mirror” [“estaba poseído por el espejo”], the narrator tells us, and
“he did not even try to turn his eyes aside, or to spill out the ink” [“ni
siquiera trató de alzar los ojos o de volcar la tinta”] (CF 62/OC 1.342).
It is as if Yaqub’s knowledge of what was to transpire were insufficient
to counter the desires that had been unleashed by the vision in the black
mirror. As the sword falls upon the neck of the victim in the mirror of
ink, Yaqub too groans and falls to the ground, dead.
“The Mirror of Ink” is one of Borges’s lesser-known stories and has
never received a great deal of attention from critics. Perhaps its conclu-
sion may be too obvious for an attentive reader; perhaps it lacks some of
the subtlety and depth of his more mature ficciones.2 But it may also be
that previous generations of readers and critics were not really prepared
1 POSSESSED BY THE MIRROR 3
to read the text in the way that we are now. To read “The Mirror of
Ink” today, two decades into the twenty-first century, is inevitably to find
certain aspects of it disquietingly familiar. Consider that our protagonist
holds in his hand a miniature screen which, enlivened by technologies he
does not presume to understand, displays animated scenes he feels com-
pulsively drawn to consume. He cannot help but watch until that crucial
moment when the representation of the desires he had wished to enjoy
in fact ends up devouring him instead. The device turns out to be not
just a screen but also a mirror, one that endows him with a species of
self-knowledge that he cannot finally abide. Now, replace the pool of ink
with an iPad; the resin and coriander seed mixture with the software that
provides streaming content; al-Masmudı̄’s conjured-up scenes with Net-
flix’s on-demand catalogue; and Yaqub’s obsessive consumption of those
images with Netflix subscribers powering their way through their queues.
Suddenly an obscure text composed in the 1930s (which purported to
be just a retelling of an obscure anecdote published in a mostly forgotten
travel narrative from the 1860s) turns into an uncannily prescient tale,
one that goes far beyond the familiar moralizing scolding about the perils
of wasting too much time binge-watching videos on-demand on a phone
or tablet.3 This is vintage Borges, a writer who somehow seems always to
be ahead of us, no matter where we are.
Screening Brooker
I’m simplifying, of course, and we shall have more to say later about the
dangers of casually reading Borges in a naïvely anachronistic way. But for
now let us push on with our contemporary re-imagining of “The Mir-
ror of Ink.” If the story feels fresh and current, perhaps it is because
the protagonist’s situation seems to resonate with our own: we too intuit
that there is a complex relationship between our desires—and even our
identity—and the technologies that have ostensibly been designed to help
us realize them. And as new forms of media evolve apace and we become
more aware of our dependence upon emerging communicative platforms,
the tension between our desires and the technological contours of our
habitus becomes only more complex. The tools that were developed with
an eye toward satisfying those desires end up impeaching some of the
most cherished beliefs we may hold about ourselves. This is the crucial
animating premise of so much speculative fiction today: technology is a
double-edged sword which unleashes the same libidinal forces that it had
4 D. LARAWAY
sought to domesticate. That Borges, the symbol par excellence of a gen-

teel and slightly antiquated bookishness, should have become regarded as
a prophet for our times speaks volumes about the plasticity of his parables.
Of course if we wished to imagine a truly contemporary reworking of
“The Mirror of Ink” that were faithful to its vision while enlarging upon
it, we could do no better than to entrust the script to Charlie Brooker.
Brooker’s Black Mirror series—created in 2011 for Channel 4 in Britain
and acquired by Netflix in 2014—has become a reference point in popu-
lar culture for its provocative exploration of the unanticipated and unad-
vertised costs of technological advances, particularly as these disclose and
amplify the social traits that we already bring to bear when employing
them. Conceptually ambitious, richly intertextual, self-aware: many of the
same descriptions that are traditionally invoked when discussing Borges
also apply to Brooker, who by all accounts has been at the vanguard of
intellectually challenging programming in the post-television era (Long-
den). The anthological nature of Black Mirror, with each episode stand-
ing logically independent of the others, has allowed Brooker to take on
a freewheeling and unfettered approach to a wide range of complex top-
ics, without needing to hew to a single narrative thread across multiple
episodes and seasons.4
In fact, if there is a common denominator that binds together the
otherwise unrelated episodes of Black Mirror, perhaps it is hidden in
plain sight, in the brief clip of ten seconds or so with which each pro-
gram begins. Black Mirror’s stylized opening title sequence manages to
foreground some of the same themes we have already touched upon in
Borges’s “The Mirror of Ink” even as it brings to light a host of new ques-
tions. It is important to keep in mind the distinctive manner in which
most viewers encounter the program: as often as not, they are likely to
view it on a phone or personal electronic device. So, when they first
queued up the first episode of the first season of Black Mirror, many
were probably unsurprised to be greeted by a familiar spinning wheel
in the middle of the screen, an icon that customarily signals that the
selected video is loading. More precocious or attentive viewers might have
noticed, however, that the animated icon rotating against the black back-
drop was not in fact a buffering icon native to their own device but rather
an element embedded in the program’s title sequence. Within seconds,
the spinning ball resolves itself into animated geometric shapes; these, in
turn, resolve into the program’s now familiar “Black Mirror” title card. At
precisely this point the viewer would have noticed a whining mechanical
sound which increases in pitch until it too resolves into the sound of shat-
tering glass. And, as the viewer hears the glass break, a hyper-realistic crack
suddenly shoots across the Black Mirror lettering. The final image of the
brief introductory sequence is visually indistinguishable from a sight that
many of us would find all too familiar: the shattered screen of a personal
electronic device once it has had an unscheduled meeting with a side-
walk or uncarpeted floor, cracks in the glass now spiderwebbing across its
surface.
The sequence is well-executed and almost elegant in its simplicity from
a design standpoint. It also comports perfectly with the sensibilities that
inform every episode of Brooker’s Black Mirror, no matter the specific
themes which particular episodes may touch upon. In a program devoted
to exploring the diverse ways in which new technological developments
oblige us to rethink the nature of our desires and to face difficult ques-
tions about what it means to be human, the title sequence reminds us
that the very medium in which these ideas are to be explored is already
part of the problem to be addressed. And of course one particular corol-
lary is unavoidable: not only is the medium itself compromised, but we
viewers are obliged to address the difficult issues raised by Black Mirror
from within that same framework. The image of the shattered screen in
its transgression of the boundary between spectacle and viewer reminds
us that we can claim no higher ground or privileged position from which
to adjudicate the issues that Black Mirror asks us to examine. We must
address the challenges and opportunities posed to us by new forms of
media from within the parameters established by those forms themselves.
The gesture is appropriate if, in a way, rather unsurprising. Certainly
the introduction of an element of self-awareness would seem to be
unavoidable in a series like Black Mirror. Since the show is in large mea-
sure concerned with the ways in which emerging technologies impinge
upon both our social world and our sense of self, no serious reflection on
these topics would be complete if it did not require us to bear in mind the
self-referential dimensions of the problem. That said, we may be forgiven
for wondering whether the techniques associated with self-referential nar-
rative have by now become so familiar that our current cultural landscape
has not become oversaturated with them, so much so that any media arti-
fact that aspires to intellectual seriousness these days seems obliged to at
least genuflect in that direction. And while it would be far too easy to
overstate the (indirect) role that Borges may have played in constituting
our current intellectual landscape in terms of self-aware narrative, there
6 D. LARAWAY
can be little doubt that his work gave now-familiar metafictional princi-
ples and techniques an air of gravitas at the same time that it made them
available to other writers, artists, and filmmakers who were capable of
reaching a wider audience than he was.
At the very least, it seems safe to say that Brooker’s work comports
with Borges’s, even if it would be too much to claim that it constitutes
a direct modulation of it into a visual key. Just as Yaqub’s scrutiny of
the mirror of ink finally discloses to him his own problematic place on a
Möbius strip in which life and representation finally—and fatally—merge,
the viewer of Brooker’s Black Mirror also finds herself drawn into a feed-
back loop that calls into question her very subjectivity as a viewer. In
either case, the interpretive problem is not a mere abstraction. Rather,
Brooker helps us recall a key point that is easy to miss when we read
Borges, one that has apparently been reified to some extent in the critical
tradition: the nature of the medium of representation is bound up in cru-
cial ways with the moment of the character’s (or, more importantly, the
reader’s or viewer’s) anagnorisis or moment of self-recognition. If Borges
helps to lay the conceptual groundwork for the self-referential dimen-
sions of a contemporary work like Black Mirror, Brooker helps us return
to Borges and (re)discover in his work important clues about the nature
of the mirror in question, in addition to its logical and self-referential
properties.
Media, Materiality, and Mirrors

We might take a first step toward appreciating the nature of the media
forms at issue by recalling a point that Slavoj Žižek is fond of making.
Žižek is skeptical of what he identifies as the quintessentially postmod-
ernist tropes of self-referentiality and the ways in which what may at first
appear to be a subversive gesture may turn out to be anything but that.
To be content with making such an identification, to merely signal one’s
self-awareness with regard to one’s place within a determinate conceptual
or ideological framework, is not only to leave the underlying substruc-
ture of the artifact untouched but actually, in a curious way, to exculpate
oneself and perpetuate or justify the structure that it purports to call into
question. Ours, he holds, is not only a moment of apparently rapturous
technological advances but of new and sophisticated guises for ideology
itself: the postmodernist fascination with self-awareness ultimately serves
to enable the ideological infrastructure to repair itself under the guise of

self-criticism. There is therefore no criticism or dialectical thought wor-
thy of the name in empty gestures of self-awareness that call attention to
one’s ideological commitments only to leave them finally unchecked and
unchallenged (cf. Sublime Object 28–30). Now, the point of the present
study is not to engage in ideological criticism of Borges and Black Mirror
per se, but Žižek’s warning is well taken. For it may turn out that gestures
of self-awareness in and of themselves serve only to occlude other aspects
of the texts that are no less essential to their ultimate meaning.
What do analyses of metanarratives in works such as those by Brooker
and Borges fail to take into account? The answer, like Poe’s letter, may
be hidden in plain sight. Both Borges’s mirror of ink and Brooker’s black
mirror tacitly draw upon an element of materiality as they highlight the
question of the technologies of inscription that each employs in order to
generate meaning.5 The moment of anagnorisis, or self-recognition—the
moment when Taqub recognizes himself in the mirror of ink and the
moment when the viewer realizes that she herself is present in the text or
visual narrative in some unanticipated way—is facilitated by these material
dimensions of the text. Consider again the Black Mirror title sequence. I
have already alluded to the moment in which the buffering icon appears,
luring us into the first trap that has been set, namely, the assumption that
the banal reality of the viewer may be safely compartmentalized from the
story to be represented. But even prior to the appearance of the icon,
a key moment of our spectatorship has already been staged as a func-
tion of the material properties of that same device that allows the story
to be told in the first place. Before the icon appears, the viewer must
have selected the program to be viewed. Generally this is done, on most
personal electronic devices and many desktop computers, when the user
interacts haptically with the glass screen that serves as the display. What
follows is an experience as significant as it is ubiquitous and therefore eas-
ily overlooked: the colorful menu of program choices disappears and the
screen goes totally dark, just prior to the appearance of any new, discrete
visual element. For a brief moment, we find ourselves gazing at our own
reflection in the reflective black surface of the device.6 Our gaze is cap-
tured and our visage is dimly reflected back to us on the screen of the
iPad or computer that is calling up the media we wish to consume.
8 D. LARAWAY
The technology of the iPad thus serves a double function that owes
as much to McLuhan as it does to Lacan. The tablet extends our bod-
ily presence and numbs our consciousness as we reenact within its dis-
play the ancient drama of Narcissus, effectively turning ourselves into
what McLuhan calls the “servomechanisms” of the images we consume
(Understanding Media 47). Entranced by the images thrown back to us
from the black waters of the mediatic reflecting pool, we are reminded of
our libidinal investments in the projects of both self-knowledge and tech-
nology. In fact, the complex relationship between the two may provide us
with an important clue regarding the nature of our own narcissism.7 The
uncanny commingling of face and interface in the iPad is evidence that
the screen in question is not simply an inert object devoid of content; the
black mirror is not just an ordinary glass surface. And yet it is not simply
a metaphor either. McLuhan suggests that our media devices are what he
calls “auto-amputations,” extensions of the body that, by virtue of hav-
ing been externalized, allow us to maintain a sort of internal homeostasis
even as they render the task of self-recognition problematic (cf. 41–47).
Consider the specific manner in which the iPad functions as a bodily
extension of ourselves. The screen of the device serves as a haptic surface
that responds to the physical touch of the user. Apple’s fabrication pro-
cesses include a step in which the glass screen is coated with a capacitive
substance that responds to changes in the electrical field: these variations
are interpreted as inputs which in turn are indexed to a series of proto-
cols (cf. McCann). In this way, the electrical charge of the user’s body is
transmitted to the device, which interprets changes in the electrical field as
inputs. These are capable of triggering the appearance of particular items,
such as an electronic menu. So the apparent emptiness of the darkened
screen itself is deceptive. Even as it reflects our countenance back to us
prior to displaying any streaming content, its black void conceals a hive
of persistent yet invisible activity within the device as the now-activated
electronic circuits—materialized in unseen chips, wire, transponders, and
so on—begin to process the commands that will result in the delivery of
viewable content. In an important sense, the screen to which we direct
our gaze is therefore not just a black mirror but also a dark membrane, a
semi-porous surface that selectively permits the passage of elements from
one side to the other.8
Of course we tend to bear none of this in mind when firing up the
latest episode of Black Mirror. Truth be told, very few of us are aware,
even dimly, of the inner workings of either the hardware or the software
that make our viewing sessions possible. The position we occupy is in this
respect not terribly different from that of Borges’s Yaqub, who was happy
to enjoy the fruits of al-Masmudı̄’s rituals without being unduly preoc-
cupied with the particulars of how the wizard’s “hardware”—i.e., the
ink, Yaqub’s cupped hand—was able to run the “software”—the specific
prayers, spells, and incantations al-Masmudı̄ offered—that correspond to
the specific visions displayed by the black mirror. This is not merely a
question of whether one is “self-aware” in some abstract, wholly con-
ceptual sense: rather, the tension between the material properties of the
story-telling device and the story itself is what animates the problems at
hand. The genius of the opening title sequence of Brooker’s Black Mirror
is that it draws upon the material features of the device in order to stage
our vulnerability to the paradoxes of self-awareness. In this way, the so-
called “metafictional” dimensions of the program—including those that
bear somehow upon the subjectivity of the viewer—turn out to be insep-
arable from the material properties of the medium of the narrative.
It goes without saying that the material elements and the media envi-
ronment of Borges’s “The Mirror of Ink” are quite distinct from those
attached to Brooker’s Black Mirror: the medium of print does not involve
the same kind of complex relationship between the literal hardware plat-
forms and software programs that we associate with digital media. And
yet to (re)read Borges now, in light of Brooker, is perhaps inevitably
to approach him with a certain predisposition to appreciate elements of
his texts that might have otherwise escaped our attention. Consider, for
instance, how some of the distinctive mediatic traits of Black Mirror may
sensitize us to elements of Borges’s “The Mirror of Ink” that were already
latent in the story and might yet have otherwise gone unnoticed.
An astute admirer of Borges at an earlier time might have understood
the tale of Yaqub and al-Masmudı̄’ to be not only an entertaining curios-
ity but a parable about the dangers of reading without at least a minimal
degree of self-awareness. But to re-read Borges after watching Brooker
is, I think, different. Among other things it is to approach him already
attuned to the ways in which the practices of self-aware reading cannot
be exhaustively characterized at the level of cognition alone. As it hap-
pens, I think that there are many other ways of bringing Brooker and
Borges into fruitful dialogue and I shall explore some of them in the
essays that follow. But for now, we can at least acknowledge this possibil-
ity: that Brooker’s Black Mirror, in its broadest contours, reminds us that
our practices of interpreting are somehow connected to the materiality
10 D. LARAWAY
of the medium in which they are embedded. We might say that Brooker
invites us to return to Borges, attuned now to questions that might have
once appeared ephemeral or uninteresting, that is, when they arose at all,
for previous generations of readers of the Argentine master.
So to what, exactly, does Brooker’s title sequence sensitize us as we
return to Borges? For one thing, we are invited to attend more carefully
to the ways in which we as readers find ourselves in a position analogous
to that of Yaqub. The black ink set against the white background in our
print edition of “The Mirror of Ink” is not merely a felicitous metaphor,
a tool with which to pry some allegorical meaning from Borges’s story. As
we have already noted, it is quite literally an embodiment of a particular
technology of inscription (cf. Arellano). As such, it not only refers to the
familiar paradoxes of self-reflexivity but rather it directly embodies them
in an altogether different, wholly material, register. The ink (or perhaps
the black pixels of the screen, if we prefer to read Borges on a tablet or
computer) of which the text is materially constituted possesses proper-
ties that are germane to not only the meaning of the text but, more to
the point, the experience of reading it. These include, to mention only
the most obvious example, the opacity of the characters on the page and
their material capacity both to absorb and to reflect light. While it admit-
tedly would be somewhat odd to claim that a print or electronic edition
of “The Mirror of Ink” reflects the reader’s visage in the same way as the
opening sequence of Black Mirror when viewed on a personal electronic
device, it does seem undeniable that we are asked to bear in mind the
literal reflective properties of ink if we are to appreciate the richness of
Borges’s tale. In principle, if not in practice, we are in the same position
as Yaqub. We too find ourselves gazing down at the constellations of ink
that we hold in our hand. Suddenly we too find our own image mate-
rially present in that same medium that bedeviled Borges’s protagonist,
alongside the representation of events we had presumed merely to enjoy.
And our sudden recognition of our own image in the black ink of the text
that we hold in our hand tells us something sobering about the material
dimensions of our own subjectivity.
Reading Borges with Brooker

I mentioned earlier that I was temporarily bracketing the dangers of read-
ing Borges from an anachronistic vantage point. Perhaps that claim should
now be clarified, since something must be said about how and why we
might read together the work of two figures who may turn out to be
only superficially related, if, that is, they are meaningfully related at all.
Part of the price that Borges has paid for his fame is that his name is now
used as a kind of shorthand for journalists and others who are tempted
to regard any technological innovation—from Wikipedia to the invention
of the internet itself—as having been somehow foreseen, foreshadowed,
or otherwise anticipated by Borges. To be sure, in some cases, this ten-
dency to namecheck Borges may be laziness or perhaps a simplistic desire
to contrive a respectable intellectual pedigree for whatever idea happens
to interest us. On other occasions, to engage in anachronistic projects
of literary interpretation is to run the risk of ignoring more fresh and
timely critical questions. Too often, we may be tempted to read Borges
and assume that the emergence of more recent cultural phenomena can
somehow be connected to him, even if we are hard-pressed to say exactly
how.9
As it turns out, Borges himself had something to say about this. In his
seminal essay on literary influence, “Kafka and His Precursors” [“Kafka y
sus precursores”] (SNF 363–65/OC 2.88–90), Borges had argued that
in the domain of literature the arrow of causation does not point from ear-
lier to later as it does in the ordinary world of causes and effects; rather,
the properly literary features of a text—i.e., those that are found salient
by other writers and readers—are only ever determined retrospectively, as
they are brought into dialogue with still other texts through the interpre-
tive labors of later generations of authors. He argues, for example, that for
us to read today certain pages from Kierkegaard, Léon Bloy, and ninth-
century Chinese writer Han Yu is to recognize that there is something
distinctively “Kafkaesque” about each of them, even if they have abso-
lutely nothing else in common. Borges hypothesizes that this enigmatic
characteristic of being recognizably “Kafkaesque” is both a constitutive
feature of their works and one which did not exist until Kafka began to
write. Kafka retroactively imbued his predecessors with qualities that they
did not previously have.10
Borges’s texts also possess relationally-bound meanings that only
emerge as a consequence of their being embedded in an endlessly mal-
leable creative framework. Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror series, I argue,
is a critical element in this constantly evolving landscape; it actualizes
certain latent possibilities in Borges’s texts, even if those possibilities are
(properly) regarded as anachronistic if what we have in mind is a narrow,
traditional notion of historical causation. For better or worse, there is no
12 D. LARAWAY
principled distinction to be made between responsible and irresponsible

invocations of Borges. The evidence to be marshalled must be assessed
exclusively in terms of its ability to illuminate the phenomena under dis-
cussion. And ultimately there is no criterion other than the reader’s own
judgment when it comes to determining whether the joint readings of
Brooker and Borges in the essays that follow are persuasive.
This brings us to the second aspect of the present study that requires
some discussion. What can Borges contribute to our appreciation of
Brooker’s Black Mirror, particularly when other sources and influences,
more germane, more closely related to Brooker’s own experience and
worldview, are already in evidence? If our objective were merely to identify
the most proximate sources of inspiration for the episodes of Black Mir-
ror, it might make more sense to train our attention elsewhere, perhaps on
programs such as Tales of the Unexpected (1979–1988) or Rod Serling’s
Twilight Zone (1959–1964). Serling’s program, for instance, also made
excellent use of the anthology format in its positing of fantastic premises
in order to guide the reader to a surprise or twist ending, frequently in
the service of some particular social allegory.11 For that matter, Brooker
at one point was asked to identify the cultural artifacts that he regarded
as having most influenced him; he responded with a list of one hundred
items, the vast majority of them television shows and movies. The Twilight
Zone predictably makes an appearance, while Borges’s name is nowhere
to be found among the authors that he mentions (Brooker, Inside Black
Mirror 314–16; see also Singal).12
But as informative and valuable as traditional studies of literary influ-
ence may be, they are in a sense perpendicular to the purposes of the
chapters that follow. For if Brooker trains our attention upon aspects of
Borges’s works that might have otherwise remain unnoticed and unreal-
ized, Borges in turn reminds us that Brooker’s concerns in Black Mirror
deserve engagement from within a determinate literary and philosophical
tradition. The temptation for viewers of Black Mirror is to assume that
some of the series’ most intriguing plotlines are predicated in some strong
sense upon technological innovations which as of this date remain only
hypothetical or perhaps imaginable as an extension of our current tech-
nological habitus. But just as Brooker could ask us to entertain the notion
that Borges’s mirror of ink is a sort of proto-iPad, so too we might regard
Brooker’s black mirror as essentially a sophisticated book, i.e., a more
contemporary embodiment of the material device associated par excel-
lence with Borges. In this regard, Brooker’s imagination may be located
within a literary and philosophical tradition that is deep indeed. The essays
of this book thus constitute a kind of double-reading, forwards and back-
wards, of the work of Borges and Brooker. The success of the project will
be predicated upon a very simple criterion: whether the reader finds it
insightful and persuasive, that is, whether it responsibly moves the con-
versation along in a fruitful direction or whether at the end of the day
it leaves the reader unconvinced and unsatisfied. Ultimately it is my hope
that someone initially drawn to this book out of an interest in Brooker will
come away with a newfound appreciation for Borges. And if I have done
my job well the reader of Borges will come away feeling that Brooker is
an indispensable interlocutor for the Argentine author.
Remediating Borges and Brooker

In 1999, as the curtains were being drawn upon the twentieth century, Jay
Bolter and Richard Grusin published their classic Remediation, a work on
emerging media forms and their relation to older, more familiar expres-
sive technologies. Following a line of investigation pursued by McLuhan
decades earlier, Bolter and Grusin remind us that newer and older forms
of media alike are ill-served when we attempt to understand the former
as supplanting or overturning the latter. Rather, the history of media
could be understood as the story of how the vast menagerie of expres-
sive forms—all of which, obviously, contain a technological dimension—
cannibalize and transform one another in ways that we have not always
appreciated. Our own age, they note, is characterized by two comple-
mentary impulses: toward immediacy (i.e., an attempt to erase all traces
of media in order for us to realize the fantasy of pure, unmediated experi-
ence) and hypermediacy (i.e., a tendency to multiply mediatic forms and
platforms so as to be fully immersed in them). Remediation is the name
that Bolter and Grusin give to that kind of double logic by which both
processes are engaged and diverse media objects negotiate the terms of
their coexistence (3–15).
Although Bolter and Grusin’s project was primarily descriptive and
analytical in nature, it also hints at a set of tacit interpretive strategies that
could prove useful here. Borges and Brooker belong to different media
universes in many respects. Brooker avails himself of all the techniques
that new media make available to him (as we have seen with regard to the
Black Mirror title sequence); Borges was content to take as his starting
point the well-established form of the short story and he is quite formally
14 D. LARAWAY
conservative in many respects. But rather than accept the conventions

of their preferred media forms or genres as interpretive constraints that
determine how each should be read, there is much to be gained by seek-
ing to understand how Borges and Brooker remediate each other. Thus
the filmic or visual logic inherent in some of Borges’s short stories will
be brought out by way of reference to Brooker’s labors and the array of
literary devices with which Borges has made us familiar will help us in
return to appreciate the timelessness of Brooker’s work.
The interpretive project in the pages that follow does not aspire to
provide overarching conclusions about either of the two. Rather, my aims
are much more humble. Each chapter is intended to be free-standing and
each features a joint reading of one episode of Black Mirror and one short
story by Borges. The emphasis thus falls on the task of remediating Borges
through Brooker and Brooker through Borges, always by means of a close
reading of their specific works, rather than a more generalized discussion
of their respective places in the philosophical or media landscape. This
implies an approach to theoretical tools and methods that is limited, cir-
cumspect, anything but doctrinaire, and which therefore declines to pro-
vide any exhaustive examination of the theoretical underpinnings of their
work.13 So, one may find the names of figures such as Žižek, McLuhan,
and Hayles occasionally sprinkled throughout the pages that follow while
other equally important theorists—Baudrillard, for example—barely make
an appearance, as relevant as they might turn out to be for the develop-
ment of an overall theory of Brooker’s or Borges’s work. And although I
have tried to be responsible and discriminate in my use of theory, I have
not hesitated to sacrifice orthodoxy to whatever immediate interpretive
challenges the specific works in question have seemed to me to present.
The same goes, to some extent, with the relevant secondary literature,
which in the case of Brooker remains mostly of a popular, nonprofessional
nature, although important scholarly contributions on Black Mirror are
just now beginning to find their way into print. As for Borges, the body
of secondary literature is already disconcertingly vast and my engagement
with those sources has perhaps erred on the side of circumspection in the
hopes of not frightening away my nonspecialist readers. Wherever possi-
ble, discussions of issues of more narrow interest have been relegated to
the endnotes. Throughout, my intention has been to not lose sight of
the thread of dual readings of both Borges and Brooker that I develop
in each chapter, with an invitation to the reader to dig in to some of the
most valuable secondary sources to the extent that he or she may take an
interest in them.
Chapter 2, “Forgetting and Forgiving in an Age of Total Recall,”
examines the ways in which Borges’s story “Funes the Memorious” [“Fu-
nes el memorioso”] and the Black Mirror episode “The Entire History
of You” (S01:E03) complicate our ordinary understanding of memory as
a kind of mental or computational process. Borges and Brooker suggest
that models of computational memory that are based on data process-
ing devices need to be supplemented with an understanding of memory
that is grounded in both the lived body and the social collectivities to
which we belong. Mark B. N. Hansen has suggested that the virtual is
always already a feature of the lived body rather than something subse-
quently added on to it (Bodies 1–22), memory too will turn out to be
an ineluctably social phenomenon, a feature of not only the individual
body but also the social bodies or collectivities which shape us. The ten-
sion between these two models of memory catalyzes Borges and Brook-
er’s tales. In the latter case, we come to see that the boundless, infallible
memories that the protagonist enjoys are nonetheless perversely faithless
in their own way. They turn out to require an element of sociality—not
to say trust and even love—in order to become meaningful and not mere
exercises in the mechanical conversion of experiential data into fungi-
ble information. In similar fashion—albeit without the erotic subtext—
Borges’s “Funes the Memorious” suggests that even infallible, computer-
like memories may require an element of collective, social negotiation in
order for them to become meaningful. In both cases, embodied memory
provides a virtual supplement to more traditional notions of recall. The
mediatic forms through which those memories are disclosed will thus have
something to teach us about the nature of the social ties that bind us.
Chapter 3, “Nostalgia, the Virtual, and the Artifice of Eternity,”
explores perhaps the most popular episode to date of Black Mirror. “San
Junipero” (S03:E04) has been hailed as an uncharacteristically sunny tale
in a television series better known for its bleak, dystopian view of the
impact of new technologies on social relationships. Set primarily in the
1980s, it asks us to imagine not only that one may live forever in a vir-
tual environment but that the fantasy spaces opened up by new technolo-
gies may make it possible to realize possibilities for personal fulfillment
that we might not have imagined before. But it is far from clear how we
are to understand the relevant notion of the “virtual” in the world that
Brooker asks us to imagine. I argue that a helpful clue for reading “San
16 D. LARAWAY
Junipero” may be found in Borges’s classic story from Ficciones, “The

South” [“El Sur”], which not only features a similarly nuanced and con-
ceptually rich notion of “the virtual” but also exploits the structure of
nostalgia, which is an essential catalyst for Brooker’s tale. The result is a
dual reading of Brooker and Borges that underscores how the logic of
the virtual is not to be found only in fanciful science-fiction scenarios but
may be deeply embedded in our most banal experiences, rendering them
alternately hopeful and terrifying.
Chapter 4, “Executable Code,” considers some of the ways that “Ban-
dersnatch,” Black Mirror’s most technologically and narratively ambitious
episode enters into dialogue with Borges’s classic story, “The Garden of
Forking Paths” [“El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan”]. Although it
was not the first streaming video program to require the viewer’s active
participation in the telling of its story, “Bandersnatch” is undoubtedly
the most intellectually rich and provocative such example to date.14 The
episode’s protagonist is a computer programmer who attempts to con-
vert a choose-your-own-adventure novel into an interactive video game
but finds himself caught up in conceptual labyrinths that call into ques-
tion our familiar notions of linear time, not to mention subjectivity and
the idea of free will. He comes to intuit that the decisions that he once
thought himself free to make may turn out to rely instead upon dark,
incomprehensible forces that are apparently vested elsewhere, ostensibly
in the program’s viewer. But the viewer’s autonomy will be called into
question as well, as we begin to see ourselves as being subject to the same
kind of forces that threaten to nullify the protagonist’s sense of self.
The episode recalls in unmistakable ways Borges’s celebrated story,
which is often credited with helping to pave the way for the development
of hypertext narrative (Sassón-Henry 23–37). His classic tale of espionage
and betrayal exemplifies the same binary logic that informs the interactive
decision nodes of “Bandersnatch.” But it also sensitizes us to the ways
that the paths we have not chosen nevertheless leave their traces upon
what Borges intriguingly alludes to as the agent’s “obscure body,” trans-
forming it into a persistent reminder of those infinitely bifurcating paths.
By reading “Bandersnatch” and Borges together, we shall come to see
how the figure of the labyrinth—with its countless junctions and turns
that double in upon themselves—reveals itself in a corporeal register and
not merely as a conceptual exercise. We shall conclude by examining the
possibility that, even if our choices may not be altogether free, they might
still be invested with ethical significance.
Perhaps I may bring these pages to a close by returning once again to

Borges’s “The Mirror of Ink.” We have already noted how Yaqub gazes
into the mirror of ink and becomes a witness to his own death, as his
life and its representation in the black mirror come briefly and fatally to
coincide. As if to underscore the moral we are to draw from Yaqub’s
hubris, our narrator ends the story by citing the benedictory words that
al-Masmudı̄ had allegedly pronounced to Burton in passing the tale along
to him. But instead of a hand cupping a mirror of ink in an outstretched
palm, the story concludes with the no less memorable image of the inter-
vention of another hand, only now it is the hand that grasps the keys of
mercy and vengeance and which belongs to the Creator himself. “Glory
to Him Who does not die,” al-Masmudı̄ solemnly intones, “and Who
holds within His hand the two keys, of infinite Pardon and infinite Pun-
ishment” [“La gloria sea con Aquel que no muere y tiene en su mano
las dos llaves del ilimitado Perdón y del infinito Castigo”] (CF 62/OC
1.343). With these words, the mirror of ink has been effectively displaced.
It has been supplanted by the keys of infinite judgment, which is just
another way of saying that they pass out of the realm of the human alto-
gether. It is difficult to imagine a more fitting finale to a brief narrative
that had invited us to consider how the object of our desires seems to
always elude our grasp and the technological machinations we contrive
to satisfy those desires always seem to displace them further, despite all
our best efforts. Whether we take as our starting point Borges’s mirror
of ink or the reflections of Brooker’s black mirror, the result in either
case is a kind of displacement and deferral that suggests our search for
self-knowledge may be never-ending.
Notes
1. References to Borges’s works will cite first the English-language transla-
tions—abbreviated CF (Collected Fictions ), SP (Selected Poems ), and SNF
(Selected Non-Fictions )—followed by the Spanish versions, which are taken
from the 1986 Emecé edition of his collected works (hereafter: OC ).
2. Borges himself seemed to encourage his reader to regard the tale lightly:
it was not published as a separate, free-standing short story in A Universal
History of Iniquity [Historia universal de la infamia] (1935), but rather as
one of six brief narrations bundled together under the decidedly inelegant
title of “Et cetera.”
3. Emir Rodríguez Monegal, in the notes to his edited anthology of Borges’s
texts, summarizes the textual history of “El espejo de tinta” in this way:
18 D. LARAWAY
“This text, which was originally attributed to Richard Burton’s The Lake
Regions of Central Equatorial Africa (a book Borges admitted to never
having read), is really based, according to Di Giovanni, on Edward Lane’s
Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians. In thus ‘mistaking’ the
correct source, Borges changed the adaptation into a different text. By dis-
placement, he gave it a new meaning. Taking into account his well-known
childhood obsession with mirrors, the ‘quotation’ becomes an effective
disguise to mask the subjectivity of the text. From Borges’s point of view,
what really mattered was that in this text, the mirror was made of ink,
tying together his old fears and the act of writing” (343–44).
4. Do all the episodes of the program finally belong to the same narrative
universe? While the storylines of each episode are autonomous, recurring
themes and motifs—for instance, the White Bear glyph—certainly has pro-
vided fans of the program with license to come up with their own theories.
Brooker himself has stated that we might regard the different episodes of
Black Mirror as belonging not to the same universe per se but rather to
what he calls, with a nod to “Bandersnatch,” the Black Mirror “multi-
verse” (IGN).
5. For a rich discussion of the “technologies of inscription” that are native
to Borges’s work and a warning to those that would regard him in a fairly
straightforward way as a “precursor” to more recent experiments with
hypertextual media, see the excellent study of Jerónimo Arellano.
6. Of course the duration of this moment varies, depending upon a variety
of factors including the speed of one’s internet connection, the processing
speed of one’s device, and so on. The point, however, is that the notion
of the black screen that appears prior to the presentation of content is
not necessarily a matter of temporal, but rather, logical, priority. For an
insightful discussion of the black mirror motif from a Jungian perspective,
see Singh.
7. For reflections by a practicing analyst on the role of the “black mirror” of
new media in the formation of self-identity and sexual development, see
Lemma.
8. We might recall note as a point of reference here Mark B. N. Hansen’s
observations concerning what he calls the “mixed reality paradigm.” It is
fruitless and misguided, he suggests, to imagine a realm of pure bodily
intentionality that is set over against technical devices that are external
to it. Rather, our primordial way of bodily being in the world is always
already interpenetrated with technical features that essentially allow it to be
encoded it into determinate social and expressive frameworks (see Bodies
in Code 1–22).
9. Andrew Brown has observed that this tendency to develop superficial,

anachronistic readings of Borges may be ultimately ascribed to our per-
sistent “desire for a Borgesian present” (231). David Ciccoricco has sim-
ilarly warned of the dangers of such readings on the grounds that they
encourage us to posit that Borges’s work is somehow “incomplete” or
“deficient,” without tacitly supposing that his ideas required unpacking by
subsequent generations of writers who have a greater array of technologi-
cal tools at their disposal (75). The danger in any case is that we attempt to
avail ourselves of the peculiar cachet that attaches to the name “Borges” in
order to justify projects of comparative interpretation that have not been
properly justified. But I think that Brown provides an intriguing clue for
us to follow. He suggests that we think of the anachronistic Borgeses of
our contemporary critical and journalistic landscape as hrönir, those odd
artifacts described in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” that have their origins
in the imagination and yet which subsequently come to instantiate them-
selves materially in the real world (Brown 237). Scholars who draw upon
Borges in response to the emergence of new technologies have failed to
recognize far too often that their work is not narrowly descriptive as they
had believed, but rather is creative in nature: it tends to summon into
being the very phenomena that they had presumed merely to catalogue
or describe (Brown 236–38).
10. Here is how Borges expresses the point, after listing a catalogue of appar-
ently unrelated items culled from the history of literature: “If I am not
mistaken, the heterogenous pieces I have listed resemble Kafka: if I am
not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. Kafka’s idiosyncrasy is
present in each these writings, to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka
had not written, we would not perceive it: that is to say, it would not exist”
[“Si no me equivoco, las heterogéneas piezas que he enumerado se pare-
cen a Kafka; si no me equivoco, no todas se parecen entre sí. Este último
hecho es el más significativo. En cada uno de esos textos está la idiosincra-
sia de Kafka, en grado mayor o menor, pero si Kafka no hubiera escrito,
no la percibiríamos; vale decir, no existiría.”] (SNF 365/OC 2.89). For
more on this argument, see Laraway (317–19).
11. See Sheffield for a discussion of the claim that Black Mirror plays the same
role for our generation as The Twilight Zone played in an earlier era.
12. Of course this is not to say that Borges did not contribute something to
Brooker in important ways but only that that influence was either uncon-
scious or indirect, transmitted through intermediaries such as Christopher
Nolan. Unsurprisingly, Brooker acknowledged the influence of Nolan’s
2010 film Inception on his work; Nolan in turn has explicitly recognized
Borges’s influence on that film in particular (Itzkoff).
13. As this manuscript is being prepared for press, a collection of scholarly
essays edited by Angela M. Cirucci and Barry Vacker has just appeared;
20 D. LARAWAY
it follows on the heels of a similar Spanish-language anthology of critical

work edited by Martínez-Lucena and Barraycoa. For explicit attempts to
locate Black Mirror in the media theory landscape, see Scolari and Vacker
and Espelie (who read Black Mirror through the lens of McLuhan); for
a more narrowly Baudrillardian reading of the series see Jiménez-Morales
and Lopera Mármol.
14. A notable precursor was the children’s program, Puss in Book: Trapped in
an Epic Tale, which debuted on Netflix in June of 2017 (see Reynolds).
CHAPTER 2
Forgetting and Forgiving in an Age

of Total Recall
Abstract This chapter examines how Borges’s story “Funes the Memori-
ous” [“Funes el memorioso”] and the Black Mirror episode “The Entire
History of You” complicate our ordinary understanding of memory as a
kind of mental process. Borges and Brooker suggest that models of com-
putational memory that are modeled on data processing devices need to
be supplemented with an understanding of memory that is grounded in
both the lived body and the social collectivities to which we belong. In
the latter case, we come to see that the boundless, infallible memories
that the protagonist enjoys are nonetheless perversely faithless in their
own way. They turn out to require an element of sociality in order to
become meaningful and not mere exercises in the mechanical conversion
of experiential data into fungible information. In similar fashion, Borges’s
“Funes the Memorious” suggests that even infallible, computer-like mem-
ories may require an element of collective, social negotiation in order for
them to become meaningful. In both cases, embodied memory provides
a virtual supplement to more traditional notions of recall. The mediatic
forms through which those memories are disclosed have something to
teach us about the nature of the social ties that bind us together.
Keywords Memory · Forgetfulness · Ethics · Media · “The Entire

History of You” · “Funes the Memorious”

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44238-5_2
22 D. LARAWAY
Breath Upon the Face of a Mirror

When the world was still new, not long after the flesh of the first men had
been formed from the sacred maize, the vision of our ancestors knew no
bounds. Their sight passed unobstructed through trees and mountains,
across the endless sky and through the depths of the earth. “Perfect was
their sight, and perfect was their knowledge of everything beneath the
sky,” the ancient elders said. If the first men “gazed about them, looking
intently, they beheld that which was in the sky and that which was upon
the earth. Instantly they were able to behold everything” (Christenson
197). But the gods that had fashioned the first men recognized that these
creatures were too much and yet too little like them. For men to see
everything just as the creators did and yet not be numbered among them
was a burden too awful to bear. So the creator-god, Heart of Sky, caused
a mist to form upon the faces of the humans: “their eyes were merely
blurred […] they were blinded like breath upon the face of a mirror”
(197, 201). The breath of the god clouded the vision of our progenitors,
allowing them to see only what was within their immediate surroundings.
And when their vision had been thus circumscribed, the first men were
finally ready to receive the female consorts the gods had prepared for
them. Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that a precondition of conjugal
happiness is the capacity to see only so much and nothing more.
At any rate this is what we are told in the ancient book of Mayan scrip-
ture, the Popol Vuh. We might have been tempted to regard the powers
and perils of total vision—and total recall, that corollary and companion
of unbounded sight—as a uniquely contemporary fantasy, an invitation
to entertain a decidedly twenty-first-century dream of visual prostheses,
cloud computing, and the finely-tuned algorithms that facilitate instan-
taneous data recall. But perhaps the old legends of the highland Maya
should give us pause. One might wonder whether the scribes of the Popol
Vuh in crafting their creation story had not somehow seen our day and
issued a warning to us precisely when we might have been inclined to for-
get that our epistemic limitations might turn out to be a blessing after all.
It is one thing to dream about wielding the powers of limitless sight and
infallible memory. But to lay claim to cognitive superpowers, they seem
to suggest, might well mean to set aside those strictures—moral as well
as epistemic—that make sociality possible at all.
This is a lesson learned too late by Liam Foxwell [Toby Kebbell], the
protagonist of “The Entire History of You” (TEHY), the final episode
2 FORGETTING AND FORGIVING IN AN AGE OF TOTAL RECALL 23
of the first season of Black Mirror (S01:E03). Liam, an affluent young

lawyer, finds himself consumed by suspicions that his wife Ffion [Jodie
Whittaker] has been unfaithful to him. Like most other members of his
social circle, he has been implanted with a tiny, subcutaneous device called
a “grain.” Surgically inserted behind his right ear and wired directly to
the perceptual centers in his brain, the grain captures the raw informa-
tion provided by his sense organs, making his ongoing stream of percep-
tions always available for review and analysis. Even those sensations that
were too minute or ephemeral to have initially registered in his conscious-
ness can be retrieved, replayed, and magnified, thereby giving him sweep-
ing powers of observation not unlike those of the first men described by
the Mayan elders. Increasingly troubled by concerns about his wife, Liam
pores over his electronically archived memories in search of clues suggest-
ing that Ffi had an affair with Jonas [Tom Cullen], an old flame in whom
she claims to no longer have any interest. Employing the grain to recall
and review his perceptual experiences with heightened accuracy, Liam
amasses a wealth of evidence that confirms his worst fears. Unsurprisingly,
Liam takes no satisfaction in his discovery of his wife’s infidelity. Unable to
forget, much less to forgive, his life crumbles around him as he becomes
obsessed with conclusively establishing her guilt. By the episode’s end,
Liam comes to see that the god-like attributes of unbounded perception
and total recall have indeed made life unbearable and love impossible.1
We don’t need to go as far back as the Popol Vuh to find an analogue
that throws into relief some of the key issues raised by “The Entire His-
tory of You.” Many viewers of the episode were quick to note that it
calls to mind the classic 1942 story, “Funes the Memorious” [“Funes el
memorioso”].2 Borges’s text is not organized around a traditional plot
so much as it is around the recollections of the narrator—ostensibly an
avatar of Borges himself—who has been asked to preserve a record of the
occasions upon which he had crossed paths with the title character. The
narrator recounts how he had become acquainted with Ireneo Funes, a
young man from a rural village in Uruguay who had suffered a traumatic
head injury after falling from a horse. Now paralyzed, Funes lives out his
days in a darkened back room in the family home, languishing in obscu-
rity. But even as the fall resulted in his bodily paralysis, it also endowed
him with vast mental powers. Borges’s protagonist suddenly finds him-
self in possession of an infallible memory that coincides exactly with his
powers of perception. To be perceived, for Funes, is to be forever remem-
bered. Every stimulus that had ever crossed the threshold of his nervous
24 D. LARAWAY
system was indelibly imprinted upon his brain with total accuracy and
made available to him for instant, flawless recall. The narrator spends an
evening with Funes and is astonished to learn of the extent of his friend’s
abilities:
With one quick look, you and I perceive three wineglasses on a table;
Funes perceived every grape that had been pressed into the wine and all
the stalks and tendrils of its vineyard. He knew the forms of the clouds in
the southern sky on the morning of April 30, 1882, and he could compare
them in his memory with the veins in the marbled binding of a book he
had seen only once, or with the feathers of spray lifted by an oar on the
Río Negro on the eve of the Battle of Quebracho.
[Nosotros, de un vistazo, percibimos tres copas en una mesa; Funes,
todos los vástagos y racimos y frutos que comprende una parra. Sabía
las formas de las nubes australes del amanecer del treinta de abril de mil
ochocientos ochenta y dos y podía compararlas en el recuerdo con las vetas
de un libro en pasta española que sólo había mirado una vez y con las líneas
de la espuma que un remo levantó en el Río Negro la víspera de la acción
del Quebracho]. (CF 135/OC 1.488)
While there is no tragic dénouement in Funes’s story to rival Liam’s—

no takeaway moral about, say, the corrosive power of jealousy—both tales
do shed light on the ways in which human flourishing may be curtailed
rather than enhanced by the radical expansion of our powers of percep-
tion and recall. However, Borges’s narrator points out that in spite of
his information-processing capabilities Funes was ultimately incapable of
thought. To think, the narrator avers, entails the capacity to overlook dif-
ferences and to posit, at least provisionally, sameness where our sense-data
would present us only with infinite, if infinitesimally small, particularities
(CF 137/OC 1.490).3 In this regard Liam Foxwell and Ireneo Funes
seem to offer us parallel parables: the powers of total recall and super-
human perception may finally prove incompatible not only with love but
even with thought itself.4
Of course there are other reasons why “The Entire History of You”
and “Funes the Memorious” might be read together. They both raise a
host of intertwined questions concerning the relation between thought
and computation; the meaning of corporeal embodiment and its relation-
ship to our cognitive processes; the coherence of our common notions
of subjectivity and enduring personal identity; and, finally, the nature of
our humanity in what is sometimes called the age of the posthuman. Ulti-
mately, for Brooker and Borges alike these issues turn on the twin axes
of perception and memory.5 What’s more, our disentangling of some of
these threads will not only result in a richer appreciation of the com-
plex nature of memory than we might have anticipated but it will also
demonstrate the social, and even ethical, dimensions of functions that
we might have been inclined to regard as narrowly cognitive. To antic-
ipate: both “Funes the Memorious” and “The Entire History of You”
present us with limit-cases of subjects whose powers of perception and
recall seem to reinforce the idea that memory might be analyzed as a
mechanical processing of sense-data. And yet the narrative and mediatic
contexts in which these characters are embedded suggest that there may
be more to memory than this. Indeed, Borges and Brooker may be read
together as exploring the possibility that the task of remembering has
an unanticipated social and even ethical dimension, one that binds indi-
viduals together, particularly when their particular recollections, and the
meaning that they ascribe to them, may differ.6 Either way, the tension
between mechanically-generated and socially-collaborative memories will
turn out to be inseparable from questions of narrative and mediatic form.
Superman/Supercomputer
At first glance, there is no real ethical or even social subtext to speak of
in “Funes the Memorious” as there is in TEHY. But there can be little
doubt that the same incredible premise, i.e., that one may enjoy infallible
and complete access to the totality of one’s own history of perceptions
and memories, informs Funes’s story just as it surely as it does Liam’s.
Short of noting that Funes had always had an uncannily accurate inter-
nal clock—he was famous for always knowing the exact time, even before
his accident (CF 132/OC 1.486)—the narrator gives us no reason to
think that the story’s protagonist was otherwise remarkable in any way
prior to being thrown from the horse. But, upon regaining conscious-
ness, Funes discovered that “the present was so rich, so clear, that it was
almost unbearable, as were his oldest and even his most trivial memories”
[“el presente era casi intolerable de tan rico y tan nítido, y también las
memorias más antiguas y más triviales”] (CF 135/OC 1.488). He came
to not only be able to remember the specific contours of each individual
leaf in a forest that he had once visited but he could also recall every sub-
sequent occasion upon which he had ever remembered or imagined that
26 D. LARAWAY
leaf (CF 136/OC 1.489). With a bank of memories that seems to expand
exponentially with every fresh perception, Funes is almost overwhelmed.
In fact in an attempt to pass the time he has recreated entire days in his
memory (of course the process of representing those days in his memory
coincides exactly with the amount of time it had taken to undergo the
original experiences) and learned to entertain himself by devising a private
numbering system in which each numeral is represented by a single image
or memory. Thus, for Funes, seven thousand thirteen is “Máximo Pérez”
and seven thousand fourteen is “the railroad,” with other numbers being
represented by images such as “Napoleon,” “gas,” “the whale,” and so
on. Funes goes so far as to toy with the idea of creating a language con-
sisting only of unique proper nouns, but decides that such a language—if
it would indeed be a language at all—would still be insufficient to capture
the richness of his world (CF 136/OC 1.489).
Borges’s narrator is astonished at the idiosyncratic and unfathomable
grandeur of what he imagines to be Funes’s interior life. Another of
Funes’s associates describes him as “a precursor of the race of super-
men” and “a maverick and vernacular Zarathustra” [“un precursor de los
superhombres; ‘Un Zarathustra cimarrón y vernáculo’”] (CF 131/OC
1.485).7 Funes tells the narrator, “I, myself, alone, have more memories
than all mankind since the world began” [“Más recuerdos tengo yo solo
que los que habrán tenido todos los hombres desde que el mundo es
mundo”] (CF 135/OC 1.488), as if to acknowledge dispassionately his
unique vantage point on human history. Now, while Nietzsche did not
characterize the übermensch as enjoying heightened powers of perception
per se, Funes would seem nonetheless to share with Nietzsche’s rugged
hero the radical capacity of unmaking the world and then putting it back
together again. In this regard, at least, we might concur with the com-
parison: Funes could be regarded as heralding some kind of superhuman
way of being in the world and an emblematic figure of a new form of
life that would be mostly incomprehensible to those of us whose vision is
more narrowly circumscribed (cf. Martin).
While Funes’s condition stands out for the powers of recall he shares
with Liam Foxwell, we cannot fail to notice the distinct paths that the
two followed in acquiring their abilities. “Funes the Memorious” tacitly
asks us to assume that the title character’s powers issue directly from the
cerebral trauma he has suffered, even if—in good Borgesian fashion—
they soon metastasize and shade into all sorts of metaphysical questions.
“The Entire History of You,” on the other hand, depicts absolute recall
not in terms of some hitherto untapped capacities of the biological brain

but, on the contrary, as a possibility opened up to us by new prosthetic
technologies. If Borges’s übermensch comes across as a sui generis figure
who emerges by chance when he is thrown from his horse, Brooker’s
hero is a product of human engineering, and thus a potential harbinger
of a new era of (post)humanity, even if his story ultimately morphs into a
cautionary fable.
Consider the ways in which the grain in TEHY enables its user to
assume powers that could only be described as superhuman. An electronic
device implanted behind the ear, it is operated via a handheld controller
known as a “pebble.”8 By manipulating the pebble, the implanted sub-
ject may access his or her own personal bank of time-coded memories and
scroll through them to locate a specific episode from the past, much as
one might quickly scrub through a video file in order to locate and replay
a particular scene. When the memories are retrieved, one sees and hears
anew the footage in question, apparently without any data loss or any of
the other imprecisions and infelicities associated with organic memory.
Other features of the grain system include the capacity to magnify details
that had been previously perceived but not consciously noticed; a lip-
reading protocol designed to reveal the content of unheard conversations;
and the ability to wirelessly transmit the data to projection screens akin
to televisions, which allows for private memories to be publicly shared.
We might therefore say that TEHY is clearly animated by something like
a cyborg logic. That is, it vividly dramatizes a form of agency that is dis-
tributed over a heterogeneous assemblage of elements, both natural and
artificial, that, taken together, are constitutive of subjectivity.9
While the difference between the organic origin of Funes’s superpow-
ers and the mechanical origins of Liam’s is impossible to miss, it is far
from clear that the distinction between the organic and the mechanical
can bear the weight we might be tempted to place upon it. On this point,
the implicit dialogue between Black Mirror and Borges is both subtle and
instructive. Unlike Liam, whose powers of memory are explicitly identi-
fied with the grain implant, Funes demonstrates powers of perception and
recall that are not linked with any technological prostheses whatsoever—
we have no reason to believe that his brain is anything but organic in
the most ordinary sense of the term—and yet in some way he too seems
to embody the logic of the posthuman, perhaps even more scrupulously
than does Liam. Clearly, Brooker’s character would seem to offer us a
textbook case of a cyborg whose memories are negotiated at the nexus
28 D. LARAWAY
of the organic and the mechanical, while for Borges’s protagonist there
is no organic/mechanical faultline to speak of. But instead of conclud-
ing that Funes’s and Liam’s cognitive powers are unrelated despite their
superficial similarities, we might actually take the argument in exactly the
opposite direction: the case could be made that Funes, far from some-
how being a more “natural” or “organic” subject than Liam, stages in an
even more perspicuous way the irreducibly hard, unsymbolizable kernel
at the heart of the ostensibly autonomous subject itself (cf. Žižek, Sub-
lime Object 162). The mnemonic powers of Funes as Borges describes
them suggest that the logic of the cyborg—insofar as it is characterized
by the distribution of agency over a heterogeneous assemblage of ele-
ments—need not involve the introduction of any mechanical or techno-
logical device whatsoever, popular images of the cyborg as a mélange of
flesh and steel notwithstanding.
This is a point that Herbrechter and Callus have insisted upon in their
posthumanist reading of Borges. Funes’s faculties of computational mem-
ory, they claim, hint that the emergence of the posthuman cyborg need
not be regarded as the actualization of a set of technologically-determined
affordances that are somehow grafted on to a traditional human subject.
Rather, a cyborg-inspired reading of “Funes,” they hold, would regard
the story as the discursive unfolding of a host of cyborg-like possibilities
that were already latent in the subject itself. Pursuing a line of inquiry also
explored by Mark Hansen and Katherine Hayles, Herbrechter and Callus
argue that Borges’s Funes shows us that “the thinkability of the ‘posthu-
man’ relies on ‘pretechnological’ conditions entirely outside its control.
It is why it is more than a poststructuralist platitude to say that we have
always already been posthuman” (23).10
Their point about a “pretechnological posthuman,” if it is indeed to be
more than a metaphor, may be strengthened by demonstrating precisely
how “The Entire History of You” actually conditions us to re-read “Funes
the Memorious” retrospectively, not merely as the literary embodiment of
established philosophical positions that had previously been charted by,
say, Locke, Hume, and Nietzsche, but rather as a posthuman parable, in
spite of the fact that it was published decades before Brooker produced
the TEHY episode. In just the same way that Kafka sends us back to his
predecessors, preparing us to now acknowledge their “Kafkaesque” qual-
ities retrospectively, to read Borges after Brooker is unavoidably to see
Funes as an anachronistic, organic cyborg, one who lacks any mechan-
ical prosthesis and who comes into being precisely at the dawn of the
modern computer age. To be clear, it is not that Funes should somehow

be regarded as Borges’s answer to the emergence of modern computing
technologies, even if he seems to be something like a computer incarnate.
It is that he inhabits a narrative space that has already been conditioned
by a kind of cyborg logic and a way of being in a world in which per-
ception is understood to be an all-encompassing yet indiscriminate gath-
ering of sense-data and in which memory is but a name for the functions
of mechanically storing and recalling that data. To read Borges through
Brooker is thereby to see Borges’s character as a cyborg who has both
foreseen the computer age and somehow embodied it.11
Today we find it totally natural to invoke the brain–computer analogy
when trying to make sense of a figure such as Funes. We have come to find
it intuitive to think of our own senses as something like data input devices;
our central nervous system as a motherboard; and elements of our limbic
system as a hard drive. We might even be inclined to accept explanations
of our mental states as something akin to computational states. But in
the case of Funes the familiar brain–computer analogy seems to lend itself
to being extended still further: Funes differs from us in that he is unable
to ever expunge information from the hard drive of his mind once the
data has been written to it. Unlike Liam, who at least can entertain the
hope of removing the grain device and thereby dream of returning to
the blissful ignorance of fallible, organic memory, Funes has no way of
excising his memories. As he tells the narrator, “My memory, sir, is like a
garbage heap” [“Mi memoria, señor, es como vaciadero de basuras”] (CF
135/OC 1.488). It is an almost uncannily prescient image that evokes for
us the ubiquitous desktop computer icon, which, as we have all come to
know, doesn’t really delete any data at all but rather assigns it to another
physical location on the hard drive. Once Funes’s data has been written—
and it is always being written as long as he is receiving sensory input—it
cannot be unwritten or erased.12 For Funes, no distinction can be made
between the ephemeral and the enduring: he is an involuntary hoarder
of memories. Everything is always preserved, nothing is thrown away,
regardless of its meaning or qualitative value.
Additionally, we might note that Funes shares with a traditional com-
puter an inability to think allegorically or diachronically, since he is unable
to suppress the sorts of trivial differences in sensory input that might
allow for the spontaneous and creative emergence of meaning.13 This is
why generic nouns confuse him and he struggles to grasp the thought
that an object might persist unchanged throughout time.14 For similar
30 D. LARAWAY
reasons, Funes, in good Humean fashion, is almost totally lacking any

robust sense of self: this is because, as Clancy Martin has noted, Funes
is for all intents and purposes “pure observation itself” (273).15 This is
also why, by way of contrast with Liam—a cyborg whose organic mem-
ory and technologically-enhanced memories had become intertwined and
consequently caused him tremendous psychological distress—he is utterly
impassive, lacking the capacity for responding in an emotional or affective
way to any stimulus whatsoever. This becomes clear as he speaks through
the night with the narrator, his disembodied voice showing no traces of
pleasure or pain as he tells his story.
For that matter, Funes regards his own body after the accident as noth-
ing but another collection of sense-data toward which he feels no particu-
lar attachment. The narrator marvels at the utterly impartial way in which
his friend looks upon his own processes of bodily deterioration: “Funes
could perceive the quiet advances of corruption, of tooth decay, of weari-
ness. He saw—he noticed—the progress of death, of humidity. He was
the solitary, lucid spectator of a multiform, momentaneous, and almost
unbearably precise world” [“Funes discernía continuamente los tranqui-
los avances de la corrupción, de las caries, de la fatiga. Notaba los progre-
sos de la muerte, de la humedad. Era el solitario y lúcido espectador de
un mundo multiforme, instantáneo y casi intolerablemente preciso”] (CF
136/OC 1.490). While Funes is an unfailing and indefatigable witness of
the world, processing and archiving the steady flow of information that it
unceasingly presents to him, it would appear that, unlike Liam, the price
he pays for this ability is the incapacity to be affectively engaged by it.
The self that is attached to Funes’s body is just as ephemeral as any of the
fleeting perceptions that find their way into the hard drive of his memory.
Presumably none of this is what Nietzsche had in mind when he fan-
tasized about the übermensch, but perhaps there is something to be said
after all for the idea that Funes represents a kind of posthuman or super-
human organic computer, one fashioned out of flesh and bone rather than
silicon and plastic, albeit with very similar functions. If Brooker’s charac-
ter is a cyborg whose subjective agency is distributed across his “organic”
and “mechanical” (or “artificial”) features, then Borges seems to go fur-
ther still: Funes is not just a traditional cyborg but a computer who just
happens to have been instantiated in the form of a human being.16 If this
is what it means to be a Nietzschean superman—to be nothing more than
an information-processing supercomputer—then Borges’s and Brooker’s
protagonists suggest that it is hardly a form of being whose arrival mer-

its much celebration. While Nietzsche may turn out to be an important
interlocutor for them both, perhaps a more helpful clue as to his utility
to us may be found elsewhere.
Inter-face
While Borges’s narrator had explicitly acknowledged Funes’s debt to the
theorist of the übermensch and Brooker had helped us draw the connec-
tion between the superman and the supercomputer, it is worth noting that
Borges’s story may actually be defined by a still more salient Nietzschean
point, one that takes us in precisely the opposite direction of any simple
identification of the superman in terms of any unusual cognitive powers.
Ever the provocateur, Nietzsche, in his essay “On the Utility and Liability
of History for Life,” had tried to get his readers to see that acute histori-
cal awareness did not so much grant its possessor any unusual powers as
it paradoxically exposed one to the risk of a life of inaction and unhap-
piness. Forgetfulness, he argued, far from being a defect, was a necessary
condition of meaningful action. To drive his point home, he proposed the
following thought experiment. Let us imagine, he wrote,
a human being who does not possess the power to forget, who is damned
to see becoming everywhere; such a human being would no longer believe
in his own being, would no longer believe in himself, would see everything
flow apart in turbulent particles, and would lose himself in this stream of
becoming; like the true student of Heraclitus, in the end he would hardly
even dare to lift a finger. All action requires forgetting. […] It is possible
to live almost without memory, indeed, to live happily, as the animals show
us; but without forgetting it is utterly impossible to live at all. (89)
It is hard not to think of these lines, written in 1874, being channeled

directly by Borges in 1942, who was in turn channeled by Brooker in
2011.17 We have seen that, as if in direct response to Nietzsche’s invi-
tation, Borges had imagined the disintegration of a character’s sense of
self as his powers of memory and perception became all-encompassing.
Brooker, for his part, places the accent in a slightly different place, namely,
upon the affective and emotional price one must pay for acquiring these
32 D. LARAWAY
powers. Either way, the consequence is clear. Without a means of circum-

scribing our perceptions and expunging or somehow repressing our mem-
ories, our sense of self would be crushed under their cumulative weight.
It would be impossible to act decisively or, for that matter, to really live at
all, to say nothing of living happily. For Nietzsche, and, presumably, the
viewer of Black Mirror and the reader of Borges, this would be no life at
all.
Liam in “The Entire History of You” attempts in vain to straddle the
boundary between the organic and the artificial even as he will eventually
conclude that a more natural, more “human” way of being in the world
would be preferable to his current divided state. Unable to sustain the
emotional weight of the memories generated and preserved by technol-
ogy, he fantasizes about a return to a wholly natural bios, as if this would
extricate him once and for all from the nightmarish spiral of his obsessive
and endless recall of his wife’s infidelity. To be a cyborg, Liam discovers,
may mean that one is unable to simply close one’s eyes and forget. And
to be unable to forget is to be unable to forgive in the way that love
requires.
Liam’s inability to reconcile himself to the powers of infinite, infalli-
ble recall that the grain had granted him is a sign he has not been able to
find any kind of equilibrium between his somatic and prosthetic memories
that would allow him to maintain his integrity as a posthuman subject. If
to be a cyborg is to reconcile oneself to a form of agency that occupies
the liminal space between the organic and the foreign, then it seems that
Liam is unable to integrate the spheres of desire and memory into a uni-
fied, coherent expression of selfhood. In his case, the join where the two
sides meet is maximally unstable. Indeed, it is precisely the curious logic
of the interface where they meet that now claims our attention. As we
shall see, the term “interface” is particularly appropriate, as both Borges
and Brooker choose to dramatize the problem of mapping the thresh-
old where incommensurable spaces meet in terms of the visages of their
main characters. But before we turn to a joint reading of the final scenes
of “Funes the Memorious” and “The Entire History of You,” let us con-
sider another kind of interface that is at issue, albeit in a more indirect and
somewhat understated way: the interface between the individual subject
of memory and the social world in which the characters are embedded.
Just as the device is literally embedded in Liam’s flesh in “The Entire
History of You,” it has also been metaphorically embedded in a broader
field of social and discursive practices in the vaguely futuristic society in
which the Black Mirror episode is set. These practices dramatize the ways
in which the grain serves as an interface among the characters themselves
as well as between individuals and the social and legal structures that make
up the fabric of their world. An advertisement playing in the background
of one scene indicates that the grain is indeed a consumer product, with
its users urged to purchase upgrades that include “full spectrum memo-
ries” (which presumably involve the archiving of data corresponding to
the other senses). Furthermore, the line between consumer and citizen
appears to have been blurred as economic opportunities for private com-
panies coalesce with the interests of the state.18 Even while the citizens
in TEHY are not legally required to be implanted with a grain, those
who have been implanted enjoy certain benefits, including more expedi-
tious processing by security when traveling.19 Similarly, we see that new
economic opportunities have presented themselves for the adopters of
the grain technology. For instance, in the episode’s opening scene, we
meet Liam as he learns that the legal firm where he works is preparing
to expand into a novel field of litigation: children suing their parents for
damages against earnings on the grounds that they received insufficient
parental attention, based upon the admissibility of evidence captured by
the children’s devices.
It is not surprising that Liam and his friends find themselves suspended
between having fully naturalized the technology and still feeling some fas-
cination with those who enjoy a pre- or post-grain form of life, which now
strikes these young, affluent professionals as something exotic, not to say
transgressive. The same dinner party that gives Liam occasion to won-
der about Ffion’s fidelity also provides an opportunity for the characters
to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of grain technology. One of
them in particular, Hallam [Phoebe Fox], attracts the attention of the
others for her revelation that she no longer has a grain. She had been
assaulted a year earlier and her assailants had forcibly removed the device.
Finding that she preferred the vagaries of organic memory to the perfect
recall of the grain, she had decided against having a new one installed.
The group finds her story enthralling but her explanation leads to this
rebuke from Colleen [Rebekah Staton], another dinner guest who hap-
pens to work in grain development. Colleen is skeptical about any return
to organic, grainless memory:
34 D. LARAWAY
You know, half the organic memories you have are junk. Just not trustwor-
thy. With half the population you can implant false memories just by ask-
ing leading questions in therapy. You can make people remember getting
lost in shopping malls they never visited, getting bothered by pedophile
babysitters they never had.
Hallam makes no attempt to directly rebut Colleen’s argument about

the vulnerabilities of organic memory but the scene concludes with her
offering a simple rejoinder, albeit one which Nietzsche would certainly
endorse: “I’m just happier now.”
Liam’s dilemma in determining how to deal with his suspicions about
his wife echoes the disagreement between Hallam and Colleen. Specifi-
cally, he finds irresistible the temptation to assess her faithfulness in terms
of the documentary evidence provided by the grain. As the party con-
cludes and he returns home with Ffi, he replays a number of minor, seem-
ingly insignificant, moments that in retrospect had hinted at the complexi-
ties of her prior relationship with Jonas. Confronted with Liam’s findings,
Ffi at first attempts to explain them away but her faltering explanations are
unconvincing in light of the evidence provided by the grain. Her pleas for
forgiveness fall upon deaf ears. For his part, Liam slips into an emotional
abyss as he finds himself compelled to replay, time and again, the recol-
lected scenes that demonstrate her faithlessness. A direct confrontation
with Jonas about the affair not only fails to bring him relief but actu-
ally provides Liam with a still more troubling revelation, namely that his
young child was actually fathered by Ffion’s former lover.
So it is that “The Entire History of You” stages the confrontation
between the fallibility of organic memory on the one hand and the flaw-
less perfection of mechanical memory on the other. Nietzsche’s distinc-
tion between happiness and history could hardly have been more starkly
represented. Certainty, historical accuracy, and the potential for crushing
disappointment on the one side; uncertainty, ambiguity, yet the poten-
tial for happiness on the other: it would appear that the gap between the
body and its cognitive prostheses defines the parameters of the debate.
Liam’s cyborg-subjectivity, with his cognitive faculties distributed across
the boundary separating the organic from the artificial, embodies this ten-
sion. Unable to harmonize the two, he finally attempts to sever the bond
linking his somatic body to the embedded device and expunge his mem-
ories of Ffi, or at least take some measure of comfort from a return to the
inaccuracies and imperfections of organic memory alone.20
The final scene brings to a head the meaning of the interface in these
two registers, i.e., between the organic and computational memory of the
cyborg-subject on the one hand and between the individual subject and
the larger social framework in which he or she is embedded on the other.
In the episode’s dénouement, Ffi has abandoned Liam, who now wanders
through his empty house, unable to resist compulsively recalling brief,
quotidian scenes of the happy times he had shared with her before the
grain had undermined any hope of reconciliation. But even these mem-
ories, no matter how often Liam replays them, cannot compensate for
her absence. “The Entire History of You” concludes with Liam staring
at his own face in the mirror, razor blade in hand and blood dripping
into the sink, as he digs the grain out from his flesh. As he finally extracts
the device, a few final memories of Ffi flash like lightning bolts through
his consciousness. The screen fades to black, the mirror of the bathroom
now replaced by the black mirror of our viewing device, as if to shift the
burden for interpreting the final meaning of the story’s conclusion to us,
the viewers.
Liam’s troubled visage in the bathroom mirror is the perfect emblem
of the instability of the posthuman interface between, on the one hand,
the organic and the mechanical and, on the other, the private and the
public. “Funes the Memorious” similarly draws our attention to this prob-
lematic, liminal space. The night’s long conversation between the narra-
tor and Funes draws to a close as dawn begins to break. The light falls
upon Funes’s face, illuminating it for the first time since their conversation
began. The narrator cannot but be struck by the way his friend’s counte-
nance seems to disclose the gap between his human form and something
troublingly inhuman about him: “The leery light of dawn entered the
patio of packed earth,” the narrator recalls, and “it was then that I saw
the face that belonged to the voice that had been talking all night long.
Ireneo was nineteen, he had been born in 1868; he looked to me as mon-
umental as bronze—older than Egypt, older than the prophecies and the
pyramids” [“La recelosa claridad de la madrugada entró por el patio de
tierra. Entonces vi la cara de la voz que me toda la noche había hablado.
Ireneo tenía diecinueve años; había nacido en 1868; me pareció monu-
mental como el bronce, más antiguo que Egipto, anterior a las profecías
y a las pirámides”] (CF 137/OC 1.490). Funes’s visage suggests not
only timelessness but something monstrous, as if he were both tempo-
rality incarnate and yet somehow outside of the flow of time altogether,
36 D. LARAWAY
his nominally human form notwithstanding.21 As with Brooker’s stag-

ing of the final scene with Liam, whose face in the bathroom mirror has
become the site where the human and the inhuman meet, Borges makes
the disclosure of Funes’s countenance the decisive moment in revealing
the uncanny interface between the human and something altogether for-
eign. It will then fall to the reader, just as it does to Borges’s narrator, to
determine how to respond to this realization.
To Forgive, Divine
While the thematic and symbolic significance of these two moments is
undeniable, the concluding scenes in “The Entire History of You” and
“Funes the Memorious” also reveal something critical about the narrative
and mediatic forms these take even as they hint at the often neglected
richness of other ways of thinking about memory. Brooker offers us a
helpful starting point, as the episode’s final shot yields important clues
about the way that mediatic forms and the theme of memory are con-
nected. Let us rewind and replay once again that final scene in which
Liam confronts both himself and the unrelenting demons of his past in the
bathroom mirror. As the sequence begins, we meet Liam’s gaze directly,
as if we were on the opposite side of the bathroom mirror: it is a trope
from film and television which even the most casual viewer will recog-
nize. We watch as he replays a memory from the grain: it is an otherwise
banal moment when he had once been brushing his teeth while looking
into that same mirror. Ffi had suddenly appeared behind him, meeting his
gaze in the mirror as she asked him which dress he would prefer that she
wear for an evening out. The recollection fades, Liam is alone once again,
and the opaque film over his eyes dissipates, signaling the closing of the
memory loop. Once again he catches the viewer’s gaze in the mirror as he
lightly fingers the place just behind his left ear where his grain is located.
But as the camera then pans down to the razor blade resting on the
side of the sink, we realize that we are actually not on the other side of the
invisible mirror at all. We are on the same side of the mirror as Liam. Our
vantage point as viewers is the same as his. Initial impressions notwith-
standing, we have not been gazing at the protagonist from an ontologi-
cally secure space on the other side of the black mirror: we have literally
been seeing Liam—and, by extension, ourselves—through the character’s
own eyes. The spell is broken ever so briefly by a quick over-the-shoulder
shot that confirms that the device has in fact been removed from behind
Liam’s right ear, and not his left, as we would have inferred if we indeed
had occupied the space on the other side of the mirror. As Liam finally
removes the grain, we see, along with him, a final flurry of images of
Ffi that are abruptly replaced by the empty, black screen with which the
episode concludes.
At this point the meaning of the title, “The Entire History of You,”
comes into sharper focus. The viewer now understands that the second-
person form of address means that he or she has been interpellated all
along as not just an impartial observer but as a participant. Liam’s and
Ffion’s world of constant surveillance and digital memory is actually our
world as well. Those same electronic prostheses that extend the range
of the characters’ sight and memory turn out to already mediate our
own contact with the world in crucial ways. Consider our own viewing
habits when consuming streaming media. The scanning and reviewing
techniques that TEHY’s characters employ with their grain devices are
essentially the same procedures that we viewers use when taking in the
episode: we pause, we rewind, and, in an effort to ferret out the mean-
ing of apparently minor details, we avail ourselves of our ability to replay
brief moments of the program time and again, until the details in ques-
tion have yielded whatever meaning we had sought. This is why the full
force of the second-person pronoun “you” in the title is felt only when
we too recognize ourselves in the mirror, that is, when we recognize our
own place in Brooker’s parable about perception, memory, and, finally,
trust.
“The Entire History of You” in this way articulates a recurring theme
in Black Mirror. The idea is that emerging technologies—i.e., ones that
lie just beyond our current grasp but that are not so far removed from our
present capabilities that they strike us as altogether incredible—may iron-
ically turn out to disclose precisely those human frailties that they were
developed to ameliorate or conceal. TEHY provides a cautionary tale as
we enter what is ostensibly the age of the posthuman, when our cogni-
tive powers are enhanced in unimaginable ways by computing technolo-
gies that seem destined to eventually become naturalized through their
familiarity. McLuhan famously averred that our media gadgets are both
amputation devices—they isolate and cut off stimuli that we experience
as irritations (such as aspects of our social lives that are uncomfortable or
unsatisfying)—and extensions of ourselves. It thus stands to reason that
the devices’ amplification of our cognitive faculties would not only result
38 D. LARAWAY
in the enhancement of our information-processing faculties, but also bring

to light the more troubling aspects of our being.22
It is worth lingering a moment longer on the question of the medi-
atic forms that make this phenomenon of recognition possible. Jörgen
Skågeby has identified the grain technology in “The Entire History of
You” as an example of what he calls a “diegetic prototype” (Skågeby 3;
cf. Kirby 43). Diegetic prototypes are not-yet-existing technologies fea-
tured in works of fiction and film that allow us to not only imagine future
iterations of our current, embryonic technologies but which also serve a
crucial role in preparing a space—social, political, cultural, phenomeno-
logical—in our conceptual ecosystem for these technologies to inhabit
once they have been fully developed (cf. Kirby 44–47). More specifically,
for Skågeby, we take diegetic prototypes, like the grain device in TEHY,
to be valuable insofar as they prompt us to anticipate how new technolo-
gies may fail and, more to the point, the kinds of solutions their failure
would inspire. He finds the scene in which Liam removes the grain to
be of particular interest, as it signals one possible response to the fail-
ure of the diegetic prototype: “the grain in Black Mirror,” he claims, is
finally driven by a “nostalgic […] desire to return to the ‘pure body,’”
one that is “uninfected by technology” (11). In Skågeby’s view, Liam’s
rejection of the grain, vividly depicted in the moment that he physically
excises it from his flesh, suggests one potential solution to the failure of
the imagined technology. TEHY, he claims, endorses a position that he
calls “bioconservatism,” or the expression of a desire to return to what is
ostensibly the simple givenness of the organic flesh and the tacit accep-
tance of a form of dualism that he equates with a “heteronormative and
dichotomous imagination” (12).23
The sudden shock that the viewer feels when recognizing that he or
she is unexpectedly present in “The Entire History of You” is akin to
the shock that the narrator of “Funes the Memorious” feels when the
dawn breaks, the room is finally illuminated, and he sees for the first time
the face corresponding to the voice that had spoken to him throughout
the night. As his gaze finally meets Funes’s, he is jolted by an epiphany
of self-awareness as he realizes that every word he utters and every ges-
ture he makes will live on forever in his friend’s memory (CF 137/OC
1.490). Nothing, for Funes, is ephemeral; everything is eternal. Suddenly
the narrator understands that his own presence implicates him not only
in Funes’s memory but in the warp and woof of the narrative that he
himself is crafting. Just as he now holds the image of Funes fast in his
own organic memory—however imperfectly, however his memory may be

altered by his biases, his cognitive limitations, the passage of time—and
has transmitted that image to his readers, everything he says or does will
live on in Funes’s consciousness, his words and actions echoing forever in
the machinery of his mind.
We readers should not forget that “Funes the Memorious” is itself a
media artifact. As such, it is inseparably bound up with a host of cognitive
commitments and presuppositions about the meaning of the character’s
superhuman powers. In its very form the story highlights the interplay
between the computational memory of the story’s cyborg protagonist
and the cognitive limitations of the narrator as he sets down in writing
his memories of his friend. The narrator himself is quick to underscore
his faulty powers of recall when compared with those of Funes. The story
begins with his confession that if the authority to speak truthfully is pred-
icated upon an impeccable recall of the events just as they transpired, then
he himself is unreliable: “I recall him (though I have no right to speak
that sacred verb—only one man on earth did, and that man is dead)”
[“Lo recuerdo (yo no tengo derecho a pronunciar ese verbo sagrado,
sólo un hombre en la tierra tuvo derecho y ese hombre ha muerto”] (CF
131/OC 1.485). The remainder of the opening paragraph goes on in
that same vein, as if to ensure that we not fail to note both the narra-
tor’s claim to authority and the precariousness of the grounds on which
he had staked that claim: “I recall him—his taciturn face, its Indian fea-
tures […];” “I recall, I think, the slender, leatherbraider’s fingers […];” “I
recall, in the window of his house, a yellow straw blind with some painted
lake scene […];” “I clearly recall his voice […],” and so on [“Lo recuerdo,
la cara taciturna y aindiada …;” “Recuerdo (creo) sus manos afiladas de de
trenzador …;” “recuerdo en la ventana de la casa una estera amarilla …;”
“Recuerdo claramente su voz…]” (CF 131/OC 1.485; italics mine).
The persistent references to the narrator’s memories and the modest
warrant he can offer for them are linked to his awareness that his recol-
lections will form part of an edited volume to be published on Funes’s
case. The scholarly project of which his narrative forms a part is of course
a decidedly traditional vehicle for ascertaining the facts (and, more impor-
tantly, the meaning of the facts) about Funes’s story. By way of contrast
with the immaculate powers of perception and recall of the protagonist,
the narrator can only add his own voice to what we are to imagine will be
a chorus of voices, each of which will undoubtedly offer a distinct—and
quite possibly inconsistent—interpretation of the main character.
40 D. LARAWAY
It is therefore the interplay between Funes’s infallible memory and the

narrator’s more conventionally limited memories—and the latter’s obliga-
tion to invite the reader to test them against the recollections adduced by
others—that defines the contours of the narrative. The stories of Funes’s
boundless cognitive powers throw into relief the disclaimers and caveats
the narrator offers in order to justify his own understated account of his
meeting with Funes. But now the full meaning of his apologetic gestures
becomes more clear, in just the same way that daylight had finally pene-
trated Funes’s room. He confesses that his memories are potentially mis-
taken in some of the particulars, but this is in keeping with the narrative
form that the tale has taken: his is one in a number of analyses and memo-
ries of Funes that has been gathered for publication by some unidentified
third party.24 By comparison with the unimpeachable powers claimed by
of memory claimed by Funes himself, one might well imagine that such
an anthology would be impoverished indeed.
Such a project would have been incomprehensible to Funes himself.
This should not surprise us, since while Funes cannot not recall, he is
unable to narrate: as Beatriz Sarlo has memorably put it, the story pro-
vides a model of “the enslavement of discourse by direct experience”
(30).25 But it is precisely in the banality of limited, flawed, and imper-
fect recollections, distributed across a number of witnessing subjects—
the story’s readers, as well as the other contributors to the volume—that
narration becomes possible and the virtues of what has been called “dis-
tributed memory” are cast into relief.26 Even as the story revolves around
a character possessed of an infallible memory and superhuman powers of
perception, it also invites us to appreciate the forms in which more hum-
ble forms of recollection—always finite, incomplete, and even contradic-
tory—might be distributed among a plurality of fallible subjects. In the
same way that the logic of the cyborg invites us to reflect upon the possi-
bility that agency may be parsed out among a multiplicity of witnesses and
narrators rather than instantiated in a single, autonomous subject, “Fu-
nes” invites us to appreciate the phenomenon of distributed memory and
the ways in which it is connected to narrative form.27 While “Funes” gives
voice to the fantasy of a computer-subject for whom there is no possibility
of slippage or error in the gap between perception and recall, distributed
memory is a collaborative project of testimony that rejects the notion of
a single, infallible memory, as if recollection were ultimately a matter of
some kind of photographic fidelity to the past. Rather, we should regard
it as a discursive project in which we, as readers, play a critical role.28 This
project involves multiple, interdependent subjects, who are always finite

and fallible and finds expression in a mediatic form that is both time-worn
and yet perennially fresh and innovative.
The moment when the narrator’s gaze meets Funes’s, and its docu-
mentation in Borges’s story, demonstrates precisely what is at stake in the
contrast between the computational model of memory that Funes embod-
ies and this distinct notion of memory as a multivalued relation among
multiple subjects. The story reminds us that the phenomenon of recall
need not be interpreted along the lines suggested by Funes’s case—as a
simple two-place relation between a cognizing subject and some discrete
bit of information—but as a multi-place relation between two or more
individual subjects and some element of a shared past that binds them
together and whose meaning must be jointly negotiated and narrated.
For all the impressive features of the computational memories associated
with Funes and Liam, it seems that the raw data of which those memories
are comprised is not self-interpreting and that consequently it is not clear
to what extent it is truly meaningful.
Liam’s case demonstrates this perhaps even more perspicuously than
does Funes’s. While Liam has no trouble identifying his potentially incul-
patory memories of Ffion, he is repeatedly frustrated by the deep-seated
need to get others to agree as to the broader meaning of the images
that he recalls. At one point, he becomes fixated on a moment that had
occurred during the dinner party, when his wife’s former lover Jonas had
made a banal joke which Ffi appeared to find considerably more amus-
ing than the other guests. Unsatisfied that her response to Jonas’s humor
was not an attempt to signal her continued interest in him, Liam scru-
tinizes the brief memory clip endlessly, finally projecting the memory to
a public screen and appealing to the couple’s babysitter to weigh in on
whether the joke was funny enough to merit Ffi’s reaction. It is not only
an awkward moment that signals Liam’s increasingly obsessive pursuit of
evidence of his wife’s guilt but a testament to the gap he intuits between
his mechanically-curated memories and his attempt to ascribe social mean-
ing to them.
The most critical example of Liam’s need to socially negotiate the
meaning of his memories is provided by his disagreement with Ffi her-
self as to the significance of the visual and auditory evidence he calls up
on demand. Their exchange begins in a predictable enough way, quib-
bling about whether or not Ffion, in acknowledging her previous rela-
tionship with Jonas, had not deliberately understated the facts about their
42 D. LARAWAY
affair. But Liam quickly shifts gears and their disagreement ceases to be
a matter to be adjudicated by means of discussion but rather an oppor-
tunity for him to aggressively prosecute his case. Ffi, for her part, had
indeed mischaracterized the facts of the affair and she is forced to retreat
as Liam adduces additional video evidence captured by the grain. Finally,
as it becomes undeniable that her relationship with her former lover was
much more serious than she had let on—and as Liam suggests their child
might have actually been fathered by Jonas—she is left defenseless.29 Like
the skilled attorney that he is, Liam baits her into making more and more
compromising statements and she contradicts herself each step of the way.
As Liam establishes her guilt beyond any reasonable doubt, she can only
stammeringly protest that she is sorry, insisting that she loves him.
Finally humiliated and reduced to silence as Liam forces her to project
upon the screen the most damning evidence of the affair from her own
grain, Ffion’s body language demonstrates more effectively than her
words the depth of her contrition. But Liam is blind to this kind of evi-
dence. He is unwilling or unable to take into account the nonverbal but
nonetheless tangible signs of her regret since, in his view, her guilt and
the evidence of her continued inability to be fully forthcoming is deci-
sive. To the viewer, the scene is excruciating and, as Brooker himself has
noted, its raw intensity recalls Bergman’s Scenes from a Wedding (Inside
Black Mirror 57). It seems clear that Ffion’s shame is in large measure
evidence of her love for her husband, her earlier betrayal notwithstand-
ing. But Liam cannot or will not see this. For all intents and purposes, it
is as if his reliance on the grain had triggered a kind of emotional apha-
sia on his part, a perverse (if tragic) form of social blindness as to the
meaning of the things that he ostensibly holds most dear. His reliance
upon the memory-data of the grain leaves no place for any other kind
of meaningful evidence to be marshalled and adjudicated, including the
less quantifiable but no less tangible forms of mutual understanding that
join spouses and lovers. Liam recognizes that the memories stored on the
mechanical device do require interpretation even if he struggles to accept
the idea that this is not a project that he can complete on his own. Made
overly reliant on the technological precision of a prosthesis designed to
externalize and preserve his memories, he has ironically forgotten that
the meaning of some memories can only be determined collaboratively,
as the outcome of a delicate and ongoing negotiation between the histor-
ical record and the multiple parties that have a stake in how that record
binds them together (cf. Blackwell 59). And it is precisely in these epis-
temic gaps between fallible, finite subjects whose powers of perception
and memory are inherently limited, compromised, and even contaminated
that a space may open up for forgiveness and reconciliation. The kind of
truth that is finally at issue in TEHY is not of a sort that could be settled
by amassing a determinate number of salient facts, but is embodied as a
kind of socially-grounded trust or faith (Crain).
Perhaps it would not be too much to conclude that “Funes the Memo-
rious” and “The Entire History of You” ask us to imagine that the powers
of memory that each work examines might not be dismissed as mere fic-
tions or hypotheticals. As we have seen, in either case Borges and Brooker
oblige us to confront our natural tendency—almost as if it were the dictate
of some foreign, hard kernel deep within ourselves—to regard perception
and memory as primarily cognitive operations which may be exhaustively
described in the kind of mechanical language appropriate to an age of
cyborgs and supercomputers. But we can only do so by forgetting how
the limitations and affordances of their respective mediums show us that
the fantasy of total recall may turn out to be just that. It is a desire to
forget the invisible bonds that join us to others, indeed, to those from
whom we learn both how to remember and how to forget.
Notes
1. Ironically, when the characters in TEHY employ their technologically-
enhanced cognitive powers by privately reviewing memories captured with
the grain device, they are depicted with a misty, whitish film clouding their
eyes. It is, of course, an almost perfect inversion of the image in the Popol
Vuh in which the divinely-sanctioned limitations of human cognition are
represented by the mist with which the deity known as Heart of Sky clouds
the faces of his human creations.
2. For a few representative discussions of TEHY that invoke Borges’s story—
albeit without extended analysis—see Lima, Crain, and Burnstein. As for
the English-language title of the text, Andrew Hurley has chosen to render
the original “Funes el memorioso” as “Funes, His Memory” following
the inspiration of Borges’s early French translator, who had given the title
as “Funes ou La Mémoire.” I opt for the more traditional (if perhaps
less idiomatic) “Funes the Memorious” (cf. Hurley’s explanation for his
decision in CF 535).
3. “To think is to ignore (or forget) differences, to generalize, to abstract. In
the teeming world of Ireneo Funes there was nothing but particulars—and
44 D. LARAWAY
they were virtually immediate particulars” [“Pensar es olvidar diferencias,

es generalizar, abstraer. En el abarrotado mundo de Funes no había sino
detalles, casi inmediatos”] (CF 137/OC 1.490; italics in original). It is
unsurprising that neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga makes frequent
reference to “Funes the Memorious” in his Borges and Memory, although
his book is less an exercise in literary criticism per se than it is in draw-
ing upon Borges’s work to illustrate key principles regarding the brain
sciences.
4. As extraordinary as Funes’s situation is, it is not necessarily fanciful or
without parallel in the real world. Although we are not explicitly told as
much, we are given to understand that his powers of recall stem from
some sort of cerebral trauma sustained in the fall from the horse; sim-
ilar cases of extraordinary memory have been documented which seem
attributable to some kind of brain anomaly. To mention one example,
Funes’s condition seems to bear a more than passing resemblance to the
ailment known as hyperthymesia, first diagnosed in 2006, more than six
decades after Borges’s story was first published. According to the modest
literature on the topic, sufferers from this condition share a pathological
inability to expunge from their memory even the most minute details of
their daily experiences, even if these do not appear to be endowed with
any particular emotional significance. Jill Price, the first patient diagnosed
with the condition, has written an autobiography called The Woman Who
Can’t Forget. For the initial clinical report on her case, see Parker, Cahill,
and McGaugh.
5. Although I will refer to Brooker when discussing the “The Entire History
of You,” it should be understood that his role with regard to the episode
was to serve as executive producer. TEHY was directed by Brian Welsh
and written by Jesse Armstrong.
6. We might recall how Nietzsche insisted long ago that even our illusory
and naïve aspirations to speak the truth were themselves predicated upon
forgetfulness: truth, he famously announced, amounts to nothing but
a mobile army of metaphors whose origins have been forgotten (“On
Truth” 878).
7. The comparison is rendered somewhat more poignant by the fact that,
as the Second World War was still raging, Borges published a story sug-
gesting that the übermensch might take the form of a simple indigenous
youth from South America rather than the prototypical Aryan that the
Nazi devotees of Nietzsche might have imagined.
8. The term “pebble” is not actually used in the episode but this was in
fact the term for the device in the TEHY’s script and storyboards. See
Brooker, Inside Black Mirror 54–55.
9. Obviously the characterization of the cyborg offered here is not unrelated
to Donna Haraway’s classic formulation (149–81). See also Currier.
10. Hansen’s Embodying Technesis (2003) calls into question the widespread
assumption that technology may be admitted into discourse only on the
condition that it enter under the aegis of cultural constructionism; see
also his Bodies in Code for a robust defense of the claim that our bodies
are always already intertwined with the virtual, regardless of the stage of
our technological evolution. Hayles’s pioneering work on the discursive
dimensions of the posthuman touches upon Funes (cf. Hayles, How We
Became Posthuman 197), but she does not fully develop the resources the
story offers us, as Herbrechter and Callus point out (22).
11. It is tempting to develop a proleptic reading of Borges here: Borges first
published the story in the newspaper La Nación in 1942 and included it in
his seminal Ficciones which was published in 1944, just a few years before
Alan Turing published his quintessential paper “Computing Machinery
and Intelligence” (1950), in which he developed his famous test for deter-
mining whether or not a machine is capable of thought. Turing’s pro-
posal was that if machine-generated responses to questions could not be
distinguished from human-generated responses, then we would have no
grounds for denying the computer the ability to think. One might read
Borges’s story as if the narrator were describing his administration of the
test to Funes, who, in a sense, “passed.” But Borges could also be read
as developing a reductio ad absurdum argument regarding the Turing
test: Funes is undeniably human, from a biological standpoint. But in an
important respect, Funes actually fails the test of the human: the story
seems designed to hone our intuition that there is something uncannily
inhuman about Funes.
12. This explains Funes’s struggle to sleep: in order to take refuge from the
constant onslaught of images and memories, he would picture himself at
the bottom of a dark river, gently swaying in its current (CF 137/OC
1.490).
13. In one notable instance, the narrator does indeed ascribe figurative lan-
guage to Funes, when he recalls Funes’s claim that his memory is like a
garbage heap. The use of the simile presupposes, of course, its creator’s
ability to notice salient similarities between the two terms of comparison
and to disregard the numberless dissimilarities. How could Funes have
done this? We should remember that the narrator himself had acknowl-
edged perhaps engaging in some fanciful recreation of the details of his
conversation with Funes. His attribution of the simile to his friend seems
to be evidence of his own claim that the words Funes spoke to him
that night had become “irrecoverable” [“irrecuperables”] (CF 134/OC
1.488) and that he had engaged in some fanciful reconstruction.
14. “Funes, we must not forget, was virtually incapable of general, platonic
ideas. Not only was it difficult for him to see that the generic symbol ‘dog’
took in all the dissimilar individuals of all shapes and sizes, it irritated him
46 D. LARAWAY
that the ‘dog’ of three-fourteen in the afternoon, seen in profile, should

be indicated by the same noun as the dog of three-fifteen, seen frontally”
[“Éste, no lo olvidemos, era casi incapaz de ideas generales, platónicas. No
sólo le costaba comprender que el símbolo genérico perro abarcara tantos
individuos dispares de diversos tamaños y diversa forma; le molestaba que
el perro de las tres y catorce (visto de perfil) tuviera el mismo nombre que
el perro de las tres y cuarto (visto de frente)”] (CF 136/OC 1.490).
15. Martin goes on to note that Funes seems to push to its breaking point
the Lockean strategy of linking personal identity to memory: “As an ideal
Lockean subject, Funes falls apart: selfhood for him is nothing more than
the continual play of discrete images that captivate his consciousness. He
is, we might say, a kind of apotheosis of the empiricist subject, the subject
as Hume had no choice but to conceive of it: selfhood for the fictional
Funes has in fact become a fiction” (274).
16. One final point might be offered with regard to this reading of Funes
as not just a cyborg but, more radically, a computer-subject. Readers have
long found the last line of the story somewhat anticlimactic and disjointed
with respect to the rest of the tale: “Ireneo Funes,” we are abruptly told,
“died in 1889 of pulmonary congestion” [“Ireneo Funes murió en 1889,
de una congestión pulmonar”] (CF 137/OC 1.490). This may seem to
be an odd ending for a character who was defined by his peerless cognitive
abilities. But perhaps his cause of death would be more comprehensible if
we were to regard it as something akin to the sort of contingent hardware
failure that seem to always mark the permanent failure of a personal com-
puter. Funes’s pulmonary infection might be seen as nothing more nor
less than a system malfunction caused by some sort of deficiency or flaw
in the materials of which the computer is fashioned.
17. Roxana Kreimer has suggested that Borges might indeed have had Niet-
zsche’s essay “On the Utility and Liability of History for Life” in mind
when he first drafted “Funes,” alleging that Borges’s own copy of Niet-
zsche’s essay contained underlining and marginal notes, although she does
not offer any details about the particulars (189).
18. Not only does the episode touch upon the ways in which the grain may
play a role in creating a top-down surveillance culture, it also demonstrates
the allure of what has been called “lateral surveillance,” i.e., a means of
fomenting practices of multidirectional surveillance in which citizens freely
and fluidly exchange the roles watcher and watched (Blackwell 57).
19. The Foucauldian theme of biopower is woven through a number of
episodes of Black Mirror and the implantation of the grain device in the
subjects of TEHY represents an almost embarrassingly literal interpretation
of the phenomenon (Foucault 140–41; cf. Lima 153–54).
20. The dilemma faced by Liam might strike us as somewhat fanciful but it is
not altogether absurd. More than a decade ago a professor of art at NYU
had a video camera surgically implanted in his skull so as to document

his perceptions (Dolan); more recently, a research team from the École
Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland has demonstrated a pro-
totype of a telescopic contact lens, capable of switching between normal
vision and vision magnified by a factor of 3X (Rutkin). These and similar
technological advances—which we have every reason to believe will mul-
tiply in the foreseeable future—naturally tend to reinforce the widespread
beliefs that (1) our cognitive future will be determined in large measure
by cyborg logic and (2) that the brain itself is best regarded as a computer,
with the functions of memory and perception most satisfactorily modeled
as highly complex computations. There is of course a vast literature on
the second of these topics in particular: for a recent, popular defense of
the claim, see Marcus; for a rebuttal, see Epstein.
21. The timelessness of Funes’s visage from the narrator’s perspective stands
in sharp contrast to the constant flux of images to which he had grown
accustomed and which swamped any sense he might have had of self: “His
own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw
them” [“Su propia cara en el espejo, sus propias manos, lo sorprendían
cada vez”] (CF 136/OC 1.490).
22. It would be hard to imagine a more perspicuous representation of
McLuhan’s tetrad of laws of media than the grain technology. Particularly
notable is the way that the grain initially is developed in accordance with
the first law (whereby the media artifact serves as a mode of enhancement
of a capability or power) but then comes to exemplify the others as well
(obsolescence of other forms; retrieval of ostensibly lost media forms; and
reversal of the form’s original characteristics when pushed to its extremes).
See McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws 93–128. For a systematic discussion
of how each of the laws may be applied to the individual episodes of
Black Mirror, see Scolari. On the connections between media as autoam-
putation and extension devices, see McLuhan’s “The Gadget Lover” in
Understanding Media (41–47).
23. Skågeby’s point is well-taken, with one caveat. On my reading, it is not
just that Funes offers us a diegetic prototype of the posthuman cyborg in
advance of its historical emergence. It is that Brooker—as if hewing to the
argument laid out in Borges’s “Kafka and His Predecessors”—licenses us
to read Borges as having retrospectively imagined a space for a posthuman,
computational cyborg such as Liam. The arrow of causation thus points in
both directions. On the one hand, we could imagine Funes as a diegetic
prototype of a character who embodies fully a kind of technology that
was only nascent and unexplored at the time of the story’s writing; on the
other hand, it is thanks to the work of visionaries such as Brooker that
48 D. LARAWAY
we may read Borges as having retrospectively written about posthuman

cyborgs before they existed in reality.
24. “I applaud the idea that all of us who had dealings with the man should
write something about him: my testimony will perhaps be the briefest
(and certainly the slightest) account in the volume that you are to publish
[…]” (“Me parece muy feliz el proyecto de todos aquellos que lo trataron
escriban sobre él; mi testimonio será acaso el más breve y sin duda el más
pobre […]”) (CF 131/OC 1.485).
25. John Sturrock, like Sarlo, sees Funes primarily as a failed narrator who is
forced to rely upon the story-telling capacities of others to make his own
story intelligible: “it is the narrator of ‘Funes’ who offers the paralyzed
victim a chance of escaping from his excessive temporality [sic] through
literature” (111).
26. There is a rich and growing philosophical and psychological literature
on distributed memory, or, as Heersmink characterizes it, the view that
“rather than seeing our cognitive system as instantiated only by the brain,
we should see it as spread out across embodied brains and information-
structures in the environment” (3136). Hayles, of course, would argue
that the these “information structures” include narrative. See, in particu-
lar, her chapter “Toward Embodied Virtuality” in How We Became Posthu-
man (1–24).
27. Hayles has made a cognate point, namely, that discussions of distributed
agency in the biological sciences—she takes the work of Richard Dawkins
as representative—tend to efface their own critical rhetorical moves which
subtly reintroduce familiar notions of agency but at the level of narrative
form. See her “Desiring Agency” (152) in addition to How We Became
Posthuman.
28. Jonathan Boulter has developed an insightful reading of “Funes” that
posits that the work requires the reader to “prosthetically” complete a nar-
rative which from the vantage point of the protagonist—a hysteric victim
of trauma—is altogether unintelligible (“Borges and the Trauma” 126–
34).
29. While it appears that the evidence is inconclusive as to whether Liam is
the biological father of the couple’s child, Brooker himself has expressed
the view that Liam was actually mistaken in believing that the child was
not his: “Sometimes people think […] that he’s not the dad. But Liam is
the father of the child, so he’s ruined his life. The moral, if there is one,
is he shouldn’t have gone looking for something that was only going to
upset him. His wife loved him and there were secrets in the past, but he
should have let them lie” (Inside Black Mirror 56; italics in original).
CHAPTER 3
Nostalgia, the Virtual, and the Artifice

of Eternity
Abstract “San Junipero” (S03:E04) has been hailed as an uncharacteris-

tically sunny tale in a television series better known for its bleak, dystopian
view of the impact of new technologies on social relationships. Set pri-
marily in the 1980s, it asks us to imagine not only that one may live
forever in a virtual environment but that the fantasy spaces opened up
by new technologies may make it possible to realize possibilities for per-
sonal fulfillment that we might not have imagined before. But it is far
from clear how we should understand the relevant notion of the “vir-
tual” in the world that Brooker asks us to imagine. It is argued that a
helpful clue for reading “San Junipero” may be found in Borges’s clas-
sic story “The South,” which not only features a similarly nuanced and
conceptually rich notion of “the virtual” but also exploits the structure
of nostalgia, which is an essential catalyst for Brooker’s tale. The result is
a dual reading of Brooker and Borges that underscores how the logic of
the virtual is not to be found only in fanciful science-fiction scenarios but
may be deeply embedded in our most banal experiences, rendering them
alternately hopeful and terrifying.
Keywords Virtual · Nostalgia · “San Junipero” · “The South”

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44238-5_3
50 D. LARAWAY
Heaven Is a Place on (Virtual) Earth

To judge from the plaudits that “San Junipero” (S03:E04) has received
from casual viewers and critics alike, the program may well be without
parallel among the first three seasons of Black Mirror in terms of its
popularity and the amount of passionate discussion and analysis it has
generated.1 And for good reason: it offers us a well-crafted love story
involving two sympathetic characters; it makes an appeal directly to the
viewer’s conscience as it raises awareness of the challenges that the gay
community has historically faced, including in the recent past; its mem-
orable conclusion is predicated upon an intriguing conceit that manages
to raise complex metaphysical and ethical puzzles in a compelling way;
and it displays, at least for some viewers, a degree of optimism and hope-
fulness that one does not generally expect from Black Mirror.2 What’s
more, in addition to its other virtues, “San Junipero” has been praised
for its vivid depiction of 1980s popular culture in a way that cannot but
evoke nostalgia on the part of those viewers who lived through that time
and perhaps a tinge of envy on the part of those who have not.3 In this
respect it may be called a triumph in its aesthetic as well as its intellectual
ambitions. Now, it might not appear at first glance that “San Junipero”—
a tale of lesbian lovers, the guilty pleasures of pop culture, disembodied
consciousness, and a vision of an eternity comprised of ones and zeroes—
has much in common with Borges’s “The South” [“El Sur”], a story of
a lonely librarian who seeks redemption in the Argentine flatlands. But
to read the two narratives together yields surprising dividends. For they
both invite us to interrogate the logic that subtends the computer simu-
lation (in the case of “San Junipero”) and the hallucination (in the case of
“The South”) even as they prompt a revalorization of the notion of the
virtual itself. And the “artifice of eternity”—to borrow a phrase from W.
B. Yeats—that each story envisions will turn out to be both unexpectedly
distant from, and close to, what we are accustomed to think of as our
ordinary reality.
Let us begin with “San Junipero” and its recounting of the story of a
shy, insecure young woman named Yorkie [Mackenzie Davis] who finds
her way into a lively club in an alluring resort town. There she strikes up a
friendship with the vivacious and uninhibited Kelly [Gugu Mbatha-Raw],
who endeavors to bring her out of her shell. Against a backdrop of pas-
tels, neon, a lot of hairspray, and a soundtrack featuring the likes of The
Bangles, Robbie Nevil, and Simple Minds, the two become lovers, even
3 NOSTALGIA, THE VIRTUAL, AND THE ARTIFICE OF ETERNITY 51
as we learn that the awkward Yorkie, somewhat incongruously, is already

engaged to be married. Little by little we begin to piece together the
women’s backstories as the true nature of San Junipero—which seems to
exist solely as a kind of fantasy space to which characters such as Yorkie
and Kelly have limited, temporary, access—comes into view. It turns out
that the bustling resort town is a computer simulation populated primarily
by deceased individuals whose consciousness has been extracted and pre-
served on hard drives managed by a company called TCKR Systems. The
youthful lovers are actually the avatars of enfeebled elderly women who
are near death. The two have only entered San Junipero on a trial basis
before deciding whether or not to have their disembodied consciousnesses
uploaded definitively to the virtual world managed by the corporation.
For Yorkie, a lesbian who had been disavowed by her family when she
came out to them as a young woman, the decision to be together forever
with her lover—albeit in virtual form—is simple and clear; for her bisexual
partner the matter is more complicated. While in the real world Kelly is
happy to take the place of the dying Yorkie’s fiancé and thereby help
her surmount a legal obstacle that would have kept Yorkie from being
uploaded permanently into San Junipero, she is initially unwilling to cross
over permanently into the digital world. Having spent nearly five decades
married to a loving husband, and having shared with him all the joys and
pains of a long life together—including the loss of a daughter who never
had the opportunity to choose whether or not to have her consciousness
uploaded to the platform—Kelly hesitates to step into a digitally-curated
eternity with Yorkie and is anxious to show her husband and daughter
the same fidelity in death that she had shown them in life. Kelly finally
makes her decision: she dies and her physical body is laid to rest next to
her husband and child. But it turns out that she has also arranged for her
consciousness to be uploaded to the hard drives maintained by TCKR
Systems. As the episode draws to a close, we watch as the youthful virtual
avatars of the two women meet once again in the resort town, where—in a
scene that effectively updates the iconic ending to Thelma & Louise—they
take a recklessly uninhibited and joyful spin in their convertible, fearing
nothing and no one. They finally wind up in the club where they had
first met, happily dancing to the strains of Belinda Carlisle’s 1987 hit,
“Heaven is a Place on Earth.”
The sheer emotional exuberance of the scene has led many viewers to
praise what they regard as a welcome note of hopefulness in the pro-
gram, a rarity in a series like Black Mirror that inclines more generally
52 D. LARAWAY
toward a dystopian outlook.4 But lest we put too much stock in any vis-
ceral response to the scene of Kelly and Yorkie’s reunion, the final shot of
the episode is bracing. The image of the two young lovers in each oth-
er’s arms, caught in the sensual music of an endless summer, segues to a
scene set on the tech corporation’s campus. As the closing credits roll and
Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven” continues to play—extradiegetically, now—
we watch as a robotic arm loads two small electronic storage devices into
their corresponding slots in a seemingly endless bank of blinking, num-
bered hard drives, each of them presumably running the software that
populates the virtual fantasy worlds that have been ordered up by TCKR
System’s clients. None of this is unexpected: as viewers, we had already
been introduced to the idea that our youthful protagonists were not really
embodied human beings but rather just so many lines of computer code.
But the montage juxtaposing Yorkie and Kelly’s joyful dancing in the club
with the banks of computers running the software programs in which they
“live” is sobering nonetheless. The screen fades to black as we hear the
former Go-Go’s vocalist sing these lines from her emblematic 80s hit:
“In this world we’re just beginning / to understand the miracle of liv-
ing.” The “miracle of living,” it would appear, is the miracle of a virtual
life beyond bodily death, a life curated by anonymous programmers and
maintained by a powerful tech corporation. Of course it is far from clear
what it would mean to say that we are “just beginning to understand”
any of this.
Virtual/Reality
To be sure, the philosophical terrain here is not exactly uncharted: the
image of the robotic arm inserting the characters’ extracted conscious-
nesses into a hard drive where it will be fed experiential prompts via
the “San Junipero” software calls to mind the venerable brain-in-a-vat
thought experiment associated with philosopher Hilary Putnam. Putnam
had famously asked us to consider what grounds, if any, we might have for
advancing or rejecting the claim that we might not be just brains stored
in a vat of chemical nutrients, whose sensory inputs have been replaced
by direct electrical stimulation and which thus do not correspond to any
stimuli originating in the outside world (Putnam 1–21).5 Even at that, the
brain-in-a-vat thought experiment is not altogether novel: the scenario
Putnam described is essentially an updated version of the “evil genius”
scenario Descartes had contrived centuries ago; “San Junipero” would
seem to offer us but a twenty-first century, technologically-enhanced,

twist on what by now has become a well-established philosophical motif.6
But even though it is natural to regard the virtual in “San Junipero”
as standing in contradistinction to the real just as it does in the Cartesian
tradition, it is not clear that this characterization of the problem fully
accounts for the vision that Brooker offers. It is also possible to think
of the virtual world represented by the San Junipero program not as an
ersatz substitute for the real world but rather as an essential component
of it, an extension of it, a kind of causally efficacious force that does not
strictly speaking exist but which nevertheless determines the contours of
reality itself. The kind of point I have in mind is one that Slavoj Žižek
has often vigorously defended, as he does here by way of contrast with
the manner in which the Cartesian tradition disposes us to think of the
virtual:
Virtual Reality in itself is a rather miserable idea: that of imitating reality,

of reproducing its experience in an artificial medium. The reality of the
Virtual, on the other hand, stands for the reality of the Virtual as such, for
its real effects and consequences. Let us take an attractor in mathematics:
all positive lines or points in its sphere of attraction only approach it in
an endless fashion, never reaching its form—the existence of this form is
purely virtual, being nothing more than the shape towards which lines and
points tend. However, precisely as such, the virtual is the Real of this field:
the immovable focal point around which all elements circulate. (Organs
3–4)
On Žižek’s view, the virtual is not so much an ontological category to

be juxtaposed with reality but an invisible, unlocalizable mechanism that
does not, strictly speaking, “exist” in any positive way, but which nev-
ertheless discloses itself indirectly insofar as it plays a causally efficacious
role in shaping reality itself. Reality on this view is inherently incomplete,
impoverished, and requires a sort of surreptitious positing of the virtual
in order to maintain the illusion of its ontological and ideological con-
sistency. The virtual, then, is that which supplements, which patches up,
the ideological inconsistencies in reality itself, precisely because the virtual
does not exist as such. It follows that the virtual in the last analysis does
not really compete directly with reality per se; rather, in its structuring
of reality it inevitably discloses reality’s ontological gaps and fissures (cf.
Žižek, “From Virtual Reality”).
54 D. LARAWAY
In what sense does the virtual in “San Junipero” function as an ide-

ological supplement to reality itself? Perhaps fittingly, the question can
only be answered indirectly, with reference to its effects. We might begin
by noting that if we were to limit our examination of “San Junipero”
to the ways in which it employs a particular technological conceit—i.e.,
the system for extracting and archiving consciousness in artificial envi-
ronments—in order to update a now well-worn philosophical problem,
it is not clear that we could fully explain the affective dimensions of the
episode that give it its peculiar richness and flavor. Indeed, I shall argue
that, far from being a pleasant but ultimately inconsequential element of
the conceptual infrastructure of “San Junipero,” the carefully curated 80s
aesthetic that has so impressed the program’s viewers is actually integral
to the functioning of the virtual in “San Junipero.” The operative notion
of the virtual in the episode is not exhausted by the Cartesian tradition,
which tends to regard the virtual as a simulation of reality which is gener-
ated and sustained by a mechanism of one sort of another, whether it be a
dream (Descartes), an evil genius who deliberately deceives us (Descartes
again), a brain-in-a-vat scenario (Putnam) a malevolent corporation (e.g.,
as in The Matrix), or a presumably benevolent one (TCKR Systems).
Neither is it reducible, I think, to Baudrillard’s familiar notions of sim-
ulations and simulacra.7 What these notions of virtual-as-simulation leave
out, are other crucial valences of the virtual, including the ways in which
it structures our ordinary, daily reality. In the case of “San Junipero” we
should not neglect the philosophical significance of the distinctive emo-
tional response that the episode has prompted on the part of so many
viewers, who have tended to engage the program’s distinctive aesthetic
in the mode of nostalgia. Indeed, something like an aesthetics of nostal-
gia will turn out to be the key register in which the virtual exercises its
effects in “San Junipero,” even as traditional metaphysical and epistemo-
logical puzzles exercise their hold on the viewer in more obvious ways.
The issues that “San Junipero” raises are indeed philosophically com-
plex and emotionally fraught. But a first step toward grasping the kind of
life that “San Junipero” seems to commend to us is to appreciate more
fully the complex nature of the gap between the real and the notion of the
virtual to which I have alluded. To be sure, much of the program’s intel-
lectual appeal derives precisely from traditional puzzles about the nature
and justification of our knowledge about the world and specifically the
possibility that our beliefs about our place in it may be radically mistaken.
But to focus exclusively on this narrow framing of the problem of the
virtual-as-simulation is to miss a more immediate lesson about the ways

in which it is embedded in our quotidian experience.
Borges famously stated in the 1956 prologue to Ficciones that his now-
canonical tale “The South” lent itself to two very different readings. On
the one hand, the story of Juan Dahlmann—a librarian from Buenos Aires
who falls ill, only to miraculously recover and meet his destiny on the
vast Argentine flatlands that he had daydreamed about—could be read, in
Borges’s words, as “a forthright narration of novelistic events” [“directa
narración de hechos novelescos”]. On the other hand, Borges cryptically
observed that the tale could be read “in quite another way” [“de otro
modo”] (CF 129/OC 1.483). In a subsequent interview, Borges was yet
more direct about what this second reading might entail: in addition to
the narrowly realistic interpretation of the story, he noted that one could
posit that everything that happened subsequent to the protagonist’s hos-
pitalization was a hallucination on his part brought about by blood poi-
soning. On the verge of dying in the clinic, the feverish librarian dreamed
instead that he was to meet the fate he had always longed for, knife in
hand, on the endless plains of the South.8 This is the Borgesian equiva-
lent of the brain-in-a-vat scenario: our hero may turn out to be endlessly
haunting the stacks of an imaginary library when he believes himself to
roam freely outside.
Both Brooker’s “San Junipero” and Borges’s “The South” set before
us two apparently disjunct narrative frames. The first of these is associated
in a fairly straightforward way with what we might call ordinary reality
and it features the elderly and infirm Yorkie and Kelly in the former case
and a feverish Dahlmann in the latter. The second, involving a degree
of fantasy or simulation (whether oneiric or encoded in a computer pro-
gram) might be properly regarded as a staging of the virtual-as-simulation
and it encompasses both Dahlmann’s fantasy of the South and Yorkie
and Kelly’s life together in San Junipero. Both “San Junipero” and “The
South” accordingly invite us to cultivate a strategy of double-reading, of
combining the straightforward narration of ordinary reality with the nar-
ration of the simulation or dream. But Borges’s explicit identification of
these two conflicting interpretations of “The South” amounts to a tacit
invitation for the reader to posit a third reading, i.e., one that, in good
Hegelian fashion, would invite us to speculate about how the two “au-
thorized” accounts may stand in relation to each other. Any satisfying
interpretation of both “San Junipero” and “The South” will require us
to say something about the implications of the narrative strategies that
56 D. LARAWAY
allow apparently straightforward stories to be told in divergent registers

simultaneously.9 The relevant notion of the virtual that enables us to do
so turns out to be connected in a surprising way with a key aspect of
“San Junipero” to which we have already alluded: its incorporation of
the affective powers of nostalgia. Ironically, the futuristic premise of “San
Junipero” depends upon a certain aesthetics of nostalgia that gives struc-
ture and form to desire itself—thus making possible the ostensibly happy
ending that so many viewers of the program have found satisfying—even
while it occludes its troubling underside. Again, the clue we shall follow
comes from Borges.
From the outset, our introduction to “The South’s” protagonist, Juan
Dahlmann, trains our attention upon the ways in which his quotidian
reality is shown to be deficient by comparison with the unrealized possi-
bilities that structure it, precisely by their absence. The year is 1939 and
Dahlmann is a municipal librarian living in Buenos Aires. He is a bookish
romantic who dreams of living the kind of authentic life he associates with
Francisco Flores, his quintessentially Argentine maternal grandfather, who
had been a distinguished participant in the 1870s military campaign to
subdue the indigenous peoples of Patagonia. To Dahlmann’s chagrin, he
realizes that his life has followed instead the script of his paternal grand-
father and namesake, Johannes Dahlmann, an evangelical clergyman who,
having emigrated to Argentina in 1871, was preaching in the city while
Francisco Flores was fighting in the countryside. Despite having lived an
unremarkable life in the vein of Johannes, Juan has spent a lifetime sur-
rounding himself with cultural accoutrements that bear witness to his fas-
cination with the romantic life of Francisco Flores; this is the fantasy that
makes his dull daily existence bearable. The crown jewel of these is the
Flores family home in the mythical south which Dahlmann had some-
how managed to hold on to throughout the years without ever actually
dwelling there (CF 174/OC 1.525).
It is crucial to note that the family home—and its metonymical asso-
ciation with the South—is the primary linchpin of Dahlmann’s private
desires rather than a place to be physically inhabited. Indeed, it is not in
spite of its remoteness that the house holds a particular significance for the
protagonist. Rather, its importance stems precisely from its absence from
his tangible daily reality. Why had Dahlmann never actually removed him-
self to the South before? Our narrator can only speculate: “His work, and
perhaps his indolence, held him in the city,” he claims, so that “summer
after summer he contented himself with the abstract idea of possession
and with the certainty that his house was waiting for him, at a precise
place on the flatlands” [“Las tareas y acaso la indolencia lo retenían en la
ciudad. Verano tras verano se contentaba con la idea abstracta de posesión
y con la certidumbre de que su casa estaba esperándolo, en un sitio preciso
de la llanura”] (CF 174/OC 1.525). The narrator’s vagueness here as to
Dahlmann’s motives is not unwarranted. The protagonist’s reluctance or
inability to actually take possession of the house that emblematizes his
desires constitutes our first clue that the house is not merely one item
among many in his libidinal economy but that it plays an invisible yet
essential structural role in it. Like Kafka’s castle or Achilles’ arrow, the
house is a vanishing point on the horizon that cannot be reached and its
virtual structure defines the entire domain of Dahlmann’s fantasy.10
Dahlmann’s family home on the plains is a sort of unreachable location
that plays a crucial, highly personalized role for him and the club in “San
Junipero” plays a similar role for Yorkie. As the place she metonymically
associates with Kelly, it too is essentially a crucial load-bearing beam in the
infrastructure supporting her fantasy. We need not be confused here by
the fact that so much of the story of “San Junipero” is set directly in the
club, while the question whether Dahlmann ever reaches his destination
on the southern plain is left open. In either case, the location is purely
functional and serves as a kind of point de capiton that stabilizes the char-
acters’ fantasies. It would not be too much to say that the power that
inheres in Dahlmann’s house on the pampa and Yorkie’s crowded club in
San Junipero is predicated precisely upon the condition that these spaces
remain virtual, that they not become simply banal, ordinary locations on
the same plane as other sites and locations in the real world, even if they
might appear totally unremarkable to a disinterested observer. To deny
their virtual status in this way would be to deny the power they wield
over the subjects in thrall to them. Indeed, that power resides precisely
in the fact that it is not actualized, for any attempt to exercise that power
directly would cause it to dissipate, in much the same way that kompro-
mat —to take an example much in the news these days—is most effective
when it remains exclusively virtual and its specific contents occluded from
the subject about whom it is gathered (cf. Davidson).
58 D. LARAWAY
From Trauma to Nostalgia: Foreseeing

the Past, Remembering the Future
In both “San Junipero” and “The South,” the generally unseen and
unguessed aspects of the virtual are disclosed obliquely through trauma;
traces of that trauma are in turn imprinted on otherwise unremarkable
elements of the characters’ everyday reality, endowing them with a kind
of double meaning as they function simultaneously in the realm of simu-
lation and the realm of daily existence. In “San Junipero,” it is the trauma
of the paralysis Yorkie suffers in a car wreck as a young woman when she
flees home after coming out to her unsupportive parents. In “The South”
it is the trauma of the head injury that Dahlmann sustains while absent-
mindedly reading The Arabian Nights and climbing some stairs. In each
case the function of trauma is not to constitute the virtual per se or to
magically summon it into being—the virtual is always at work behind the
curtains of ordinary reality anyway—but to render its effects visible. It
does this by transubstantiating particular items in the repertoire of the
main characters. The primary mechanism for doing so is by means of an
uncanny doubling of signifiers: specific elements of each story come to be
endowed with significance and serve as inflection points where quotidian
reality and its virtual infrastructure are rendered together.
Those readers of Borges who are interested in penetrating beyond the
most obvious interpretation of “The South”—what Borges referred to as
the “forthright narration of novelistic events”—have accordingly trained
their attention upon the ways in which particular elements in the first
part of the story are duplicated in the second part, after the protagonist
is suddenly and unexpectedly released from the hospital and sent to the
countryside to recuperate.11 Although these items appeared to be of no
particular interest when they were first mentioned, in the second part of
the story, after Dahlmann is discharged, the reader notes with the bene-
fit of hindsight that they constitute evidence for the hallucinatory inter-
pretation of the protagonist’s fate. Thus the doctor’s needle becomes the
gaucho’s knife; the hospital orderly becomes the owner of the small coun-
try shop where Dahlmann is challenged to the duel; the open door jamb
that gave him blood poisoning becomes the bread crumb thrown at him
by the drunken miscreant looking for a fight. “Reality is partial to sym-
metries and slight anachronisms” [“A la realidad le gustan las simetrías y
los leves anacronismos”], the narrator had coyly noted upon Dahlman-
n’s discharge from the hospital, as if to ensure that the reader not miss
the primary strategy for the indirect staging of the virtual that is to fol-
low (CF 175/OC 1.526). The logic of dreaming—and in particular the
piecemeal way that dreams draw upon elements found in waking experi-
ence—shapes the retrospective reading of the story, according to which
Dahlmann passes away in the urban hospital rather than in the pampas.
“San Junipero” employs a similar strategy of endowing particular signi-
fiers with multiple meanings, even if the narrative frames are now inverted
and we unwittingly take our initial bearings from the simulation rather
than the main characters’ daily reality. And, as with Borges, the signifi-
cance of these details only becomes apparent when we view them in ret-
rospect. So it is that alert viewers may notice that the apparently unre-
markable name of the club where Kelly and Yorkie meet—“Tucker’s”—is
derived from the name of the tech company, TCKR Systems, that has
designed and maintains the simulation. We discover that Yorkie’s aversion
to playing the Top Speed video game in the club’s arcade stems from her
recollection of having been paralyzed in a car crash. A promotional poster
that appears outside the club for the 1987 movie Lost Boys (tagline: “Sleep
all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It’s fun to be a vam-
pire”) turns out to be not just a bit of innocuous 80s color but a prescient
commentary on the fate of San Junipero’s ghostly inhabitants. And songs
featured in the soundtrack that at first appeared to have been selected
simply for period ambience are revealed to be uncannily on point once
we understand the nature of the simulation in which Yorkie is embedded
(e.g., The Smiths’ “Girlfriend in a Coma,” Alexander O’Neal’s “Fake,”
Living in a Box’s eponymous hit single, and so on).12
I mentioned earlier that Borges had explicitly acknowledged the possi-
bility of two distinct readings of “The South.” On the one hand, we have
the narrowly realistic one that asks us to take each element of the story
at face value, while on the other we have the fantastic one, according to
which those same elements become invested with fresh meanings once we
have divined the hallucinatory logic of the simulated world in question.
But, again, to identify two conflicting or competing readings in this vein
is tantamount to acknowledging the possibility of a third reading that
would somehow mediate between them. In both “The South” and “San
Junipero” this alternative reading begins to emerge once we acknowledge
that the clues that illuminate the dreaming or simulation scenarios are at
the same time clues to the disclosure of the virtual, not as an imitation of
reality but as a kind of invisible substructure that subtends the logics of
60 D. LARAWAY
both dreams and ordinary reality. But what more can be said about the
nature of this third reading?
Note first how the evidence for the oneiric interpretation of “The
South” is not limited to the duplication of symbols and motifs. Rather,
the entirety of Dahlmann’s experience as he leaves the hospital is colored
by an uncanny fusion of temporalities: everything that happens to him
during his present journey meshes perfectly with the images he bears in
mind of the South as it was, or how it believes it must have been, in a
more remote past. He climbs into an old-time carriage as the trip begins
and discovers to his delight that everything is already in its right place: “A
few seconds before his eyes registered them, he would recall the corners,
the marquees, the modest variety of Buenos Aires. In the yellow light
of the new day, it all came back to him” [“Unos segundos antes de que
las registraran sus ojos, recordaba las esquinas, las carteleras, las modestas
diferencias de Buenos Aires. En la luz amarilla del nuevo día, todas las
cosas regresaban a él”] (CF 176/OC 1.526). Of course we come to sus-
pect that it is not just that Dahlmann is endowed with unusual powers of
memory such that he literally foresees countless details before he encoun-
ters them again. It is rather that the immediacy of sense-perception in the
present is short-circuited and rerouted through the machinery of memory
so as to perfectly synchronize the two. What he “sees” is indistinguishable
from what he remembers.
In similar fashion his experiences in the present seem to fuse with
emotionally-charged, if trivial, memories from his youth, as when the
lunch that he is served on the train is placed before him in bowls of
shining metal “as in the now-distant summers of his childhood” [“como
en los ya remotos veraneos de la niñez”] (CF 176/OC 1.527). And
in still other cases, his perceptions seem to have been filtered through
something akin to a literary or archetypal unconscious which draws upon
collectively shared, rather than personal, memories. Thus the old gau-
cho that Dahlmann encounters in the country store could have walked
straight out of central casting, as he seems to exemplify all the familiar
traits Dahlmann—the connoisseur of a certain romantic vision of Argen-
tine history—had associated with the gauchos of times long past:
He was small, dark, and dried up, and he seemed to be outside time, in
a sort of eternity. Dahlmann was warmed by the rightness of the man’s
hairband, the baize poncho he wore, his gaucho trousers, and the boots
made out of the skin of a horse’s leg, and he said to himself […] that only
in the South did gauchos like that exist anymore.
[Era oscuro, chico, reseco, y estaba como fuera del tiempo en una
eternidad. Dahlmann registró con satisfacción la vincha, el poncho de
bayeta, el largo chiripá y la bota de potro y se dijo […] que gauchos
de esos ya no quedan más que en el Sur.] (CF 178/OC 1.528)
In short, as Dahlmann’s own story continues to evolve toward its inex-

orable, if ambiguous, conclusion, his future seems to have been shaped—
perhaps even overdetermined—by the contours of a highly idealized past
crafted for him personally out of fragments of recollection, fantasy, and
half-forgotten books. This why the narrator can say, as Dahlmann, knife
in hand, prepares to meet his destiny, that “had he been able to choose
or dream his death that night, this is the death he would have dreamed or
chosen” [“si él, entonces, hubiera podido elegir o soñar su muerte, ésta
es la muerte que hubiera elegido o soñado”] (CF 179/OC 1.530). Had
his life been a play and he its author, Dahlmann could not have written a
more perfect script.
To be sure, the artfulness of this script manifests itself in strange ways.
Dahlmann appears at times to be on the cusp of awareness of the curious
form in which the elements of his ordinary experiences have been subli-
mated and yet his engagement with them never quite reaches the thresh-
old of consciousness. Rather, these details serve to bathe his experiences
in a haze, as if the universe itself had determined to engulf him in a highly
stylized reality that somehow comported perfectly with his desires. Ironi-
cally, Dahlmann regards this luminous sheen of the world as an indication
that he has finally managed to leave behind the artifice and falsity of his
previous mundane existence as a librarian in exchange for something more
pure, more authentic, something almost more real than reality itself. Once
he makes himself comfortable on the train that will take him to the south,
his first impulse is to pick up the same book, The Arabian Nights , that
he had been inspecting when he originally suffered the traumatic head
injury. However, as a token of his triumph over his earlier misfortunes,
Dahlmann decides to close the book instead, allowing himself “simply to
live” [“se dejaba simplemente vivir”] (CF 176/OC 1.527).13 Dahlman-
n’s closing of the book and his attendant determination “simply to live”
suggests he dwells now in an almost Heideggerian mode, unburdened by
the ballast of an overly intellectualized engagement with the world and
relishing his triumph over “the frustrated forces of evil” [“las frustradas
62 D. LARAWAY
fuerzas del mal”] (CF 176/OC 1.527) as he undertakes his journey to

the south.
But in what does this living consist? It is not only that the very perfec-
tion of the artifice itself signals that he might be inhabiting a simulation
or dream: that much could have been readily inferred from the evidence
for the second of the two “authorized” readings of the story to which we
have already alluded. Rather, the uncanny integrity and coherence of the
simulation suggests that it is driven by something like the logic of nostal-
gia, which, as an indirect form of disclosure of the virtual, gives a partic-
ular shape and physiognomy to one’s experience. The central idea is this:
taking the impoverishment of our current moment as a point of depar-
ture, we seek to remedy the present’s perceived deficiencies by appeal to
a highly stylized version of the past. We thus adopt the narrative tech-
nique of what Linda Hutcheon calls “nostalgic distancing” as a means
of abiding in a complex and unsatisfying present. Hutcheon notes that
the mechanism of nostalgic distancing “sanitizes as it selects, making the
past feel complete, stable, coherent, [and] safe” (Hutcheon 195), effec-
tively inoculated, that is, from the contingencies and accidents of ordinary
reality. If our postmodern present is indissolubly connected with irony,
contingency, and self-awareness, nostalgia is a distinctive mode of presen-
tation of the past, whereby we attempt to (re)claim a “prelapsarian” and
“utopic” state we sense that we have somehow lost (cf. Stewart 23 and
Hutcheon 197).14 In this regard, Dahlmann’s nostalgic attempt to return
to the South should be understood as an effort to reinstantiate a set of
cultural values that constitute an essential part of the founding myths of
the Argentine nation (Sarlo 47).
It goes without saying that the endeavor will be problematic. Patrick
Dove has suggested that, among other possible readings, “The South”
could be construed as an allegory of the failure of a particular kind of
national utopian project which is continually interrupted by the material
contingencies and accidents of history (cf. Dove 84). Recall the moment
when Dahlmann, gazing at the landscape that rushes past his window
on the train, closes his book and allows himself simply to live. Far from
marking a moment when ideology is finally left behind in favor of an
untainted experience of the reality that surrounds him, the closing of
the book marks the moment when the ideology implicit in Dahlman-
n’s nostalgic fantasy has most definitively taken hold.15 No longer does
Dahlmann require the book that had served him as a symbolic crutch: he
demonstrates that he has fully internalized all the terms of the nostalgic
fantasy when he closes it. On the other hand, we might say that as he
stares out the window of the train, he has fully externalized the fantasy
as well, in that his gaze now projects upon the passing rural landscape an
entire world of values which are then reflected back to him and which he
regards as natural. The window of the train thus does not serve merely
as an indifferent, wholly transparent frame separating Dahlmann from the
object of his gaze. It is rather the minimal threshold that allows the fan-
tasy to be staged in first place.16 This is how nostalgia works in “The
South”: it pretends to offer one unmediated access to the past even as it
surreptitiously crafts the very content that it purports only to re-present.
Nostalgia, as a structural form that discloses the workings of the virtual,
functions in a similar way in “San Junipero.” In the most straightforward
sense, the entire San Junipero simulation, as it has been designed by the
engineers and programmers of TCKR Systems, merely operationalizes the
emotional impulses of its aging clientele who wish to relive the happier
days of their youth. In Yorkie’s case, the San Junipero simulation offers
her a second chance to renegotiate her identity, now on her own terms
rather than the terms set by her parents or according to the mandates of
her general social milieu. She is accordingly transported back to a point
in her life that we may assume immediately preceded the moment when
she came out to her parents and was then injured in the car crash. Like
Dahlmann’s return to the South, Yorkie’s exploration of San Junipero
represents the perfect opportunity for her to realize possibilities previously
neglected or unavailable and thereby rewrite her own history. Indeed, in
many respects the shy, bespectacled Yorkie is the functional equivalent of
Dahlmann, in terms of her bearing, her personality, and her attempt to
negotiate her way into a world that had long fascinated her but which she
had viewed from the outside.
Just as the Argentine countryside comported perfectly with Dahlman-
n’s expectations, so too does San Junipero prove to be uncannily attuned
to Yorkie’s fantasies. To be sure, she experiences some moments of self-
doubt as she seeks admittance to the dynamic and appealing social circles
that she had idealized and in which her friend Kelly moves with grace
and confidence. In preparation for a second encounter with her crush,
Yorkie determines to find a distinctive look that would be more satisfying
than her previous mundane wardrobe choices. In a montage that could
have been torn from an unproduced script of quintessential 1980s direc-
tor John Hughes, we watch as she removes her staid eyeglasses and tries
on a number of different outfits in the mirror. Each shot is accompanied
64 D. LARAWAY
by a different musical theme, including songs by The Smiths (“Girlfriend

in a Coma”), Simple Minds (“Don’t You Forget About Me”), T’Pau
(“Heart and Soul”), Robert Palmer (“Addicted to Love”), and Terence
Trent D’Arby (“Wishing Well”). None of the highly stylized outfits satisfy
her: Yorkie’s facial expressions make it clear that they all come across as
somehow false, as mere exercises in pretense. The scene ends with her
apparently resolving to “just be herself,” as it were, and she puts her
glasses back on and dresses once again in the same kind of unremarkable
clothing which at least has the merit of belonging to her own (some-
what bland) sense of style. The scene is the functional equivalent of the
moment when Dahlmann sets aside the book on the train in his attempt
to delineate a space beyond artifice. Just as the gesture of laying the book
aside marked the moment in which artifice and ideology are not forsaken
but rather fully internalized, so too does this moment—when Yorkie is
purportedly her most authentic self—signal that she has fully embraced
the rules of the fantasy, that she has accepted the premises of the simula-
tion as something to be regarded as fully real and meriting an authentic,
sincere response on her part.17
In both “The South” and “San Junipero,” one of the unspoken pos-
tulates of the logic of nostalgia is that its efficacy is predicated upon
the operations of forgetfulness and repression. Nostalgia seeks to efface
the gap between nature and culture, “between signified and signified,
between the material nature of the former and the abstract and histor-
ical nature of the latter” (Stewart 24). But this can only be done by
suppressing the material contingencies and accidents that have no fixed
place in the idealized version of the past in which one might wish to
dwell. Patrick Dove has argued that for this reason “The South” offers a
trenchant critique of the project of the Argentine national romance as it
had taken shape in the 1930s and that Dahlmann’s experience of material
finitude and falsity could therefore only take the form of something to be
repressed (76). But of course in the libidinal economy nothing repressed
ever disappears altogether: rather, it is always displaced, recycled, repur-
posed. We shall soon see how this displacement is connected to the ques-
tion of narrative form in “The South,” but for now let us note how the
phenomenon of repression, as the necessary corollary of nostalgia, takes
shape in “San Junipero.”
Brooker provides us with a tangible emblem of the obverse side of
the mostly harmless, if not benevolent, nostalgia by means of a place
known to locals in San Junipero as “The Quagmire.” The Quagmire is the
obverse of Tucker’s, the club where Yorkie and Kelly had first met. Instead
of offering the latter’s cheerful, neon-glowing ambience, it is a dark and
sinister site on the outskirts of the city where hedonism finds its most
extreme forms of expression, bending into violence, cruelty, and despair.
As a symbol and a warning, the significance of “The Quagmire” is almost
too transparent: those undying souls who are unable to form lasting emo-
tional attachments are reduced to seeking out ever more outrageous expe-
riences in order to feel anything at all. Given that these denizens of San
Junipero will spend an eternity seeking only pleasure without love or
emotional commitment, it is unsurprising that they indulge in degrad-
ing behaviors in order to kill time.18 In this respect one might almost say
that The Quagmire is a necessary feature of the San Junipero simulation
that has been deliberately incorporated into the program’s design by its
architects: it acts as a repository for libidinal forces that can find no other
outlet and is therefore necessary for maintaining the homeostasis of the
system (cf. McLuhan, Understanding Media 41–47).
If the introduction of The Quagmire as a device for channeling the
forces of repression and forgetfulness strikes us as almost too heavy-
handed in its symbolism, it is worth bearing in mind that the truly
interesting dimensions of the nostalgia–repression dyad are not limited
to whatever meanings may be ascribed to the club where the characters
engage in acts of debauchery. As an abundance of critical and popular
responses to “San Junipero” has indirectly demonstrated, the emotional
valences of nostalgia are not experienced only by the story’s characters
but by the viewers themselves. The episode’s recreation of the ambience
of the mid- to late-1980s has been widely praised by critics of media
and has unsurprisingly secured award nominations for best costume and
design19 ; fans too have expressed delight in the way the artistic and musi-
cal design of “San Junipero” flawlessly captures the aesthetics of that par-
ticular epoch, right down to the lighting.20 Indeed, the fantasies that
have been actualized by the “San Junipero” simulation are not just those
of the characters but of the viewers, who apparently have been as will-
ing to be drawn into the milieu of the 1980s-fantasy as were Yorkie and
Kelly. In fact, it might be said that, if anything, the episode’s painstaking
re-creation of that particular period is almost too perfect. One contribu-
tor to the Black Mirror subreddit cogently notes that the realism of “San
Junipero” is somewhat over the top but finds in that excess a motive for
praise, not criticism:
66 D. LARAWAY
I didn’t believe the nightclub was real after about thirty seconds. Nothing
in the 80s was ever that 1980s, and I kinda believed BM wouldn’t play
that level of cliché straight. That guy Kelly was flirting with the second
weekend was even a dead ringer for James Spader in Pretty In Pink. Which
tbh is why it was perfect. It was the 80’s of our current cultural memory.
[…]21
The observation is on point. Like Dahlmann’s vision of the South,

“San Junipero” offer us a species of nostalgia that hits its mark a little too
squarely: we should regard its perfection as a clue that something other
than gauzy memory is at work here. Indeed, the approach to the period
taken up the episode’s excellent art direction team brings us very close to
some of the issues mentioned by Fredric Jameson in his seminal remarks
on what he calls the “nostalgia film.” To single out a set of cultural prod-
ucts and characteristics as emblematic of a given historical epoch (such
as the 1950s or 1980s) is, Jameson pointed out, to have already made
critical determinations about what is to count as belonging to the period
based on criteria that are themselves problematic and which might well
be contested.22
What “San Junipero” elicits on this count is something we might call
“participatory nostalgia.” Not only do the yearnings for an idealized (if
not altogether real) past epoch motivate the characters of the story to
immerse themselves in the world of the computer simulation; these same
impulses provoke certain emotional and affective responses on the part of
us, the program’s viewers. As Linda Hutcheon has pointed out, nostalgia
is best understood not as a catalogue of features inhering natively in par-
ticular discourses per se, but rather as a set of dispositions and attitudes
adopted by readers and viewers with respect to those discourses (199).
We thus not only appreciate the characters’ indulgence in the pleasures
of nostalgia but we also indulge in those same pleasures ourselves and
thereby come to play an active role in the reification of a certain model of
the historical moment that the episode presumes simply to represent (cf.
Jameson). Of course a corollary follows as well: like the characters, we
viewers also tend to respond to the demands of nostalgia in the modes of
forgetfulness and repression.
So, what exactly is it that is repressed and forgotten in the kind of
participatory nostalgia that “San Junipero” solicits from us? In a general
sense one might claim that, at the level of production design, costumes,
and soundtrack, the vision of the 1980s on offer recalls nothing so much
as a glossy brochure advertising the gently hedonistic pleasures of the Rea-

gan/Thatcher years. The decade of the 1980s as it is imagined in “San
Junipero” seem to consist mostly of a pastiche of pop culture references,
set in an impossibly beautiful location, that manages to avoid any mention
of the uncomfortable realities of that period: the AIDS outbreak, a surge
in homelessness, persistent fears about nuclear war, US support for brutal
military dictatorships in Central America, an ever-widening income gap
between the wealthy and everyone else… the list goes on.23 Particularly
notable—for reasons we shall soon see—is the absence of any explicit ref-
erence to one of the most salient political and cultural reference points
of the 1980s yet one that is often forgotten in popular depictions of
the period. At the time when the events in the episode presumably tran-
spire, in or around 1987, political pressure against the Botha and later the
de Klerk governments in South Africa had severely crippled the nation’s
economy and the world was transfixed as the struggle against apartheid
became an international cause célèbre. At the time that Yorkie and Kelly
have chosen to live out their fantasies, Nelson Mandela was still impris-
oned and would not see the light of day for three more years.
None of these issues are addressed directly in the program and we have
no clear indication that any of the characters residing in San Junipero are
aware of them. Nor is there any open invitation for the viewer to acknowl-
edge them directly as we indulge in a bit of 80s pop culture nostalgia.24
This is perhaps unsurprising, given that the narrative mode of nostalgia
does not lend itself to the consideration of moral and political complexi-
ties of this order for reasons we have already seen. So, what, then, are the
implications of engaging in the kind of participatory nostalgia that “San
Junipero” seems to solicit? Perhaps nothing can be said against deriving
some innocent pleasure from a highly stylized and selective take on the
popular culture of years past. But at the same time it is incumbent upon
us as viewers to bear in mind the price we pay for doing so, i.e., by attend-
ing to what is excluded from this version of the 80s. To put the dilemma
in terms made familiar by our examination of “The South,” to do any-
thing less would be akin to regarding Dahlmann’s idealized view of an
antiquated Argentine nationalist project as something to be enjoyed, or
at least accepted with a straight face. Now, of course, we can see the ide-
ologies of the Argentine nationalisms at play in the story for their superfi-
cial and historically-bounded limitations, not as a serious political project
worthy of emulation or to be excused as of no consequence. In similar
68 D. LARAWAY
fashion we should bear in mind the dangers of giving ourselves over too
fully to the pleasures of a time gone by.
All that said, I would like to conclude this section on a note that com-
plicates the somewhat facile participatory nostalgia to which we would
appear to have been beckoned by “San Junipero.” Perhaps there is a case
to be made after all that the episode does indeed evince a powerful, if
indirect, corrective to the discourse of nostalgia as I have characterized it,
albeit on an unexpected extra-textual level. Although many viewers have
quite reasonably inferred that the story is set in California—although we
are never told as much directly—the “San Junipero” episode of Black Mir-
ror was actually filmed in Cape Town, South Africa (Molloy). It features
a black lead actor of South African descent—Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who
was born in England but whose father was a black from South Africa—
in the role of Kelly, and a white lead, also of South African heritage:
Mackenzie Davis, in the role of Yorkie, who was born in Canada of a
white South African mother.25 Although laws against racial intermarriage
in South Africa were rescinded in 1985, the topic remained controversial
and highly stigmatized in South Africa—to say nothing of a same-gender,
interracial relationship—a mere couple of years later, that is, at the time
corresponding to the “San Junipero” simulation. This is not to invite us
to presume that the episode itself is set in Cape Town and still less that
it represents any kind of direct commentary on the politics and culture
associated with South Africa’s past. But it does seem to suggest a degree
of complexity in the way that Brooker’s Black Mirror episode (whether
fortuitously or by design) cuts across intra- and extra-textual lines. To
appreciate fully the function of nostalgia as a structuring device is thus
to appreciate not only the internal logic of the “San Junipero” episode
itself but to understand the ways in which its story is bound up with the
material and mediatic elements of which Black Mirror is also comprised.
Since we now have (re)introduced in a roundabout way the question
of narrative structure, let us bring this chapter to a close with some final
reflections on some of the ways that Borges’s and Brooker’s attention to
exigencies of form may lead us to unanticipated questions and possibili-
ties.
Grecian Goldsmiths, Anonymous

Programmers, and Infinite Narrative
It is a long-standing conceit of high-minded, serious literature that the
vessel of literary form may serve as an instrument for trapping and pre-
serving subjectivities, granting us a way of living forever, if only between
the pages of a book. Yeats, of course, famously daydreamed about passing
out of the natural world and being gathered into “the artifice of eter-
nity.” Once he had found his way to his Byzantium, he imagined himself
being fashioned by Grecian goldsmiths into something akin to pure artis-
tic form, undying and unchanging ever more.26 Borges and Brooker offer
us two provocative responses to Yeats’s idyllic conceit: Borges through an
examination of the meaning of infinite form and Brooker through an invi-
tation for us to reflect on an unanticipated crossing of art and technology.
While it is a commonplace among Borges scholars to acknowledge the
infinitely doubling configuration of his narratives (cf. Alazraki 65–76),
they have less often moved beyond his use of the mirror trope to examine
other ways in which the structure of temporal recursivity is embedded in
the form of the story itself. Taking as his starting point the hermeneutic
puzzle of the story’s ambiguous conclusion, Mac Wilson has offered an
intriguing interpretation of “The South” as an infinite narrative, noting
that the text not only provides no narrative closure where we might expect
it but that it perpetuates itself indefinitely through a variety of inter-, intra-
, and extra-textual devices. Wilson’s reading is subtle and complex but I
would single out one of the intratextual mechanisms that he finds Borges
employing in order to forestall the closure of the narrative. He argues
that Borges tacitly draws upon something like Gérard Genette’s distinc-
tion between narrative duration (the length of time it takes to narrate the
story) and story duration (the length of time it takes for the story to take
place) in plotting the tale within four discrete temporal frames.27 These in
turn exemplify the logic of “non-arrival” that are associated with Zeno’s
paradoxes of motion, in particular the race between Achilles and the tor-
toise, which the latter wins because the Greek hero can never traverse
the distance between them before his rival has advanced still further. On
Wilson’s reading, narrative duration in “The South” is inversely correlated
with story duration and the story’s final line, in its distinctive employment
of the future tense to suggest uncertainty, hints that the search for clo-
sure will be infinitely deferred and that the duration of narration and the
70 D. LARAWAY
duration of story will never coincide, in just the same way that Achilles
will never catch up to the tortoise (52–54).28
In this way the tale’s final line does not so much mark either the
protagonist’s or the reader’s arrival at any particular destination—much
less Yeats’s Byzantium—but rather promises that there will always be yet
another page to be turned (cf. Wilson 56). We are not obliged finally
to choose between the two “authorized” interpretations to which I have
alluded, according to which Dahlmann either dies in the hospital or on
the plains. On the contrary, as we have seen, there is reason to wonder
whether the protagonist dies at all, or whether the story really even ends:
any attempt to force upon us a choice between the binary options pre-
sented by the authorized interpretations is belied by a recursive narrative
structure that is formally infinite.29 The story has been inscribed in such
a way as to preclude closure. The artifice of the eternal is neither more
nor less than the artifice of narrative itself.
The “artifice of eternity” takes a different form in “San Junipero” but
its meaning is complementary to that of Borges’s text. Recall once more
the final shot of the episode: from the scene in Tucker’s of Yorkie and
Kelly dancing together we transition to the seemingly infinite banks of
flashing hard drives, each containing, we may presume, countless virtual
worlds, each of these infinitely rich and infinitely complex in its own right
(or at least as rich and complex as the virtual subjectivities that they con-
tain). The image is at once vertiginous, terrifying, and sublime. We are
asked to imagine that this too is an artifice of eternity, even if the emphasis
here falls more upon the material artifice than the narrative art, narrowly
defined, and it is fashioned not by Yeats’s nameless Grecian goldsmiths
but by the anonymous artisan-programmers whose labors are carried out
in the medium of code. Yorkie and Kelly, transformed into so many lines
of computer code themselves, will continue to give expression for all eter-
nity to the executable protocols that have been composed by the soft-
ware’s architects, who are employed by TCKR Systems. It is of course for
the viewer to decide if this is a kind of eternity is to be ardently embraced
or altogether avoided.
We began our study of Brooker’s and Borges’s works by noting that
they both provided us with a window into the workings of the virtual,
that the point of the two texts was not exhausted by limiting our exami-
nation to the familiar trope of the virtual-as-simulation. To be sure, there
is something captivating and even intoxicating about the virtual inasmuch
as we associate it with dreams and computer simulations: we seem to feel
the ground shift under our feet or give way altogether. Such in large mea-
sure are the pleasures of reading Borges or watching Black Mirror. But it
is imperative, I have been suggesting, that we appreciate certain aspects
of the virtual for the light that they both cast upon the invisible infras-
tructure upon which reality itself depends. These attributes and powers lie
much closer to home than any superficial reading of Brooker or Borges
might suggest. In this sense, the virtual does not so much compete with
mundane reality as constitute its very structure (which, as it turns out,
is also the underlying structure of dreams, hallucinations, and computer
simulations). In the cases of “The South” and “San Junipero,” we have
seen that one of the key elements of those virtual structures is nostalgia,
with its dual valences of idealized memory and repression.
To be clear, I do not claim that Brooker’s fantasy about a never-ending
story, inscribed upon a hard drive, of two immortal characters is not “re-
ally” about the limits of technology or our imagination, any more than
“The South” is not “really” about the power of hallucinations to inspire
or deceive. The wide array of interpretations of Borges’s and Brooker’s
work that hinge on familiar metaphysical and epistemological questions
are still available to us. Indeed, I think they are of perennial interest.
But neither should we ignore the suggestion that the virtual discloses—
indirectly yet potently—even in the more banal worlds that we ourselves
inhabit, something crucial in the structure of our subjective experience.
And perhaps our own experiences, while perhaps not as gripping as any-
thing found in the stories narrated by Brooker and Borges, may be for all
that no less real or fantastic.
Notes
1. The episode garnered two Emmys in 2017 for “Outstanding Television
Movie” and “Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series, Movie, or Dra-
matic Special,” not to mention the praise of many television critics, fea-
turing prominently in many “Top Ten” lists for the year (“69th Emmy
Award Winners”).
2. “Charlie Brooker left cynicism at the door,” affirmed The Guardian of
the episode, calling it “the year’s most beautiful and touching love story”
and “filled […] with hope,” leaving the viewer “believing in the power of
love to fight pain and loneliness” (“Battle”). Other outlets were similarly
inclined to accentuate “San Junipero”’s optimism. For a critically informed
yet robust defense of a reading that ascribes a “happy ending” to the
72 D. LARAWAY
episode, see Drage, who argues that “San Junipero” constitutes a hopeful
Foucauldian heterotopia (27–39).
3. Although the primary set pieces of “San Junipero” take place in the 1980s,
it should be pointed out that the episode does features brief scenes in the
1990s and early 2000s as well.
4. For a take on “San Junipero” along similar lines, see Madison.
5. Strictly speaking, Putnam frames the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment as
a problem with respect to the nature of reference, rather than an epistemo-
logical puzzle per se. Putnam finally concludes that it is not even possible
for us to coherently frame the hypothesis that we might be brains-in-a-
vat. But in this case, as in so many others in the history of philosophy, his
framing of the problem has proven to be more influential and enduring
than his proposed (dis)solution of it.
6. Although Putnam is generally credited with developing the brain-in-a-
vat hypothesis, an important antecedent may be found in Harman, who
alludes to the possibility that one’s perceptions may have their origin in
the work of a “playful brain surgeon” who is “stimulating your cortex in
a special way” (5).
7. This is not to say that other aspects of Borges’s work do not map on
to Baudrillard’s work, so to speak. We should recall that Borges’s parable
“On Exactitude in Science” [“Del rigor en la ciencia”] provides Bau-
drillard with the crucial vignette with which he opens his Simulacra and
Simulation.
8. “Everything that happens after Dahlmann leaves the hospital can be inter-
preted as a hallucination as he was about to die of blood poisoning, as
a fantastic vision of the way he wished to die” [“Todo lo que sucede
después que sale Dahlmann del sanatorio puede interpretarse como una
alucinación suya en el momento de morir de la septicemia, como una
visión fantástica de cómo él hubiera querido morir”] (Irby 34; translation
mine).
9. Even though Borges’s comment about the two strategies for reading the
text is well-known to his readers, we might note that he is on record as
having acknowledged yet other possible readings as well (Wilson 57).
10. See Žižek’s Looking Awry for a lucid discussion of the inaccessibility of the
object-cause of desire and its role in the constitution of fantasy (3–20).
11. See, for instance, Phillips’s and Gertel’s classic discussions of the symme-
tries and repeated elements in the two halves of the story. The mirror-
like doubling of elements in “The South”—as with Dahlmann’s double
genealogy—may be regarded as an attempt to reorder elements of some of
the founding myths of Argentine culture. Beatriz Sarlo has found in “The
South” an attempt on Borges’s part to map the precarious encounter of
criollo and European influences in terms of a vague and undefined space
she calls “las orillas” [akin to the “suburbs”], located somewhere between
European modernity and American autochthony (45–49). For a highly

nuanced and persuasive reading of “The South” as a literary response to
the challenges of signifying the impasses and aporias of political modernity
in Argentina, see Patrick Dove.
12. Online discussion of the episode is rife with devotees’ observations and
theories about these dual layers of meaning. For a good initial orientation
to some of the most salient points, see Williams.
13. The passage is worth citing in full: “The truth is, Dahlmann read very
little; the lodestone mountain and the genie sworn to kill the man who
released him from the bottle were, as anyone will admit, wondrous things,
but not much more wondrous than the morning and the fact of being.
Happiness distracted him from Scheherazade and her superfluous miracles;
Dahlmann closed the book and allowed himself simply to live” [“A los
lados del tren, la ciudad se desgarraba en suburbios; esta visión y luego
la de jardines y quintas demoraron el principio de la lectura. La verdad es
que Dahlmann leyó poco; la montaña de piedra imán y el genio que ha
jurado matar a su bienhechor eran, quién lo niega, maravillosos, pero no
mucho más que la mañana y el hecho de ser. La felicidad lo distraía de
Shahrazad y de sus milagros superfluos; Dahlmann cerraba el libro y se
dejaba simplemente vivir.”] (CF 176/OC 1.527).
14. Hutcheon notes that the phenomenon recalls Bakhtin’s notion of “his-
torical inversion,” the narrative strategy whereby distant events associated
with a lost “Golden Age” are set to work in the mode of obligations and
duties for the present. “To put it in somewhat simplified terms,” Bakhtin
writes, we might say that a thing that could and in fact must only be
realized exclusively in the future is here portrayed as something out of the
past, a thing that is in no sense part of the past’s reality, but a thing that is
in its essence a purpose, an obligation” (Bakhtin 147; cf. Hutcheon 195).
15. Dove astutely observes of this passage that it offers us an allegory par
excellence for understanding the workings of ideology: “[i]t demonstrates
the ideological nature of the escape from ideology. The back-and-forth
movement between literature and nature, or fiction and the real, culmi-
nates in a gesture that would seem to signal a renunciation of artifice
(cosmopolitan life, imported literature) and restoration of the realm of
permanent truth” (80).
16. It is worth noting that the moment when Dahlmann closes the book
and gazes out the window nicely illustrates Bolter and Grusin’s discus-
sion of the double logic of remediation to which I alluded in the first
chapter. Dahlmann’s internalization of the nostalgic fantasy recalls how
their notion of immediacy—when the subject becomes so fully immersed
in the media platform that it becomes invisible to him—is but the other
side of the coin of hypermediacy, or the ubiquity of media forms and plat-
forms that surround the subject (which, in this case are the constituted
74 D. LARAWAY
by the book and the train window through which Dahlmann gazes at the
passing landscape).
17. We should not fail to note the tremendous irony of the moment toward
the end of the program when Yorkie, having permanently passed over to
San Junipero, lays her glasses aside on the beach, presumably never to
put them on again. It is not that the gesture of abandoning her glasses
now suggests a new or somehow different commitment to truth at the
expense of fantasy. Now that she is definitively “on the side” of fantasy,
her decision to lay aside her glasses has exactly the same meaning as did
her earlier decision to defiantly wear them: she has now fully embraced
the artificiality of the simulation in which she lives.
18. It is impossible to resist pointing out that Borges too had worked through
some of the logical implications of what it would be like for someone to
live for an infinitely long stretch of time. One might think of the loath-
some and pathetic creatures that populate the pages of “The Immortal”
[“El inmortal”] as akin to the emotionally deprived long-term inhabitants
of “San Junipero” once they have discovered that a corollary of their love-
less, immortal lives is the inability to experience any meaningful pleasure
at all (CF 183–95/OC 1.533–44).
19. These include both awards and nominations for categories including Best
Makeup and Hair Design (BAFTA Television Craft Awards) and Best Pro-
duction Design and Best Costume Design in a Non-series (Online Film
and Television Awards).
20. For a representative critical take on the aesthetic of “San Junipero,” see
Morgan and Fletcher. Few would likely disagree with the following assess-
ment offered by one observer: “The subtle 80s synth score aids the strange
and beguiling atmosphere of the location wonderfully, which combined
with the soft pastel colour palette only adds to the magnetic, dream-like
allure of this alternate reality as a place of reminiscence and escapism for
those whose current situation leaves a lot to be desired” (Welch).
21. See the comment from u/PopPunkAndPizza in the r/BlackMirror thread
entitled “Black Mirror [Episode Discussion] - S09E04 - San Junipero.”
22. Consider Jameson’s discussion of how “the 1950s” have become a rec-
ognizable historical epoch in pop culture representations: the shift from
“the realities of the 1950s to the representation of that rather different
thing, the ‘fifties,’” is, he tells us, “a shift which obligates us in addition
to underscore the cultural sources of all the attributes with which we have
endowed the period, many of which seem very precisely to derive from its
own television programs: in other words, its own representation of itself”
(519–20). Given that most of the users that frequent the Black Mirror
subreddit are undoubtedly too young to have any detailed personal mem-
ories of the 1980s, it seems quite likely that they are responding not to
the 1980s “as such” in their responses to “San Junipero” but rather the
way in which the 1980s have been represented by other cultural artifacts
with which they are already familiar.
23. One of the few allusions to social or political issues of any kind occurs
when Kelly explains her bisexuality to Yorkie, laughingly describing her
appreciation of men as well as women as a matter of “equal rights.”
But her playful characterization of her preferences does not seem to be
intended in any way to be taken as a gesture of advocacy (if anything, the
moment seems to have been scripted simply to establish the critical fact
that she is bisexual and not lesbian, which is of course essential to the
plot).
24. Of course it is important to acknowledge that the one overarching social
cause to which the program sensitizes us is, obviously, the plight of gays
wishing to form long-term, stable relationships with their partners. But
this cause is one that belongs more to our own moment than the histor-
ical period that the characters inhabit in the simulation. By any account,
the social cause most closely associated with the gay community in the
1980s was the AIDS epidemic, which, like some of the other social causes
of the day I mentioned above, is altogether absent from “San Junipero.”
A cynical viewer could be forgiven for assuming that the 80s setting is
little more than eye- (and ear-)candy, an attractive but ultimately inconse-
quential backdrop for the exploration of a decidedly more contemporary
issue (although I think they would be mistaken in thinking this, for the
reasons I soon explain).
25. See “Gugu Mbatha-Raw: Biography” and “Mackenzie Davis: Biography.”
26. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” famously begins by evoking the image of
lovers passionately embracing against a backdrop of the “sensual music”
of the summer of youth: it is a perfect correlate to the endless summer
romance of Brooker’s protagonists. Yeats goes on to give voice to a sen-
timent which certainly would have resonated with Yorkie in her dying
moments: “Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a
dying animal / It knows not what it is; and gather me / Into the artifice
of eternity” (193–94).
27. Wilson identifies the following segments of narrative duration: (1)
“Dahlmann’s ancestry and history up until he has his accident;” (2)
“Dahlmann’s accident, sickness, and hospitalization;” (3) the period
beginning when he leaves the hospital and ending just before the last
sentence of the story; and (4) “the last stage begins with the last sentence
and paragraph but suspends—in the sense of ‘postpone’—both narrative
and story durations in the open-ended conclusion” (53).
28. The original Spanish version of the last line reads: “Dahlmann empuña
con firmeza el cuchillo, que acaso no sabrá manejar, y sale a la llanura,”
which Hurley translates as “Dahlmann firmly grips the knife, which he may
have no idea how to manage, and steps out into the plains” (CF 179/OC
76 D. LARAWAY
1.530). The future tense employed in the original, “sabrá,” suggests an

element of conjecture or uncertainty. While Hurley’s version catches the
uncertainty of the original Spanish, it should be noted that he renders the
verb in the present tense.
29. Wilson’s argument is more multifaceted than I can do justice to here.
For instance, he also provides an instructive examination of how another
sense of the infinite in the story can be tied back specifically to the text’s
appropriation of the narrative strategies of The Arabian Nights (49–52).
CHAPTER 4
Executable Code
Abstract The “Bandersnatch” episode of Black Mirror has been widely

hailed as a groundbreaking effort to combine elements of interactivity
generally associated with gaming and the video streaming experience. This
chapter argues that Borges’s classic tale, “The Garden of Forking Paths,”
provides a map for reading “Bandersnatch.” Borges’s story of espionage
and betrayal exemplifies the same binary logic that informs the interactive
decision nodes of “Bandersnatch.” But it also sensitizes us to the ways
that the paths we have not chosen nevertheless leave their traces upon
what Borges intriguingly alludes to as the agent’s “obscure body,” trans-
forming it into a persistent reminder of those infinitely bifurcating paths.
By reading “Bandersnatch” and Borges together, one may see how the
figure of the labyrinth—with its countless junctions and turns that double
in upon themselves—reveals itself in a corporeal register and not merely
as a conceptual exercise. The chapter concludes with an examination of
the possibility that, even if our choices may not be altogether free, they
might still be invested with ethical significance.
Keywords Labyrinth · Possible worlds · Ethics · “Bandersnatch” · “The

Garden of Forking Paths”
“‘Bandersnatch’ is one of the most talked-about Netflix episodes ever—

and it could be the beginning of a sinister conspiracy to harvest your
thoughts.” So declares the breathless lede of a story featured in The Sun

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44238-5_4
78 D. LARAWAY
less than a week after the debut of Black Mirror’s groundbreaking inter-
active program (Keach). The article went on to sound an alarm which is
hardly unfamiliar, if not unwarranted: that the data associated with view-
ers’ preferences in choosing specific narrative paths for the show’s protag-
onist could potentially be harvested for nefarious purposes by government
agencies and big business. To be fair, the article did include other perspec-
tives on the issues of privacy raised by “Bandersnatch.” These included
the observation that any personal information gleaned from the viewers
of Black Mirror would pale in comparison with the value of data cap-
tured by the other media platforms to which we unblinkingly surrender
our anonymity. In this sense, the interactive design of the episode is not
so much a harbinger of a troubling digital future that awaits us as a vivid
expression of a present that arrived long ago. This doesn’t mean the issue
of privacy in “Bandersnatch” is moot. On the contrary, one of the notable
achievements of the episode is the way it elevates the question of privacy
from a mundane, practical level to a properly metaphysical one. It might
turn out that we are in fact surveilled by malign forces, and the way in
which this occurs may not just pose a problem with respect to the secu-
rity of our personal information but it may call into question the nature
of our subjectivity itself.
The premise of the Black Mirror episode will by now be familiar to
most readers. “Bandersnatch” tells the story of a precocious but soli-
tary young computer programmer in the mid-1980s, Stefan Butler [Fionn
Whitehead], who designs an interactive videogame predicated upon a sys-
tem of binary decision points requiring the player to make choices on
behalf of his or her character. Stefan pitches his game successfully to soft-
ware company Tuckersoft but struggles to complete it. “Bandersnatch” is
an adaptation of a kind of choose-your-own-adventure novel—also titled
Bandersnatch—written by Jerome F. Davies, an enigmatic author whose
attempts to finish his book drove him to madness and murder. A copy of
Davies’s novel had belonged to Stefan’s mother before she passed away
when he was a child and Stefan is still troubled by feelings of guilt and
the suspicion that he was indirectly responsible for her death.
Now, as he works to finish coding his game, Stefan finds the disparate
threads of his own desires and fears converging, separating, and inter-
twining once again in unpredictable ways. Torn between the competing
voices of his father, his therapist, his employer, and fellow game designer
Colin Ritman [Will Poulter], Stefan feels his sense of self slipping away
4 EXECUTABLE CODE 79
as the line between his life and the game begins to blur. Like the first-
person character in the game he is designing, our protagonist finds him-
self obliged to respond to prompts that require him to make determinate
decisions. He begins to intuit that he no longer exercises even a modicum
of control over a story whose ultimate meaning escapes him. His belief
is not without merit, as his actions are partially dictated by the viewer of
“Bandersnatch,” who is similarly required to respond to a series of on-
screen prompts as to which course of action to pursue: these options are
selected by clicking on one of two options on the screen or interacting
haptically with one’s personal electronic device. In this way, the viewer
makes choices for Stefan in the same way he makes decisions for his char-
acter.
The episode of Black Mirror concludes by presenting the viewer with
an array of possible outcomes for Stefan’s story, none of them defini-
tive and all of them hinting at a dizzying constellation of possible worlds
that spiral outward from the show’s founding premise. In fact, the num-
ber of possible paths through the episode is impressive from a technical
vantage point alone: one critic has noted that “Bandersnatch” contains
over 250 distinct narrative segments and 150 minutes of unique footage
(Reynolds); episode producer Russell McLean has said that it contains ten
or twelve different endings (Strause).1
Just as the episode undeniably marked a technological milestone in
bringing the principles of hypertextual narrative to the medium of stream-
ing video,2 Borges’s classic tale “The Garden of Forking Paths” [“El
jardín de senderos que se bifurcan”] is widely agreed to occupy a sim-
ilarly distinctive position at the intersection of literary and media studies.
Janet Murray singled out the story as a “harbinger of the holodeck” in her
study of the evolution of multiform narratives (cf. 30–32); Wardrip-Fruin
and Montfort’s classic anthology, The New Media Reader (2003) kicks off
with an English translation of Borges’s groundbreaking detective story;
and the title of Lev Manovich’s preface to that same collection—“From
Borges to HTML”—perfectly encapsulates the somewhat vague but per-
sistent sense that one might in principle trace a straight line from a short
story written in the 1940s to the markup languages employed by com-
puter programmers today. Moulthrop has likewise argued that no other
literary work so presciently anticipated the challenges and opportunities
that would be afforded to us by more recent experiments in hypertext
narrative (119); by this logic, Borges’s tale might properly be regarded as
a predecessor of Brooker’s “Bandersnatch” episode. At any rate, it seems
80 D. LARAWAY
the attention devoted to Borges’s work from the vantage point of media
studies is beginning to rival the attention once given the story by liter-
ary critics who have traditionally been more attuned to its philosophical
dimensions.3 Through it all, a cautionary note has been sounded by schol-
ars who have persuasively argued that no engagement of the text could
be fully satisfying without an appreciation of its complex material and his-
torical backdrop (Balderston, “Jardín;” Out of Context 39–55).4 It goes
without saying that none of these general interpretive strategies is neces-
sarily exclusive of the others and in the pages that follow we shall attend
to some of the ways in which they are mutually reinforcing.
At first glance, the plotlines and settings for Borges’s story and “Ban-
dersnatch” could not be further apart. Borges’s tale deals with a desper-
ate gambit of Yu Tsun, an ethnically Chinese spy for the German army,
to send a message to his superiors during World War I, while Brook-
er’s story is set in the anodyne world of 1980s pop culture. But they
share a central conceit: that a cluster of metaphysical questions is organ-
ically connected to issues of narrative and mediatic form. Both Borges
and Brooker weave their tales from the premise that the choices made by
their characters never truly obviate or eliminate the paths left unchosen.
These choices are presented as being objectively real even if the precise
sense in which they exist remains obscure. In Borges’s story, the meaning
of these particular narrative paths is at least partly cloaked in the guise of
literary criticism as Yu Tsun’s interlocutor, Stephen Albert, proposes a key
for interpreting a novel written by Ts’ui Pên, the Chinese governor and
writer who, as it turns out, was an ancestor of Yu Tsun. To the extent that
Yu Tsun grasps the complex narrative and temporal structure of his pro-
genitor’s story, he comes to feel, like Stefan Butler, that his sense of self is
slipping away. In Brooker’s groundbreaking episode of Black Mirror, the
nested stories of the protagonist’s creation of a video game and the novel
that inspired it become entangled. As Stefan frantically attempts to fin-
ish writing the code corresponding to the countless narrative paths of the
“Bandersnatch” software, he too becomes lost in conceptual labyrinths
which may or may not be of his own making.
In the pages that follow I develop a dual reading of both works. On the
one hand, our examination of Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths”
(GFP) will help us appreciate the philosophical backdrop of Brooker’s
striking Black Mirror episode. We shall see that the peculiar genius of
Borges’s tale resides not only in the creative story-telling techniques that
he employs but the way in which it suggests, powerfully but subtly, that
questions of narrative form are bound up with metaphysical and ethical

issues in unanticipated ways. For instance, on my reading of GFP, we shall
see that to regard our own lives as the product of an infinite number of
infinitely branching antecedent decisions is to articulate the ethical dimen-
sions of our own personal narratives in a new and potentially troubling
register. More to the point, Borges suggests that we must recast in a rad-
ical way the possibility of ethics itself once we have relinquished the idea
that we are fully the authors of our own acts. In short, we shall see that
such a reading of Borges will help sensitize us to particular dimensions of
Brooker’s work that might have otherwise been undervalued in light of
the program’s technical achievements and its science-fiction trappings.
However, to read Borges after “Bandersnatch” is also to find the
Argentine master’s short story unexpectedly transformed in the process.
For his part, Brooker’s work calls our attention to the significance of fram-
ing these same metaphysical and ethical questions in the terms of a digital
habitus from which we find it increasingly difficult to extricate ourselves.
To write, to narrate, Brooker suggests, is in some sense to program. And
to re-read Borges in light of “Bandersnatch” is to read him not so much
as a traditional author but rather as a kind of game designer or program-
mer: it is to see that the forking paths leading to different outcomes may
also be regarded as the products of particular algorithms, so to speak,
and that the narrative logic embedded in the story shares important prin-
ciples with the binary logic of computer code. To read is therefore to
immerse ourselves in the game and to explore the pathways that have
been coded into the text. But, to take the analogy a step further, we
might also say that to read is to program and to debug: it is to identify
those artifacts along the way that linger like ghosts and glitches in the
program. These seem uncannily to persist no matter what path we pursue
through the labyrinth of the narrative. Both Borges and Brooker suggest
that to explore the hidden logic that governs these forking paths is to
face questions of accountability and responsibility in ways that may prove
disturbing. And in the end we shall see that, whether it be in the tradi-
tional medium of the short story or the emerging medium of gamified
streaming video, the metaphysical, ethical, and mediatic aspects of those
roads not taken will turn out to make all the difference.
82 D. LARAWAY
The Many Worlds of Stephen

Albert and Stefan Butler
If Borges’s story has been celebrated for the breadth and ambition of its
vision, it is no less important to point out that the metaphysical kernel of
the story is buried in the fertile soil of material history (Balderston, Out
of Context 39–55). The tale is set during World War I and was originally
published while World War II was still raging. Yu Tsun, working on behalf
of the German army, is taking the measure of British strategic maneuvers
when he discovers that his identity has been compromised and that his
Irish-born British nemesis, Richard Madden, is in hot pursuit. Needing to
communicate information to his superiors about the location of a strategi-
cally important site before he is apprehended, Yu Tsun improvises a plan
to publicly identify it even as traditional communicative channels are cut
off and Madden bears down upon him. The spy’s stratagem takes him to
a labyrinthine garden on the outskirts of Ashgrove, where he meets an
elderly Sinologist named Stephen Albert. Albert has devoted his life to
studying the works of eminent Chinese governor and writer Ts’ui Pên.
Yu Tsun and Albert are afforded a few moments to discuss Ts’ui Pên’s
work before Madden arrives and Yu Tsun must execute his plan.
In this way we learn of the dual ambitions of Yu Tsun’s progeni-
tor: first, to build an endless labyrinth, and, second, to write an endless
novel. To the consternation of generations of historians and explorers, the
maze was never found and the book apparently never completed. Albert
explains to Yu Tsun that he has made the astonishing discovery that the
two projects were actually one and the same, that the labyrinth his crit-
ics had sought was really a labyrinth in time and that it had taken the
form of the apparently senseless and contradictory novel his readers had
regarded as nothing but a tedious rehearsal of inconsistencies. Ts’ui Pên’s
labyrinth turns out to be a model of the infinitely ramifying worlds that
are brought into being with each choice made by the protagonist. Just
as the decision points in “Bandersnatch” require the viewer’s repeated
intervention in selecting one course of action over another, Ts’ui Pên’s
book is composed of an endless array of forking paths, each leading to an
endless array of destinies. “The Garden of Forking Paths” concludes with
Yu Tsun killing his host, knowing that the report of the murder that will
circulate in the press will allow his superiors to identify the site in ques-
tion: Albert, France. He is immediately apprehended by Madden, who
has arrived too late to prevent Yu Tsun from carrying out his mission.
The story concludes with a dejected Yu Tsun, now in custody, reflecting

upon the circumstances that had induced him to commit a cowardly act
whose proximate objective was achieved but whose ultimate significance
was far from clear. Given the story’s suggestion that no action is ever final
and no decision ever definitive, Yu Tsun’s subjective abasement seems to
be an acknowledgment that nothing has really been settled after all, that
the wheel will always be given another spin, that his story—as well as that
of his rival—goes on.
The conceptual underpinnings of “The Garden of Forking Paths” are
succinctly expressed in the conclusion Stephen Albert reaches regarding
the meaning of Ts’ui Pên’s novel. “Unlike Newton and Schopenhauer,”
he tells Yu Tsun, “your ancestor did not believe in a uniform and abso-
lute time; he believed in an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying
web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times. That fabric of times that
approach one another, fork, are snipped off, or are simply unknown for
centuries, contains all possibilities” [“A diferencia de Newton y Schopen-
hauer, su antepasado no creía en un tiempo uniforme, absoluto. Creía en
infinitas series de tiempos, en una red creciente y vertiginosa de tiempos
divergentes, convergentes y paralelos. Esa trama de de tiempos que se
aproximan, se bifurcan, se cortan o secularmente se ignoran, abarca todas
las posibilidades”] (CF 127/OC 1.479; italics in original). It would be
difficult to overstate the degree of interest that this passage has attracted
from not only literary critics but philosophers and even scientists. Physi-
cist Bryce DeWitt, for instance, famously included it as an epigraph to
his landmark text The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechan-
ics, which laid out the arguments for what has become the best known
alternative to the more famous Copenhagen Interpretation. Whereas the
puzzles arising from quantum measurement in the latter case tend to be
treated as at least in part epistemological, the Many Worlds Interpretation
regards them as ontological. The problem is not that the observer or the
measuring device somehow interferes with the measurement of quantum
phenomena. Rather, every juncture where quantum indeterminacy seems
to come into play actually represents the branching off of new universes,
all of which are logically and causally independent of each other: none is
more or less real than any of the others.5 It is not surprising that pro-
ponents of the Many Worlds Interpretation have found in Borges’s text
an elegant expression of that same idea or that a modal realist such as
philosopher David Lewis would find it altogether natural to namecheck
Borges.6
84 D. LARAWAY
The interwoven temporalities of the story take on very different aspects

according to the vantage point of the observer. From the first-person per-
spective of the character embedded in the narrative, as particular deci-
sions are made, the possibilities that are not selected recede from his
view, seemingly to remain forever unrealized. From the vantage point that
Albert offers on Ts’ui Pên’s work, however, all options nevertheless sub-
sist within the narrative and no particular ontological privilege attaches to
any one of them. For that matter, it is precisely the fact that the novel
presents all such possibilities as being realized simultaneously that had led
its first readers to regard it as fundamentally incoherent. Yu Tsun confesses
that he too had regarded his ancestor’s work as “a contradictory jumble
of irresolute drafts.” “I once examined it myself,” he tells his interlocutor,
complaining that “in the third chapter the hero dies, yet in the fourth he
is alive again” (“El libro es un acervo indeciso de borradores contradic-
torios. Lo he examinado alguna vez: en el tercer capítulo muere el héroe,
en el cuarto está vivo”) [CF 124/OC 1.476].
But as Yu Tsun absorbs the full weight of Stephen Albert’s “many
worlds” interpretation of the work, the stability of his own limited, first-
person, perspective begins to falter. He begins to intuit the almost unfath-
omable possibility that the paths he has not chosen do not altogether dis-
appear but actually live on in some obscure way. “In all fictions,” Albert
explains to Yu Tsun,
each time a man meets diverse alternatives, he chooses one and elimi-
nates the others; in the work of the virtually impossible-to-disentangle
Ts’ui Pên, the character chooses—simultaneously—all of them. He creates,
thereby, “several futures,” several times, which themselves proliferate and
fork. That is the explanation for the novel’s contradictions. Fang, let us
say, has a secret; a stranger knocks at his door; Fang decides to kill him.
Naturally, there are various possible outcomes—Fang can kill the intruder,
the intruder can kill Fang, they can both live, they can both be killed, and
so on. In Ts’ui Pên’s novel, all the outcomes in fact occur; each is the
starting point for further bifurcations.
[En todas las ficciones, cada vez que un hombre se enfrenta con diver-
sas alternativas, opta por una y elimina las otras; en la del casi inextrica-
ble Ts’ui Pên, opta—simultáneamente—por todas. Crea, así, diversos por-
venires, diversos tiempos, que también proliferan y se bifurcan. De ahí las
contradicciones de la novela. Fang, digamos, tiene un secreto; un descono-
cido llama a su puerta; Fang resuelve matarlo. Naturalmente hay varios
enlaces posibles: Fang puede matar al intruso, el intruso puede matar a
Fang, ambos pueden salvarse, ambos pueden morir, etcétera. En la obra

de Ts’ui Pên, todos los desenlaces ocurren: cada uno es el punto de par-
tida de otras bifurcaciones.] (CF 125/OC 1.477–78; italics in original)
None of these ideas will be unfamiliar to the viewer of Black Mirror.

Like Borges’s story, “Bandersnatch” is structured around particular deci-
sion nodes that require the main character to commit to one course of
action rather than another. At these points, the viewer intervenes, mak-
ing decisions on the character’s behalf. The matters to be settled range
from the apparently trivial—what the main character will have for break-
fast—to whether or not he will kill his father. Each of these choices in
turn implies a distinct narrative trajectory that will bifurcate yet again,
with fresh decisions for the viewer to make and fresh sets of possible
outcomes. In rhizomatic fashion the paths opened up by these choices
branch endlessly, occasionally circling back around to intersect with pre-
vious decisions and scenarios while at other times taking us to unexpected
and mutually incompatible destinations.7
One scene in particular brings into focus the operative logic of the
episode. Stefan, who has lost the thread of the computer code he is try-
ing to write, is on the verge of a mental breakdown when he unexpectedly
runs into his hero, renowned game designer Colin Ritman. Colin recog-
nizes that Stefan has reached a creative impasse and takes him back to
his apartment. He then invites Stefan to follow his lead as he takes a hit
of LSD. As Stefan begins to hallucinate, Colin, suddenly inspired, breaks
into a feverish soliloquy. “People think there’s only one reality, but there’s
loads of them, all snaking off, like roots,” Colin announces to his friend,
and what we do on one path affects what happens on the other paths. Time
is a construct. People think you can’t go back and change things, but you
can, that’s what flashbacks are. They’re invitations to go back and make
different choices. When you make a decision, you think it’s you doing it,
but it’s not. It’s the spirit out there that’s connected to our world that
decides what we do and we just have to go along for the ride.
The speech offers perhaps the most explicit description of the ground
rules of “Bandersnatch” and the thematic resonances with “The Garden
of Forking Paths” are unmistakable: realities are multiple; they bifurcate;
linear time is a fiction; subjective agency is not what it seems. But while
Brooker and Borges are clearly on the same page in many respects, what
86 D. LARAWAY
really makes Colin’s speech intriguing—and potentially useful for help-

ing us to revisit Borges in light of Brooker—is where he goes next. He
quickly moves on from his metaphysical harangue to a series of garden-
variety conspiracy theories (albeit ones whose relevance becomes appar-
ent in several permutations of the story), and then begins to reformulate
his views in just the kind of idiom that would come naturally to a game
designer:
Mirrors let you move through time. The government monitors people,
they pay people to pretend to be your relatives and they put drugs in your
food and they film you. There’s messages in every game. Like Pac-Man.
Do you know what PAC stands for? P-A-C. “Program and Control.” He’s
Program and Control Man, the whole thing’s a metaphor, he thinks he’s
got free will but really he’s trapped in a maze, in a system, all he can
do is consume, he’s pursued by demons that are probably just in his own
head, and even if he does manage to escape by slipping out one side of the
maze, what happens? He comes right back in the other side. People think
it’s a happy game, it’s a fucking nightmare world and the worst thing is,
it’s real and we live in it. It’s all code. If you listen closely, you can hear
the numbers. There’s a cosmic flowchart that dictates where you can and
where you can’t go. I’ve given you the knowledge. I’ve set you free.
What Colin began by describing in familiar philosophical terms regard-

ing the nature of reality he now characterizes in terms of games, codes,
and flowcharts. What’s more, he regards his own explanation of the maze
in which Stefan finds himself as somehow comprising an essential inter-
pretive key that could unlock its meaning. In this regard, the relationship
between Stefan and Colin is functionally equivalent to the relationship
between Yu Tsun and Stephen Albert, only now the clue for interpreting
the distinct “realities” at issue comes from neither literary criticism nor
philosophy proper but rather gameplay.
Reading Player One

“Bandersnatch” is set in 1984, at a time when commercial game devel-
opment was in its infancy and the academic study of gaming was virtually
nonexistent. Within two decades, however, the contours of the emerging
field of game studies had come to be defined by a debate between nar-
ratologists and ludologists. At issue was the deep structure of the gam-
ing experience and how, methodologically speaking, it was to be parsed.
For narratologists, the primary point of departure was the structure of

the game’s underlying narrative, with accommodations made in order to
account for its interactive elements. For ludologists, however, gaming was
a categorically distinct activity and needed to be disentangled from nar-
rative theory. It was essential to begin with the interactive experience of
the gamer and then incorporate tools drawn from narratology as needed
in order to properly characterize that experience.8
In a word, the challenge for game designers and critics was to decide
whether it was more important to circumscribe the player’s actions within
a particular narrative framework or to maximize the player’s repertoire
of possible (inter)actions within the parameters of the game, even if this
meant sacrificing a degree of narrative coherence. Janet Murray, in her
classic Hamlet on the Holodeck, described the problem with admirable
clarity. On the one hand, she explained, we anticipate that emerging tech-
nologies will open up the possibility for us to enter into virtual worlds
with a maximum degree of freedom in order to interact and improvise
freely in response to virtual stimuli. On the other hand, we wish for our
reactions to those stimuli to provide us with the same kinds of satisfactions
we have come to expect from more traditional narrative forms (cf. Murray
273–84). The challenge has been called the “interactive paradox,” which
Marie-Laure Ryan characterizes as “the integration of the unpredictable,
bottom-up input of the user into a sequence of events that fulfills the
conditions of narrativity—conditions that presuppose a top-down design”
(“Narrative Games” 45). In practice, this means that we either privilege
the narrative structures provided by the game’s programmer or the ludic
structures generated by the player’s spontaneous interactions within the
gaming platform.
Defenders and detractors alike of “Bandersnatch” have quarreled over
whether or not the narrative has been compromised in favor of the pro-
gram’s gaming aspects or vice versa (Cf. Spencer). But a more fruitful
approach strategy for interpreting “Bandersnatch” might begin by notic-
ing the ways in which it subtly but critically shifts the terms of the narra-
tology/ludology debate and then, with a second stroke, masterfully calls
the debate itself into question. If the tendency has traditionally been to
frame the interactive paradox in terms of structural desiderata, Black Mir-
ror encourages us to address it instead in terms of agency, specifically,
with regard to the subjects in whom agency is vested and the manner
in which it is deployed. In other words, for the narratologist, the salient
claim with respect to game design may be expressed not only in terms
88 D. LARAWAY
of the impersonal structures of the game that have been determined in

advance by the programmer/designer but in terms of the agency that he
or she exercises. The ludologist, by contrast, places a premium on vest-
ing agency in the player herself: the meaningful structures that emerge in
the course of gameplay are better regarded as a secondary effect of the
player’s deployment of her own capacity to act autonomously. The point
is that the interactive paradox may be framed in terms of the workings
of agency rather than any intrinsic features of the narrative or gaming
structures themselves.9
But in the same gesture with which “Bandersnatch” invites us to revisit
the interactive paradox, the program arguably manages to undermine the
narratology/ludology dichotomy altogether. Not only does it suggest that
the question of agency is potentially more fundamental than the question
of structure, it will also call the notion of agency itself into question in
a deep sense. Both “Bandersnatch” and “The Garden of Forking Paths”
bring us up short by proposing that our intuitions about our freedom
may turn out to be fundamentally misguided. Borges and Brooker could
thus be read as exploring the following interrelated claims: that the reader
or viewer may be regarded as a ludic agent, i.e., one whose agency is dis-
closed through a particular gaming structure; that when the agency of the
player is mobilized through the logic of consumership it demonstrates its
own vacuity; and, finally, that even in the best of cases agency may ulti-
mately turn out to be epiphenomenal. Finally, “Bandersnatch” and GFP
could be taken together to suggest that the interpretive accent should not
fall upon the notion of agency per se—whether on the part of the game’s
player or of the game’s designer—but rather on the burden of respon-
sibility, particularly when the strength of one’s claims to agency are in
doubt.
It is indeed the case that, as detractors of “Bandersnatch” have noted,
we as viewers are asked to interact with the program in simplistic ways,
making binary choices on a touchscreen. But it is worth noting how
these choices are made and the significance of the episode’s setting in
eliciting our participation. With the possible exception of “San Junipero”
(S03:E04), no episode of Black Mirror is so organically connected to a
particular time and place as “Bandersnatch.” And, like its predecessor,
the program takes its bearings from our memories (or imagination) of
the 1980s. We saw in Chapter 3 that the surfeit of 80s nostalgia in “San
Junipero” not only provided the backdrop for the story of Yorkie and
Kelly to be staged, but it played a key role in Brooker’s examination of
how the virtual does not compete with reality as a mere simulacrum but
actually subtends reality itself. In “Bandersnatch,” nostalgia again serves
as an indispensable virtual element of the narrative. But now it is mobi-
lized directly, becoming a tool for eliciting the expression of our own
predilections regarding a host of cultural artifacts. These preferences in
turn help the story to advance. We must decide, for example, whether
Stefan will have Quaker Sugar Puffs or Kellogg’s Frosties for breakfast;
whether he should listen to a cassette by the Thompson Twins or an
anthology of pop hits as he climbs aboard the bus; and whether at the
record store he should purchase Tangerine Dream’s Phaedra or Tomita’s
The Bermuda Triangle. Each decision sets Stefan off on a different path.
The point is not just that something akin to the “butterfly effect” is at
work here, although that may be the case (Kavadlo). It is rather that we
are to regard our connoisseurship of 1980s pop cultural ephemera as if
our preferences were causally efficacious. Our idiosyncratic personal tastes
are recast as if they were matters of narrative and even metaphysical sig-
nificance, since they constitute the motor that drives the branching of the
storylines of “Bandersnatch” and determine the protagonist’s fate(s).
The connection between the exercise of the viewer’s agency and the
consumption of pop culture may be brought into focus by way of compar-
ison with another recent cultural product that also attempted to mobilize
our attraction to 80s nostalgia, Ernest Cline’s best-selling novel Ready
Player One (2011). Cline’s book sought to operationalize our enduring
interest in the 80s by contriving a story consisting of a series of puz-
zles that the protagonist must solve by drawing upon his knowledge of
the geek-pop-culture canon.10 The modest pleasures of reading Cline’s
novel derive not so much from following its mostly banal plot but rather
from the satisfaction it offers the reader who can decode its cultural allu-
sions and vicariously help the character solve the puzzles around which
the story is constructed.
The ludic logic of Real Player One is to some extent predicated upon
our ability to identify with the protagonist as we set out with him on a
joint project of cultural interpretation and gameplay. Megan Condis has
claimed that “to read [Ready Player One] is to ‘play through’ the text
as one would play through a video game, entering into the protagonist
role, walking through the textual world as that character, and seeing the
world as he sees it” (3; italics in original). Our interpretive labors, she
claims, are functionally equivalent to gaming moves: “one cannot sim-
ply consume Cline’s narrative. It must be played” (4). In this regard,
90 D. LARAWAY
Ready Player One exemplifies some of the traits that Espen Aarseth has
famously identified with cybertextual narratives, most notably the sense
that the term “reading” as it is traditionally used fails to do justice to the
(inter)active labor that the text calls us to perform. Aarseth accordingly
coined the term “ergodic literature” (Gr. ergon = work; hodos = “path”)
to convey a sense of the kind of activity at issue (Aarseth 1).11
To read, for Cline, is to remember, to remember is to play, and to play
presupposes that one has identified oneself with the book’s characters. In
this way, Ready Player One instrumentalizes the reader’s taste for nos-
talgia by treating its objects not as artifacts to be passively enjoyed but
rather as mechanisms that catalyze the development of the plot. More
broadly, we might say that Cline’s work marks the gamification of a host
of observations that call to mind the kind of arguments advanced by Zyg-
munt Bauman: that the logic of consumership flatters us into believing
our idiosyncratic private tastes are not contingent but actually somehow
metaphysically necessary; that they are inseparably bound up with our
enduring individual identity; and that they play a critical role in our con-
stitution as moral agents (cf. Bauman 1–24).
“Bandersnatch” marks both an intensification and a critique of this
identification of the reader with the program’s protagonist. While for
Cline the question of identification hinges on the coded forms of cul-
tural knowledge that bind reader to character (Condis 4–5), in Brooker’s
work this identification is to all appearances direct and unmediated. We
understand ourselves to literally make Stefan’s decisions for him, exercis-
ing our own agency in response to prompts that activate our (trivial) pref-
erences as consumer-subjects. If it is the case that in Real Player One the
reader plays through the character, in “Bandersnatch,” the viewer plays the
character directly, since his or her decisions and preferences just are, ipso
facto, Stefan’s decisions and preferences. While a cynic could be forgiven
for thinking Real Player One might be little more than an unapologetic
attempt to monetize 80s pop culture nostalgia, “Bandersnatch” would
appear to take things a step further. Stefan is not only a character in the
game with whom we identify, but also our prosthesis, an agent who actu-
alizes or acts out our own desires in a new digital environment. In a word,
he is our avatar.12 If this is indeed the case, then “Bandersnatch” lets us
lay claim directly on the world of the computer game, not by some kind
of sympathetic identification with the program’s protagonist but rather as
a direct, prosthetic extension of the very domain of our experience and
affect.
At first glance, the ergodic dimensions of Borges’s tale may be less evi-
dent than those of “Bandersnatch” but Brooker helps us return to “The
Garden of Forking Paths” with our eyes now open to the story’s game-
like dynamics. To be clear, the reader of GFP is not interpellated as a
consumer of popular culture,13 the plot is not driven by the motor of cul-
tural nostalgia,14 and the story does not turn on any direct identification
between the reader and Yu Tsun. But the distinctively game-like features
of the text are no less essential, even if they have not always been as vis-
ible as they happen to be right now, at a time when gaming has become
ubiquitous and a program like “Bandersnatch” nudges us to return to
Borges, sensitized to the clues that are hidden everywhere in plain sight.
Stuart Moulthrop was one of the first to (re)discover the ludic dimen-
sions of “The Garden of Forking Paths.” He not only identified Borges’s
story as the quintessential precursor of hypertextual fiction but actually
designed his own gamified version of it on the Storyspace platform back
in 1986. He reports that when his “forking paths” proto-game was given
to a group of literature students to explore, they were at first frustrated
with the lack of any means of orienting themselves within the text or any
discernibly coherent narrative. But they soon learned to design their own
maps, essentially assuming the role of not just reader-player in the game
but reader-programmer as well (125–30).
Moulthrop’s experiment in translating “The Garden of Forking Paths”
into a hypertextual medium was particularly instructive because it brought
to the surface a ludic element that had always been essential to Borges’s
work, even if his critics had generally neglected to give it its due. It is not
just that we might conceivably regard the reader as “playing through”
the narrative by virtue of his or her identification with the protagonist:
so much could be said of just about any of Borges’s stories. Rather,
the point is that the text invites us to identify not only with Yu Tsun
qua player but also with Ts’ui Pên qua game designer. Any explorer of
Moulthrop’s hypertext version of Borges’s story was obliged to exercise
his or her agency so as to highlight this kind of double identification
vis-á-vis the dual roles of player and designer (cf. Moulthrop 128). In
effect, Moulthrop’s students learned a lesson whose familiarity should not
dull our appreciation of its importance: to read “The Garden of Forking
Paths” is to toggle back and forth between the finite, first-person point of
view of the player within the narrative and the comparatively boundless
perspective enjoyed by the narrative’s designer.
92 D. LARAWAY
Of course, to speak of toggling between two radically different perspec-

tives in the text is to employ a figure of speech explicitly drawn from the
world of computing, but I think the metaphor may be helpful. Readers
have long noted that GFP, on a structural level, shifts from the grittiness
of material history in the story’s opening, to abstract, atemporal philos-
ophizing as Albert explains his reading of the novel to the protagonist,
and returns once again to the sordid and violent particulars of historical
being as Yu Tsun carries out the assassination and fulfills his mission. As
Boldy puts it, the story begins “with the brutality of history and historical
time, move[s] into a magical or metaphysical timelessness, both as lived
experience and literary artifice, and end[s] by a return to the brutality of
history, culminating in the murder of a distinguished intellectual” (Boldy
99). Scholars such as Moran and Balderston, who have done a great deal
to excavate the historical infrastructure of the text, have rightly reminded
us of the dangers of neglecting the internal logic of the story in our haste
to get to its explicit philosophical content. It is easy to see how an appre-
ciation of these elements of the story’s structure could naturally induce us
to speak of its “dialectical” structure as we try to account for both mate-
rial history and metaphysics at the same time (cf. Out of Context 40).
But we cannot do so without a certain degree of risk. For while the con-
tradictory and incommensurate moments of the récit might be taken to
suggest that the structure of the work is inherently dialectical—and that
term does indeed nicely capture the notion of radical difference and vio-
lent rupture—we should also be on guard against any suggestion that the
story finally achieves any kind of quasi-Hegelian synthesis.15 There is no
such resolution in the story. The task that falls to the reader or viewer—as
with the player/game designer—is to keep both perspectives in view, to
continually toggle between them, without attempting to reduce or sub-
ordinate one to the other. The ubiquitous glyph that provides the visual
and conceptual link between Stefan and Jerome F. Davies serves many
purposes: one of them may well be to remind us of this point.16
But this is easier said than done. In most of the permutations of the
“Bandersnatch” episode of Black Mirror, Stefan proves incapable of doing
so. Like his mentor Jerome F. Davies, his role as designer of the game
inevitably bleeds into his role as player/reader. Incapable of toggling back
and forth cleanly between them, he wanders aimlessly, his life and his
work having become the two indistinguishable sides of a Möbius strip.
Unable to pry his perspective as programmer apart from his first-person
vantage point associated with a story of his own, Stefan ultimately comes
to suspect that he is no longer an autonomous subject, that the very site

of his agency has been displaced, and that some dark force is somehow
operating through him, usurping the choices that are ostensibly his alone
to make. It is not just that his frantic efforts to complete the Bandersnatch
game fail, at least according to most of the paths through the episode. It
is that he comes to sense that for all he knows he too might be a glitch
in the program, that he might be living through a runtime error, a fatal
error in which the program hangs or crashes.
Glitches and Ghosts: The Obscure

Body as Material Rem(a)inder
It is not difficult to see why Stefan might lose his way in the labyrinth
of “Bandersnatch.” The overlapping temporal folds of the narratives of
Brooker and Borges sometimes lead one back to a place that one has
been before, only now, as Stephen Albert points out to Yu Tsun, it may
involve a transposition of roles, an exchange of fungible identities. “Once
in a while,” he says, “the paths of that labyrinth converge: for example,
you come to this house, but in one of the possible pasts you are my
enemy, in another my friend” [“Alguna vez, los senderos de ese laber-
into convergen: por ejemplo, usted llega a esta casa, pero en uno de los
pasados posibles usted es mi enemigo, en otro mi amigo”] (CF 125/OC
1.478). In a certain respect the point might strike us as almost obvious:
identities and social roles are as malleable as the infinitely variegated nar-
rative paths upon which we may find ourselves. But then Albert goes on
to make a curious claim suggesting that the invisible walls that separate
this proliferation of worlds may turn to be not so impermeable after all:
In most of those times, we do not exist; in some you exist and I do not;
in others, I do and you do not; in others still, we both do. In this one,
which the favouring hand of chance has dealt me, you have come to my
home; in another, when you come through my garden you find me dead;
in another, I say these same words, but I am an error, a ghost.
[No existimos en la mayoría de esos tiempos; en algunos existe usted y
no yo; en otros, yo, no usted; en otros, los dos. En éste, que un favorable
azar me depara, usted ha llegado a mi casa; en otro, usted, al atravesar mi
jardín, me ha encontrado muerto; en otro, yo digo estas mismas palabras,
pero soy un error, un fantasma.] (CF 127/OC 1.479)
94 D. LARAWAY
We saw earlier that a fundamental tenet of the Many Worlds Interpre-

tation of quantum mechanics holds that the universes that spin off from
each other with every quantum event are wholly insulated from all their
peer universes. They have nothing to do with each other and it is mean-
ingless to speak of causation across them.17 But this exchange between Yu
Tsun and Stephen Albert suggests that, at least within the many worlds
of Borges’s story, these distinct narrative universes may not be totally iso-
lated from each other after all. For what could it mean for Stephen Albert
to say that in some other possible meeting with Yu Tsun, he might turn
out to be an error or a ghost? If each universe were fully independent of
all the rest, if there were no principled distinction to be drawn between
possible universes and the actual one we inhabit, then what could it mean
to speak of glitches, errors, and ghosts?
Stefan Butler’s story—or, rather, the multiple stories about him that are
gathered in the 250 segments of the Black Mirror episode—features his
attempt to finish writing the software for the “Bandersnatch” game. But
his program is highly unstable and riddled with glitches and bugs. In some
of the branching storylines, his computer crashes, as it is unable to run
the code he has written. On other occasions, he realizes he has left partic-
ular pathways unprogrammed. At still other times, the software seems to
permit artifacts belonging to one narrative path to bleed over uncannily
into other ones. With respect to this latter possibility, the episode repeat-
edly presents us with curious details that we may be at first be inclined
to regard as cases of déjà vu (when regarded retrospectively) or fore-
shadowing (when viewed proleptically). For instance, the initial shot of
Stefan’s father watching as the neighbor’s dogs dig in the garden might
at first strike us as an innocuous detail; later we come to understand that
in another world they are exploring the place where his body is buried
after he had been murdered by Stefan. Likewise, a brief shot of an ash-
tray on a table discloses something uncanny about an ordinary object:
in some worlds, it is Stefan’s murder weapon. Stefan’s father’s locking
of his workroom door as he greets his son is likewise an innocent act in
some worlds while in others it is evidence of a government conspiracy in
which he is complicit. Strictly speaking, if the worlds associated with dis-
tinct narrative paths were truly autonomous, we would have no reason to
think that any of these details are significant. But we may also reinterpret
them as evidence of a glitch in the software, as a ghostly bleed-over from
one world to another. So while some scenes of “Bandersnatch” directly
thematize the problem of the flawed code that Stefan is trying to debug
and which results in the instability of the system as a whole, these spectral
artifacts that persist across narrative worlds are no less important. Indeed,
it is precisely because they are so disquietingly subtle that they can tell us
something about how these narrative/coding glitches might function.
In the case of “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Yu Tsun’s response to
the possibility of ghostly presences, of errors, of unnumbered and unseen
worlds, is experienced in a distinctively corporeal register. As he listens in
astonishment to Stephen Albert’s interpretation of his ancestor’s life work,
an uncanny sensation comes over him. Albert mentions an anecdote about
two warring armies in the novel who, following different narrative trajec-
tories, come to meet very different fates. Upon hearing Albert’s story,
Yu Tsun begins to feel “within [his] obscure body an invisible, intangi-
ble pullulation—not that of the divergent, parallel, and finally coalescing
armies, but an agitation more inaccessible, more inward than that, yet one
which those armies somehow prefigured” [“Desde este instante, sentí a
mi alrededor y en mi oscuro cuerpo una invisible, intangible pululación.
No la pululación de los divergentes, paralelos y finalmente coalescentes
ejércitos, sino una agitación más inaccesible, más íntima y que ellos de
algún modo prefiguraban”] (CF 126/OC 1.478). He goes on to use
that same unusual term once again—“pullulation”—to describe his cor-
poreal reaction to Albert’s final statement about the novel’s meaning. It is
as if he had come to see his historical circumstances as a previously unread
chapter that was somehow already contained in his ancestor’s book:
I felt again that pullulation I have mentioned. I sensed that the dew-
drenched garden that surrounded the house was saturated, infinitely, with
invisible persons. Those persons were Albert and myself—secret, busily at
work, multiform—in other dimensions of time. I raised my eyes and the
gossamer nightmare faded.
[Volví a sentir esa pululación de que hablé. Me pareció que el húmedo
jardín que rodeaba la casa estaba saturado hasta lo infinito de invisibles
personas. Esas personas eran Albert y yo, secretos, atareados y multiformes
en otras dimensiones de tiempo. Alcé los ojos y la tenue pesadilla se disipó.]
(CF 127/OC 1.480)
Yu Tsun had sensed in a precognitive register the teeming presence of

other characters, other stories, other temporalities, other destinies along-
side his own. He had begun to learn from Albert how his ancestor’s vast
novel might be viewed from the standpoint of the author or designer for
96 D. LARAWAY
whom all narrative paths coexist simultaneously, with no particular privi-

lege attaching to any one of them. Perhaps when Stephen Albert speaks of
himself as an error or a ghost, he has something like this in mind: in some
worlds he does not exist in any positive, determinate sense, but rather as
an almost indiscernible trace, as if some intangible aspect of his being had
bled over from a nearby, but otherwise distinct, universe. In the world
of computing, he might be a glitch, a bug. As every programmer well
knows, there is no way to avoid such irruptions into the software ecosys-
tem: no matter how carefully one tends the garden, randomness and error
seem to always find a way back in. As Peter Krapp has noted, on a more
general level, the glitch introduces an ineliminable note of contingency
into a “landscape of tightly regulated interactions between software and
hardware” (211). The glitch is a material failure, an inconsistency in the
system, a (necessary) note of contingent discord. And the medium of its
expression in “The Garden of Forking Paths” is the “obscure body.”
And what exactly is this “obscure body”? It might be easier to say what
it is not. It is not the body that, through the senses, provides representa-
tional content to the subject with whom it is associated. Neither is it, nor
can it be, something of which one can have direct knowledge. We might
say instead that the obscure body lies beyond the realm of experience and
cognition altogether, serving rather as a vehicle for the transmission of
affect and the site of a primordial encounter with alterity or otherness
that never quite crosses the threshold of cognition proper.18 The obscure
body speaks to and through Yu Tsun but its message—unlike the semiotic
message that Yu Tsun had encoded in the medium of Stephen Albert’s
(murdered) body—is not wholly intelligible. For it communicates in the
idiom of affect and bears a potent if mute witness of the other infinite
worlds that teem just beyond the edge of understanding.
In “Bandersnatch,” the obscure body at issue comes closest to finding
its voice in the scenes that take place between Stefan and his therapist.
Our protagonist struggles to articulate verbally the sensations communi-
cated to him in corporeal form, the dim intuition that other subjectivities
in unseen realms seem to speak to him in some incomprehensible lan-
guage of the body. At one point, his alienation from his own body takes
its most extreme form as he literally attempts to restrain his own hand,
as if he somehow sensed that it was no longer his, as if an alien force
had begun to animate it and the obscure body had announced its mes-
sage with irresistible but ineffable force. Exasperated, Stefan cries out,
demanding to know precisely who surveils him, who controls him, who
is exercising their agency through the medium of his body.
Of course, it is us. The circuit, we might say, is closed when we see
that the viewer stands in the same relation to Stefan as he stands to his
first-person character in the game. It is we who watch him; it is we who
manipulate him. Our agency has supplanted that of Stefan. The “obscure
body” that impinges upon him and with which he grapples belongs some-
how to the viewer. Those who surveil him are the viewers of Black Mirror.
Or so it would appear.
Responsibility After Agency

One of the more memorable riffs in Slavoj Žižek’s repertoire of pop-
culture-inspired ideological critique concerns our relationship with the
buttons that ostensibly serve to open and close elevator doors. He notes
that, like idiots, we habitually press them, even if they never seem to do
anything. Their true function, he claims, is not actually to open and close
the doors—they are not hooked up to anything at all—but rather to main-
tain the façade of our subjective agency (Less than Nothing 335). A similar
logic appears to subtend “The Garden of Forking Paths” and “Bander-
snatch.” The premise of the latter turns on the idea that the viewer exer-
cises her own agency to intervene in the program and to direct the flow
of the narrative by means of her chosen preferences, even if it is impossi-
ble to foresee where the story might go. By instrumentalizing the viewer’s
particular tastes and preferences, we are invited to understand that agency
is indeed displaced—much as Stefan had suspected—away from the char-
acter and vested instead in us.
Even as the viewer is invited to entertain the notion that he or she
is free to make certain choices, the connection between action and con-
sequence is short-circuited often enough that it invites us to call it into
doubt. The point is forcefully made in that same scene that features Col-
in’s paranoid rant. The viewer had been presented once again with a
choice: she, through Stefan, can accept Colin’s offer of the hallucinogenic
or she can decline it. But as real-life viewers of “Bandersnatch” soon dis-
covered, the question is finally moot. Even if the viewer does not accept,
Colin slips the drug into Stefan’s tea anyway: the forking paths that were
presented to the viewer were merely a pro forma gesture, an illusion of
choice, and the narrative will still take us to some destination not of our
own choosing. As if to ensure that we not miss the significance of the
98 D. LARAWAY
point, Brooker at other times collapses the binary decision-node into a

single on-screen option. A pop-up menu appears, but the viewer is given
only a single choice and it is immaterial whether it is selected or not. The
point is clear: what is enduring with respect to the notion of agency in
“Bandersnatch” is not the actual capacity to choose but rather our bound-
less capacity to convince ourselves that we are so empowered. In this way,
as Hills has noted, the program tends to promote a species of “interac-
tive neoliberal non-agency,” leaving the actual mechanisms of choice as
obscure as ever (Hills).
Borges, in a poem called “Chess,” had once characterized the problem
of agency in terms of the problem of infinite regress. “God moves the
player,” he wrote. “[H]e in turn the piece. / But what god beyond God
begins the round / of dust and time and sleep and agonies?” [“Dios
mueve al jugador, y éste, la pieza. / ¿Qué dios detrás de Dios la trama
empieza / De polvo y tiempo y sueño y agonías?”] (SP 103/OC 2.191).
If Stefan has sensed that his agency as a subject has been displaced, shifted
to an entity who occupies a metaphysical sphere inaccessible to him, we
too must entertain the possibility that our own choices may themselves
be determined by causes that we cannot grasp and actors we cannot see.
In short, the conceit of the interactive dimension of the “Bandersnatch”
episode turns out to be less a way of empowering the viewer than an
interrogation of our ordinary intuitions about subjectivity itself, whether
it be on the part of the characters in Borges’s and Brooker’s fictions or on
the part of the viewer or reader. Indeed, the episode of “Bandersnatch”
could be read as a parable about the failure of agency as an explanatory
concept: agency is displaced from the character to the player (i.e., reader
or viewer) “in the real world,” but even there it finds no purchase.19
The final image of “The Garden of Forking Paths” powerfully captures
the notion that the illusion of subjective agency ultimately serves only to
catalyze our naïve belief in our capacity for efficacious action. But it is
not an illusion that can be sustained. Madden’s arrival on the scene marks
the irruption of temporal, material time into a narrative that had, as it
were, been paused with its digression on infinite and irreconcilable pos-
sible worlds. Now the reader and Yu Tsun toggle back to banal, material
temporality. Madden arrives, the darkness drops, Albert turns his back to
his rival, Yu Tsun—seeing his opportunity—fires a single fatal shot. “The
rest,” the protagonist reports,
is unreal, insignificant. Madden burst into the room and arrested me. I
have been sentenced to hang. I have most abhorrently triumphed: I have
communicated to Berlin the secret name of the city to be attacked. Yester-
day it was bombed—I read about it in the same newspapers that posed to
all of England the enigma of the murder of the eminent Sinologist Stephen
Albert by a stranger, Yu Tsun. The Leader solved the riddle. He knew that
my problem was how to report (over the deafening noise of the war) the
name of the city named Albert, and that the only way I could find was
murdering a person of that name. He does not know (no one can know)
my endless contrition, and my weariness.
[Lo demás es irreal, insignificante. Madden irrumpió, me arrestó. He
sido condenado a la horca. Abominablemente he vencido: he comunicado
a Berlín el secreto nombre de la ciudad que deben atacar. Ayera la bom-
bardearon; lo leí en los mismos periódicos que propusieron a Inglaterra el
enigma de que el sabio sinólogo Stephen Albert muriera asesinado por un
desconocido, Yu Tsun. El Jefe ha descifrado el enigma. Sabe que mi prob-
lema era indicar (a través del estrépito de la guerra) la ciudad que se llama
Albert y que no hallé otro medio que matar a una persona de ese nombre.
No sabe (nadie puede saber) mi innumerable contrición y cansancio.] (CF
127–28/OC 1.480)
Yu Tsun’s plan was ingenious: he managed to improvise a commu-

nicative code out of the scavenged materials at hand. His execution of
the plan was impeccable. But consider the story’s dénouement, which he
characterizes here as “unreal” and “insignificant.” It marks his ultimate
abasement as a subject and a reminder that not only were the contingent
circumstances of his arrest finally meaningless but so too was his attempt
to carry out a truly meaningful action for, as Stephen Albert had taught
him, the circumstances and outcome of their encounter turned out to be
finally insignificant, given the infinite variety of other worlds in which they
would doubtless meet again, with very different results.20 Ultimately, Yu
Tsun’s triumph was at best a local and temporary success. But he has
become all too cognizant of the ways in which his murder of Stephen
Albert has marked him as deeply unethical, as an irredeemable coward.
This picture of contrition and utter exhaustion underscores a key ele-
ment of the critique of agency that Borges and Brooker pose once it has
passed through the crucible of their complex metaphysical/narratological
frameworks. Our protagonists are left with an overwhelming sense of guilt
precisely at the moment they are deprived of the tools—agency, a capacity
to intervene in the world—that would allow them to respond to whatever
100 D. LARAWAY
responsibilities they feel called to bear. But, after all, what can one do?
What is Stefan to do, if he cannot even be sure that he is the author of
his own actions? What else could Yu Tsun have done to avoid acting in
such a way as to bring upon himself endless shame and guilt? Let us begin
first with the wisdom that Colin sought to impart to Stefan in “Bander-
snatch” and then conclude with a lesson that we might take from Stephen
Albert in “The Garden of Forking Paths.”
“When you make a decision, you think it’s you doing it, but it’s not.
It’s the spirit out there that’s connected to our world that decides what
we do and we just have to go along for the ride […].” Colin directs
these words to Stefan but their ultimate meaning is unclear. What does it
mean to “go along for the ride”? One possible interpretation of Colin’s
words is that when one believes that nothing is forbidden—that one is
simply executing the orders of higher powers—then no crime whatsoever
is barred: one is exempted altogether from responsibility.21 But could not
the message be taken in precisely the opposite way as well? Presumably to
abandon any ambition to effect change through one’s actions also means
to abandon any desire to elevate one’s interests above those of another.
Indeed, the scene in question ends with Stefan being forced to make a
terrible decision in order to demonstrate that he has understood. Colin
puts the choice to him like this: “One of us is going over,” he announces,
as the two stand on his apartment balcony several stories above the vast
cityscape that stretches out beneath them. “It wouldn’t matter because
there are other timelines, Stefan. One of us is jumping, so who’s it going
to be?” Here, the viewer is asked to decide on Stefan’s behalf. But there
is no doubt that Colin himself is absolutely indifferent as to which of
the options might be selected. He has willingly forfeited his agency to
his guest and doesn’t seem to regard Stefan’s freedom to choose, such
as it is, as the kind of thing that could ultimately threaten him in any
consequential way.
Stefan, at least on most of the paths that wind through “Bander-
snatch,” never achieves this degree of self-abnegation. If anything, the
program dramatizes his response to his dilemma in terms of the tools of
psychoanalysis, although it is not clear that the transformative potential of
therapy is fully explored. The key scenes in which Stefan comes to grips
with his own lack of agency are set in his therapist’s office, but as Matt
Hills has noted, these sessions seem to function primarily as a plot device
for bringing out particular elements of Stefan’s backstory rather than a
good faith effort to think through questions of agency and responsibility
in a meaningful way (Hills). But there can be no doubt that Stefan’s trou-
bles are intimately connected to the trauma of his past. As Stefan wanders
through the maze of the game, he is pursued by a troubling, monstrous
figure. In the fevered imaginations of both Jerome F. Davies and Stefan
Butler, Pax is the name of a lion-like creature that lies at the center of the
labyrinth. The creature’s appearances in the Black Mirror episode tend
to be unexpected and terrifying, and when the viewer catches glimpses
of it, these seem to be calculated not to provide us with any particu-
lar knowledge about the creature but rather to activate within us a pri-
mordial emotional response. Properly speaking, Pax is a monster whose
presence—or, rather, minimally, the suggestion of his presence—suffices
to trigger impulses that lie below the threshold of consciousness, some-
where in the “obscure body” of the character and viewer alike. For Stefan,
Pax is the horrifying “other” of the stuffed toy he had once cherished as a
child. On one occasion he had misplaced it and, in trying to find it again,
he had forced his mother to miss her train. Forced to take the next one,
she perished when that train crashed. Stefan cannot bear the guilt of the
thought that his attachment to the creature had led directly to his moth-
er’s death: Pax would seem to be the terrible embodiment of his primal
feelings of guilt.
In “The Garden of Forking Paths,” there is no monster per se, at least
not of a traditional sort. Rather, the monster that Yu Tsun encounters
at the end of his journey, is, perhaps predictably, himself. And Stephen
Albert is the mirror in which Yu Tsun’s countenance is reflected back to
him. In response to what he perhaps intuits is Yu Tsun’s plan to put him
to strategic use in advancing his own political cause, Albert welcomes Yu
Tsun to his garden labyrinth at Ashgrove and into his home, where he
lays out the meaning of Yu Tsun’s ancestor’s work, and, by extension,
reveals to him something of his own heritage and identity. Then, at a
crucial moment, he turns his back on him, offering him a perfect target,
just as Madden arrives. Sylvia Molloy has read Albert’s gesture as a token
of hubris on his part, an arrogance in assuming that he had arrived at the
correct interpretation of Ts’ui Pên’s work and a mistake for which he paid
with his death (35). But it also seems plausible to read Stephen Albert’s
(non)action as a different mode of relinquishing agency altogether and
hinting at an ethic in which vulnerability, and not agency, is to be prized.
David E. Johnson has called our attention to the often neglected theme
of hospitality in Borges’s work. Here, he argues that we may glimpse
102 D. LARAWAY
something of the quintessentially ethical gesture itself in the way that the
host receives the guest into his domicile:
Hospitality is tied to the home, the domicile or shelter (but also, therefore,
to the family, the nation, and the state). Hospitality is related to power or
mastery over the home in that it always takes the form of the decision
of inclusion and exclusion. From the beginning, then, hospitality is ethics.
(144)
Thus Albert welcomed his killer into his home. Thinking that Yu Tsun
has been sent by the Chinese consul, he greets him warmly when he
arrives: “I see that Hsi P’eng has undertaken to remedy my solitude. You
will no doubt wish to see the garden?” [“Veo que el piadoso Hsi P’ěng
se empeña en corregir mi soledad. ¿Usted sin duda querrá ver el jardín?”
(CF 123/OC 1.475). It is not that Stephen Albert is naïve. He is not
unaware that Yu Tsun may be an enemy, as he later indicates explicitly
(CF 127/OC 1.479). But the ethic that seems to guide Albert in the
reception he tenders his guest is not premised on the preservation of
his own agency, but rather on a willingness to demonstrate hospitality,
a hospitality grounded precisely in his willingness to cede his own claims
to power and certainty. As Johnson points out, this view of ethics takes
radical vulnerability as its starting point:
the demand of hospitality, that there be a pact between citizen and for-
eigner in which both occupy the same space and are equal under the law,
must be violated at the very moment of its inception or institutionaliza-
tion, because the demand for the absolute equality of citizen and foreigner
entails that the citizen/sovereign no longer be the master of his or her
house. (144; italics in original)22
Albert, in this way, is an ideal host: he welcomes his enemy in and, in

his hospitality, he relinquishes any pretense to wield ultimate power over
his own home. Seen from this angle, the moment when Stephen Albert
turns his back upon Yu Tsun thus marks not a failure or hubris on the
British sinologist’s part, but a token of his having internalized an ethics
of vulnerability and hospitality and having invited his rival to do the same.
“In all fictions, each time a man meets diverse alternatives, he chooses
one and eliminates the others; in the work of the virtually impossible-
to-disentangle Ts’ui Pên, the character chooses—simultaneously—all of
them” [“En todas las ficciones, cada vez que un hombre se enfrenta con
diversas alternativas, opta por una y elimina las otras; en la del casi inex-
tricable Ts’ui Pên, opta—simultáneamente—por todas”] (CF 125/OC
1.477–78). These words—which Stephen Albert directs to his interlocu-
tor as he begins to unfold to him the secret meaning of Ts’ui Pên’s
work—aptly summarize the overwhelming dilemma faced by the protago-
nists of both “Bandersnatch” and “The Garden of Forking Paths.” How is
one to choose when the choices are finally infinite? How is one to choose,
if to choose all options means that one cannot really choose freely at all?
Here we arrive at perhaps the secret center of the labyrinth of Brooker’s
and Borges’s works and encounter a problem without a solution. But to
squarely face the problem is at the same time to acknowledge the possibil-
ity that what matters is not any solution we might proffer but rather the
gesture we offer in response: it is to acknowledge that to entertain the
deepest questions regarding metaphysics and mediatic form is to leave
ourselves ontologically exposed, vulnerable, and yet somehow responsi-
ble.
Notes
1. His evasiveness on the point may also be due to the fact that the pro-
gram appears to have other “Easter Egg” endings, which are not easily
discoverable.
2. This is not to say that “Bandersnatch” marked the first attempt to inte-
grate first-person gaming principles into the medium of streaming video.
As has been widely noted, Netflix had previously experimented with deliv-
ering user-interactive streaming content through children’s programming
(López).
3. One persistent theme in the philosophically-informed criticism of the story
concerns the story’s similarities to the kind of ontological puzzles often
associated with quantum mechanics. For a few representative discussions,
see Merrell (177–82), Baulch (59–68), and Moran (935–28).
4. A very different, but provocative, reading of the story has been pro-
vided by Moran, who has argued that Borges’s text may be read as a
re-working of a little-known story by English writer Olaf Stapledon, with
whom Borges was at least passingly familiar (928ff.).
5. For a helpful overview of the Many Worlds Interpretation, see Vaidman.
6. Lewis’s allusion to Borges may be found in his classic “Counterfactual
Dependence and Time’s Arrow” (459). Ryan has provided a particularly
rich and comprehensive discussion of the ways in which the principle of
possible worlds may be brought into dialogue with narratological the-
ory. For her most sustained discussion of the topic, see her Narrative as
Virtual Reality; for a more concise summary of the relevant issues, see
104 D. LARAWAY
“From Parallel Universes to Possible Worlds.” On Borges and possible

worlds specifically, see also, e.g., Orlando and Merrell (177–82).
7. As a point of comparison, see Sassón-Henry’s discussion of the peculiarly
rhizomatic dimensions of Borges’s text (43–47).
8. For a highly entertaining and polemical take on the debate from a ludol-
ogist, see Eskelinen. Frasca, a key protagonist of these debates, provides a
somewhat more restrained perspective.
9. This is not to say that the significance of agency has not long been
acknowledged by ludologists, particularly in practical terms. Murray, back
in 1997, singled out agency as one of three attributes of the aesthetic
of emergent electronic story-telling mediums (along with “immersion”
and “transformation”) (Murray 126–53). But the approach to agency I
develop in the pages that follow endeavors to connect the pragmatic role
agency plays in gaming to questions more traditionally regarded as belong-
ing to the domain of metaphysics.
10. It is worth noting that the cultural canon at issue in Cline’s work is by no
means innocent and it plays a role in articulating and tacitly defending a
well-defined, highly gendered set of values (Condis 7–13).
11. Of course it is an open question how literally we should take Condis’s lan-
guage here about the equation of literary interpretation and ergodic play
in Real Player One: it might well prove challenging for us to fully iden-
tify Wade Watts’s playing through the game with the kind of interpretive
decisions the reader is called upon to make (which are, arguably, just like
the garden-variety interpretations that every literary text calls upon every
reader to make). Perhaps the argument could be better framed at the
level of affect: the satisfactions we take from decoding the text’s mélange
of 80s pop culture references are not unlike the satisfactions enjoyed by
the protagonist as he plays his way through the game. In a sense, our con-
sumption of the pop culture references produces a sensation of gameplay
on our part, even if, strictly speaking, the novel is at best an imperfect
example of ergodic literature. I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer of
this manuscript for having called my attention to this point.
12. Here is Jonathan Boulter, channeling and extending McLuhan: “the avatar
[…] is […] a narcissistic projection of the player’s desires. In some ways
the avatar is a live model of the central nervous system of the player insofar
as it mirrors and mimics the physiological responses of the player; and
while I would not figure the instantiation of the avatar as a kind of auto-
amputation, I am willing to accept that a ‘displacement of perception’
occurs precisely as I engage with the avatar, its limits, but also its sublime
possibilities” (60). On this interpretation, Stefan, as the viewer’s avatar,
serves not only to displace the viewer’s perceptions but also his or her
desires. That said, it is worth bearing in mind that the precise nature of
the relationship between the player and his or her avatar may prove to be
much more nuanced than this quick sketch may suggest (cf. Papale 1–12).
13. That said, it does bear pointing out that “The Garden of Forking Paths,”
for all the erudite aura that now attaches to it, was originally crafted as an
homage to the lowbrow detective and mystery tales of which Borges was
especially fond. Fittingly enough, it first appeared in English translation in
a special international edition of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
14. While in some respects our agency as readers may be mobilized by our
identification with the protagonist, more consequential still are the inter-
pretive challenges we face in virtue of the organization of the document
itself: the story is presented as the product of an unnamed editor who has
not only taken it upon himself to recount Yu Tsun’s story but who has
censored it in accordance with his own ideological agenda. The reader’s
work, then, consists in part in disentangling the story of the main charac-
ter from the narrative framework—text, paratext, and context—in which
it is embedded (Balderston, Out of Context 39–55).
15. One might recall here Žižek’s attempt to account for the Lacanian Real,
which he explains by evoking the parallax effect, i.e., the constant oscil-
lation between two untenable, unstable, reference points. “The Real,” he
says, “is simultaneously the Thing to which direct access is not possible
and the obstacle that prevents this direct access; the Thing that eludes
our grasp and the distorting screen that makes us miss the Thing. More
precisely the Real is ultimately the very shift of perspective from the first
standpoint to the second” (Puppet 77). Like the notion of “toggling” in
the field of computing, Žižek’s description of an oscillation between these
two perspectives is designed to show that they cannot be reduced to a
single function: one cannot be collapsed into the other.
16. The “White Bear glyph” (so named because of its initial appearance in
S02:E02) provides us with a perfect visual summary of the subtending
logic of the episode. The glyph—a unitary point or node that bifurcates
into two parallel line segments—features prominently in “Bandersnatch”
and recalls the coding challenges Stefan faces as he designs the game. As
the branches multiply—emblematized by the ever-increasing prevalence of
the shape in the scribbled notes and diagrams that cover his workspace—
he finds himself increasingly unable to orient himself in the bifurcating
pathways that they represent. His life increasingly comes to resemble that
of Jerome F. Davies, who was unable to escape his own demon in his
narrative labyrinth. The “White Bear” glyph also serves to link “Bander-
snatch” in a still more direct way to Borges: it would be difficult to imag-
ine a more succinct visual emblem of the “forking-paths” logic of GFP.
For that matter, the shape is identical to the visual figure that Borges
himself had made use of in a companion text from Ficciones, “A Sur-
vey of the Work of Herbert Quain” [“Examen de la obra de Herbert
106 D. LARAWAY
Quain”]. That brief narrative included a similar decision-tree figure to

illustrate the creative strategies adopted by a fictional author who tried
to weave multiple incompatible tales into a single narrative (CF 107–
11/OC 1.461–64). Finally, it is worth noting that the glyph recalls a
principle of recursive symmetry which is used to model complex systems
that are isomorphic across different spatial or temporal frames. Katherine
Hayles has explored how that principle is employed to model complex,
dynamic systems (including literary texts) that otherwise constitute seri-
ous challenges for representation. The form of the bifurcating glyph as it
is used in “Bandersnatch” and “The Garden of Forking Paths” offers such
a case, in which “the same general form is repeated across many different
length scales, as though the form were being progressively enlarged or
diminished” (Chaos 10).
17. In a certain regard, this interpretation recalls the phenomenon of “fork-
ing” in the context of computer programming. Forking is the process by
which a single batch of source code may be replicated and set to work in
different environments. Generally speaking, it “involves a split, the dupli-
cation of source code or content and the creation of a new project along
with the original. The two projects proceed in different directions, but,
at least initially, both draw on the original code” (Tkacz 95). In similar
fashion, we are invited to think of the many plotlines of Ts’ui Pên’s novel
and the many paths through Stefan Butler’s game as fully autonomous
from each other. Despite springing from the same initial starting point,
every forking path is logically and causally independent. Thus the viewer
of “Bandersnatch” may arrive at any one of as many as a dozen differ-
ent conclusions (although one imagines that, setting aside the technical
constraints faced by the producers of the episode, an indefinitely large
number of outcomes might have been programmed); the reader of Ts’ui
Pên’s work could have similarly found his patience exhausted with too
many possible outcomes to count.
18. Aubrey Anable has recently published an excellent study of the signifi-
cance of affect theory for game studies. One of her primary conclusions
can be articulated like this: “video games […] are a particularly popular
form of representation through which we can trace and analyze how affect
moves across bodies and objects in the present. Furthermore, bodies and
subjectivities have long been, or perhaps have always been, coassembled
with technologies of mediation. Video games […] are an important con-
temporary site through which to address the longer history of how bodies
are mediated, how their mediation informs shifting notions of what ‘the
body’ is, and which bodies come to matter” (132). While Anable is pri-
marily interested in developing an account of how affect can synchronize
bodies and subjectivities across a wide array of gaming experiences, her
question of how affect shapes our sense of what the body might be in
a gaming context is very much a question that “Bandersnatch,” on my
reading, addresses.
19. Fittingly enough, Netflix developed in 2016 an uncanny promotional spot
marketing Black Mirror that begins by posing two stark questions, both
framed against a black screen: “What do you love most in life?” and “What
if the things you love could always be with you?” A montage of quotid-
ian scenes follows: people working out, gazing at the ocean, sitting in
a business meeting, paying a visit to an elderly person in the hospital.
In each case their eyes are glazed over with the milky film that signals
that they are viewing Netflix through prosthetic visual implants (Waring).
Ordinary experience is overlaid with a pre-customized, pre-programmed
viewing experience and we have the uncanny realization that we are merely
witnessing stylized depictions of ourselves: we have already become Black
Mirror characters.
20. It’s not clear that the English translation of the phrase “innumerable con-
trición y cansancio” captures the strangeness of the original Spanish. The
adjective “innumerable” is in fact identical in Spanish and English. In both
languages it always modifies a mass-count noun (and never a mental or
emotional state). While Borges might not have disagreed with the senti-
ment conveyed by the English word “endless,” the allusion in the original
text is clearly to the multiplicity of alternate selves that populate countless
other universes and which are somehow present to the protagonist.
21. In fact, this is the view expressed by an expert on the case of Jerome F.
Davies in the documentary film that plays in the background of crucial
scenes in “Bandersnatch.”
22. The framing of the problem of hospitality in terms of citizen/foreigner
brings out layers of complexity in the story that I cannot address here.
GFP may also be read as a tale about how ethnic and national identi-
ties—framed against a backdrop of colonialization—come to be negoti-
ated (Balderston, Out of Context 42–48). We should recall that Madden
is an Irishman in the service of the British; Yu Tsun is a Chinese spy in the
service of the Germans; and Albert is a British sinologist who had spent
time in China as a missionary.
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Index
A “The Immortal”, 74
Aarseth, Espen, 90 “Kafka and his Precursors”, 11, 47
Agency, 27, 28, 30, 32, 40, 48, 85, “The Mirror of Ink”, 1–4, 9, 10,
87–91, 93, 97–102, 104, 105 17
Amputation, 37 “The South”, 16, 50, 55, 58, 59,
Apple, 8 69, 71, 72
The Arabian Nights , 58, 61, 76 “Survey of the Work of Herbert
Argentina, 56, 73 Quain”, 105
“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, 19
Brain-in-a-vat, 52, 54, 55
B Brooker, Charlie
Balderston, Daniel, 80, 82, 92, 105, “Bandersnatch”, 18, 79–81, 85,
107 88–91, 93, 97, 98, 100, 103
Baudrillard, Jean, 14, 54, 72 Black Mirror title card, 4
Bauman, Zygmunt, 90 “The Entire History of You”, 15,
Bioconservatism, 38 24–26, 28, 32, 36, 37, 43, 44
Bolter, Jay, 13, 73 “San Junipero”, 15, 16, 52, 53, 55,
Borges, Jorge Luis 68, 88
“Chess”, 98
“On Exactitude in Science”, 72
“Funes the Memorious”, 15, C
23–26, 28, 32, 36, 43, 44 Carlisle, Belinda, 51, 52
“The Garden of Forking Paths”, Cline, Ernest, 89, 90, 104
16, 79, 80, 85, 88, 91, 103, Cyborg, 27–30, 32, 34, 35, 39, 40,
105, 106 43, 44, 46–48
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 117
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44238-5
118 INDEX
D Interface, 8, 32, 33, 35, 36

Descartes, René, 52, 54 iPad, 1, 3, 7, 8, 12
DeWitt, Bryce, 83
Diegetic prototype, 38, 47
Dovem, Patrick, 62, 64, 73 J
Jameson, Fredric, 66, 74
E
K
Embodiment, 10, 12, 24, 28, 101
Kafka, Franz, 11, 19, 28, 57
Ergodic literature, 90, 104
Ethics, 81, 101, 102
L
Labyrinth, 16, 80–82, 93, 101, 103,
F 105
Fantasy, 13, 15, 22, 40, 43, 51, 52, Lacan, Jacques, 8
55–57, 61–65, 71–74 Lewis, David, 83, 103
Forking, 81, 82, 97, 106 Locke, John, 28
Foucault, Michel, 46 Ludology, 87, 88
G M
Genette, Gérard, 69 The Matrix, 54
Glitch, 81, 93–96 McLuhan, Marshall, 8, 13, 14, 20,
Grain, 23, 27, 29, 32–38, 42, 43, 46, 37, 47, 65, 104
47 Memory, 15, 22–48, 60, 66, 71
Grusin, Richard, 13, 73 Metafiction, 6, 9
Mirror, 2, 3, 6–8, 18, 22, 35–37, 47,
63, 69, 72, 86, 101, 104
H Montfort, Nick, 79
Hansen, Mark B.N., 15, 18, 28, 45 Moulthrop, Stuart, 79, 91
Haraway, Donna, 44 Murray, Janet, 79, 87, 104
Hayles, N. Katherine, 14, 28, 45, 48,
106
Hospitality, 101, 102, 107 N
Hume, David, 28, 46 Narcissism, 8
Hutcheon, Linda, 62, 66, 73 Narcissus, 8
Hypermediacy, 13, 73 Narratology, 87, 88
Hypertext, 16, 79, 91 Netflix, 3, 4, 20, 77, 103, 107
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 26, 28, 30–32,
34, 44, 46
I Nolan, Christopher, 19
Ideology, 6, 62, 64, 73 Nostalgia, 16, 50, 54, 56, 62–68, 71,
Immediacy, 13, 60, 73 88–91
INDEX 119
O Skågeby, Jörgen, 38, 47

Obscure body, 16, 93, 95–97, 101 South Africa, 67, 68
Subjectivity, 6, 9, 10, 16, 18, 24, 27,
34, 78, 98
P Surveillance, 37, 46
Pebble, 27, 44
Perception, 23–27, 29–32, 37, 39,
40, 43, 47, 60, 72, 104 T
Popol Vuh, 22, 23, 43 Tales of the Unexpected, 12
Posthuman, 25, 27, 28, 30, 32, 35, TCKR Systems, 51, 54, 59, 63, 70
37, 45, 47, 48 Thelma & Louise, 51
Privacy, 78 Turing, Alan, 45
Prosthesis, 28, 42, 90 Twilight Zone, 12, 19
Putnam, Hilary, 52, 54, 72
V
Q
Virtual, 15, 16, 45, 50–59, 62, 63,
Quantum mechanics, 94, 103
70, 71, 87, 89
Virtual Reality, 53
R
Ready Player One, 89, 90
Remediation, 13, 73 W
Ryan, Marie-Laure, 87, 103 Wardrip-Fruin, Noah, 79
White Bear glyph, 18, 105
S
Sarlo, Beatriz, 40, 48, 62, 72 Y
Screen, 3–5, 7, 8, 10, 18, 27, 35, 37, Yeats, William Butler, 50, 69, 70, 75
41, 42, 52, 79, 105, 107
Self-referentiality, 6
Serling, Rod, 12 Z
Simulation, 50, 51, 54, 55, 58, 59, Žižek, Slavoj, 6, 7, 14, 28, 53, 72,
62–66, 68, 70, 71, 74, 75 97, 105

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LITERATURES OF THE AMERICAS

More information about this series at

Borges and Black

Literatures of the Americas

Covre illustration: © Melisa Hasan

1 Possessed by the Mirror 1

2 Forgetting and Forgiving in an Age of Total Recall 21

3 Nostalgia, the Virtual, and the Artifice of Eternity 49

Works Cited 109

David Laraway received a Ph.D. in Romance Studies from Cornell Uni-

Possessed by the Mirror

Keywords Media · Materiality · Borges · Brooker

© The Author(s) 2020 1

managed, through his divinatory talents, to ingratiate himself with the

sought to domesticate. That Borges, the symbol par excellence of a gen-

Media, Materiality, and Mirrors

to enable the ideological infrastructure to repair itself under the guise of

Reading Borges with Brooker

principled distinction to be made between responsible and irresponsible

Remediating Borges and Brooker

conservative in many respects. But rather than accept the conventions

Junipero” may be found in Borges’s classic story from Ficciones, “The

Perhaps I may bring these pages to a close by returning once again to

9. Andrew Brown has observed that this tendency to develop superficial,

it follows on the heels of a similar Spanish-language anthology of critical

Forgetting and Forgiving in an Age

Keywords Memory · Forgetfulness · Ethics · Media · “The Entire

© The Author(s) 2020 21

Breath Upon the Face of a Mirror

of the first season of Black Mirror (S01:E03). Liam, an affluent young

While there is no tragic dénouement in Funes’s story to rival Liam’s—

not in terms of some hitherto untapped capacities of the biological brain

modern computer age. To be clear, it is not that Funes should somehow

reasons, Funes, in good Humean fashion, is almost totally lacking any

protagonists suggest that it is hardly a form of being whose arrival mer-

It is hard not to think of these lines, written in 1874, being channeled

powers. Either way, the consequence is clear. Without a means of circum-

Hallam makes no attempt to directly rebut Colleen’s argument about

his nominally human form notwithstanding.21 As with Brooker’s stag-

in the enhancement of our information-processing faculties, but also bring

own organic memory—however imperfectly, however his memory may be

It is therefore the interplay between Funes’s infallible memory and the

project involves multiple, interdependent subjects, who are always finite

they were virtually immediate particulars” [“Pensar es olvidar diferencias,

that the ‘dog’ of three-fourteen in the afternoon, seen in profile, should

had a video camera surgically implanted in his skull so as to document

we may read Borges as having retrospectively written about posthuman

Nostalgia, the Virtual, and the Artifice

Abstract “San Junipero” (S03:E04) has been hailed as an uncharacteris-

Keywords Virtual · Nostalgia · “San Junipero” · “The South”

© The Author(s) 2020 49

Heaven Is a Place on (Virtual) Earth

as we learn that the awkward Yorkie, somewhat incongruously, is already

seem to offer us but a twenty-first century, technologically-enhanced,

Virtual Reality in itself is a rather miserable idea: that of imitating reality,

On Žižek’s view, the virtual is not so much an ontological category to

In what sense does the virtual in “San Junipero” function as an ide-

virtual-as-simulation is to miss a more immediate lesson about the ways

allow apparently straightforward stories to be told in divergent registers

From Trauma to Nostalgia: Foreseeing

In short, as Dahlmann’s own story continues to evolve toward its inex-

fuerzas del mal”] (CF 176/OC 1.527) as he undertakes his journey to

by a different musical theme, including songs by The Smiths (“Girlfriend