The following article looks into technology and information society through a palimpsest of textual orders and entextualizations at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Through the figure of the bored reader idly paging through rapidly aging science fiction, the essay "reads" through this literal archive of information technologies whereby coterminus information orders -- cataloging numbers, card catalogs, subject headings, "natural language" postcoordinated searching and so on -- contemporaneously exist and therefore gesture to the limits (and possible futures) of information societies. By excavating these ruins of information's past, the author hopes to gesture beyond totalizing visions of information society as knowledge-based utopia or Orwellian dystopia.

Reading Over the Shoulder of the Future at the Library of Congress

Samuel Gerald Collins

<1> It is 2003 and I am doing some research at the Library of Congress, the de facto national library for the United States and the largest library in the world. Next to me sit some articles I've printed off of online journals on the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's "Total Information Awareness Project," a plan, still in its formative stage, to throw a panopticon net of surveillance across the United States through a combination of "language translation technologies, data search and pattern recognition technologies, and advanced collaborative and decision support tools" (DARPA). But I am also doing research on Chad Oliver, an anthropologist and science fiction writer best known for stories and novels published in the 1950s and 1960s. In contrast to DARPA's vision of the completely surveilled society, I am finding my researches into Chad Oliver a somewhat less than Foucaultian experience: 3 of the 6 call slips I hand in come back "Not on Shelf," the other three inform me that the primary texts from Oliver are in remote storage and will take several days to retrieve. Forced to abandon my research, I give myself to a kind of peevish reverie one sees often at the Library of Congress.

<2> What should I make of these differences? On the one hand, the virtual, tightening grip of a government with far-reaching, seemingly unlimited power and, on the other, the obstinate (and oftentimes elusive) corporeality of the book, limited by the social practices of people and the confines of (merely) Cartesian space? Is the Library an atavistic dinosaur here, a relic of the Gutenberg Age? And is DARPA the future?

<3> My fascination with the Library of Congress -- by many accounts the largest library in the world and, for a good portion of my adult life, my neighborhood library -- begins with an apparent paradox. The twenty-first century seems to spell--if we believe all of the paeans to the lost art of the book and the death of the classics--the end of reading and the superimposition of glossy and shallow hyperlinked mutltimedia over the organic holism of reader and book. As biblical scholar Robert Alter perorates:

The neo-Marxist critic Terry Eagleton shows admirable candor and consistency in proposing that a curricular move be made from literature to "discourse studies," so that instructors would be free to teach Shakespeare, television scripts, government memoranda, comic books, and advertising copy in a single program as instances of the language of power. What is regrettable, though also characteristic of a certain ideological coerciveness, is that Eagleton also proposes the abolition of departments of literature, having demonstrated, at least to his own satisfaction, that there is no coherent phenomena that can be called literature. (Alter 1989:13-14)

I am haunted by the thought that all of the unsorted, unverified, constantly changing information on the Internet may inundate knowledge, may move us back down the evolutionary chain from knowledge to information, from information to raw data. (Billington 1996:38)

Billington's and Alter's concerns both echo a common postmodernist insight that late-twentieth century knowledge has been shorn of its semantic content under the detritus of undifferentiated information flows, that endless profusion of signs (Baudrillard 1983).

<4> On the other hand, reading has never been so widespread. This is not the triumph of the computer over the book, it is the triumph of reading over other social and political practices. The computer is the reading machine par excellence. The only reason the E.D. Hirsches, Alan Blooms and Robert Alters of the world complain over the demise of reading is because the text has become ubiquitous in an age obsessed with the interpretation of textual orders. No longer the special province of litterateurs and critics, reading has been popularized, with all the attendant inequalities that this implies. In the United States, at least, almost all aspects of life have been penetrated by the logic of the readerly: wars and executions become somehow diaphanous in the age of information, the flesh falling away to reveal the message beneath. Our relationships and the practices of our everyday lives seem less important than the auto-referentiality of the messages we send. "Today, the President sent a message to Congress," drones National Public Radio, cutting to the hermeneutic chase and neatly eliding the tragedy of world events for the semiotic nuggets buried just beneath those tortured surfaces. After the bombs, we wait. Only after the press conference will the semiotic circuit be complete. But is it possible to elegize the Gutenberg Age even as we blast into the Gutenberg Galaxy? How can our society be reading less even as it reads more? Better yet, how do we theorize a society where semiology has replaced bibliology and where it may be more culturally important to read one's t-shirt and blue jeans than Richardson's Clarissa or Eliot's The Mill On the Floss (Eco 1986; Fiske 1989)?

<5> These (apparent) contradictions and (feeble) ironies have become a familiar part of the rocky topography of "information society," those revolutionary changes in the way we live, work and exist that are, for some, a bygone conclusion and, for others, a calumnious rumor. Sometimes linked to greater quantities of information technologies, information workers or information production and, at other times, to the logarithmic growth of chaotic, fecund, signifying quanta, "information society" is at once solid and indistinct, self-evident and yet impossible to unambiguously assay (Webster 1995). This is doubly ironic given information society pundits' predilections for quantifiers of social change and their insistence on distinguishing the arrival of an entirely new era as an "explosion" of technology and value. Can we truly distinguish a new epoch of life and work from what went before? What measure do we use? Is "information society" a matter of value? Of labor? Of power?

<6> It is my belief that the "information society" is none (or all) of these things, or, at least, that whether or not the information age is here or on its way is not the most interesting question we could be asking. Rather, I would suggest that "information society"-first and foremost-signals shifts in desire, in fears and dreams. More than some unilinear stage in the evolution of society, "information society" indexes the distance between where people believe organizations are and where they should be: it is, in other words, a function of the imaginary. Regimes of technoscience exist both in the present and the future, products of both their immediate materiality and their teleologies; indeed, with information society, those temporalities are effectively reversed and future-oriented IT may only cast indistinct shadows into the present-we have a better idea, in other words, of what information society may be in the future than we do about information society in the present.

<7> Writing about the propensity for quotations of the part in the world's varied postmodern mediascapes, Appadurai suggests that:

The image, the imagined, the imaginary -- these are all terms which direct us to something critical and new in global cultural processes: the imagination as a social practice. No longer mere fantasy (opium for the masses whose real world is elsewhere), no longer simple escape (from a world defined principally by more concrete purposes and structures), no longer elite pasttime (thus not relevant to the lives of ordinary people) and no longer mere contemplation (irrelevant for new forms of desire and subjectivity), the imagination has become an organized field of social practices [ . . .]. (Appadurai 1990:5)

While the imagined scapes of community, identity and difference seem, to me, extremely influential in the lives of people, I wonder how new this social practice is. Certainly the historical landscape and the historical nation have always been objects rendered by force (and practice) of imagination (Anderson 1991; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1984). Doesn't much of modernity (anthropology included) hinge on the wonder (or the terror) of the imaged ethnos? If twenty-first century modernity traffics in pastiche, decoupage and superimosition rather than the familiar language of realism, it does so towards the same ends. Just as the future and the past are imagined worlds, so the present is construed as an imagined totality of place, event and agency. If consigning cultural, racial and ethnic difference to imagined allochronisms or allotropisms is the precondition for imperialism or orientalism, passing the laws and debating the public policy of the coeval state is no less an imagined act. This is particularly the case in the United States, where politics traverse a mythopoetics of race, class, gender and ethnicity. "American pastoralism" and the "frontier" are two such constructs, imagined at the moment of their dissolution, yet still powerful enough to fuel public policy up until the present (Marx 1964).

<8> What about information society's imaginaries? Do they accelerate past the older orders of nationalism, imperialism and progress? Or are these visions of the coming order consigned to replay moribund nightmares of the past. Sitting here at the my Library of Congress reader's desk filling out call slips for books, both versions of the future seem imminent. From here, the present and the future are contained in the space of a book.

<9> For the moment, it may be important to ignore the Not On Shelf notices that obstruct my research and consider the other books on my desk.

Book I:[1]

<10> "Cyberpunk" -- a loosely defined subgenre of science fiction emerging in the 1980s with works like William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), Pat Cadigan's Mindplayers (1988) and Rudy Rucker's Wetware (1988) -- pits fashionable protagonists against a "new bad future" defined by advanced capitalism, advanced technologies and shifting worlds of undifferentiated information.

Easily extrapolating from the present social tensions and contradictions, cyberpunk posits a government/corporation that controls and monitors all (dis)information channels and cybernetic technologies, ruthlessly hunting down any infiltrators of its vast data banks. While information may want to be free to spontaneously mix and match, to express constantly changing algorithms of potential knowledge, bottom line outcomes prefer stable, patented, monopolized situations -- and passive consumers fat with bread and circuses! (Wolf )

Cyberpunk explores the mediation of people with their machines in worlds reduced to virtual space. Those fictions suggest an information society pushed to the limits -- all aspects of life reduced to flow of fungible information. For a brief time in the late 1980s and early 1990s, literary critics and students of the postmodern positively venerated cyberpunk as a synecdoche for the coming age, an extrapolation of the coming postmodern world of uncertain identities and unstable signifieds (Cf. McCaffery 1991). Some critics found in cyberpunk's penchant for shifting subjectivities the potential for a feminist politics while others a confirmation of postmodernism's obsession with surfaces (Hollinger 1991).

<11> In Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk spoof/adventure Snowcrash (1992), Hiro Protagonist connects to the "Metaverse" -- essentially a jazzed-up internet -- and materializes in a virtual world complete with streets, bars and residences. He walks into his office and finds something waiting for him by his desk.

There is something new: A globe about the size of a grapefruit, a perfectly detailed rendition of Planet Earth, hanging in space at arm's length in front of his eyes. Hiro has heard about this but never seen it. It is a piece of CIC software called, simply, Earth. It is the user interface that CIC uses to keep track of every bit of information that it owns -- all the maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance stuff. (Stephenson 1992:99)

In Stephenson's good-natured dystopia, "CIC" stands for the "Central Intelligence Corporation," a for-profit amalgam of the CIA and the Library of Congress.

<12> To utilize the "Earth" software, Hiro need only fix his eyes on some detail to blow it up to larger scale or focus his eyes to bring out the tiniest minutiae. Everything is represented there: the exact position of ships, satellites, encroaching weather systems, the blueprints of homes and factories. Later in the novel, Hiro will use the "Earth" to fix the exact location of his enemies on a flotilla of rafts in the middle of the Pacific ocean.

<13> "Earth" software is the apotheosis of everything we hope (and fear) information society may turn out to be; this is information in a perfectly transparent medium where scale and distance are meaningless. All walls have disappeared; there are no corporeal boundaries interceding between the "knower" (Hiro Protagonist) and the "known" (the location of his enemies). In comparison, the standard Benthamite panopticon seems less than ideal, revealing everything, but only from a single perspective (Foucault 1980). The "Earth" software, on the other hand, allows Hiro to switch from macro- to micro-perspectives by simply re-focusing his eyes. Even better, "Earth" renders the abstract concrete, presenting weather information and building schematics alongside the more conventionally physical. "Earth" is the ultimate artefact of information society, where "information" is imaged as reality and where "reality" is consigned to the imaged ghosts of the old, Gutenberg world. The spectral presence of the real and the all-too-real trade places on a fantasy map that toggles effortlessly between the corporeal and the diaphanous

<14> When I first started using the Library of Congress in 1992, I watched -- as an introduction to the institution -- A Tour of the Library of Congress -- a 22 minute film run on a tape loop in the Library's visitor's center in the Madison Building (Library of Congress 1986). Besides the expected summary of the Library departments and functions infused with a strong dose of self-aggrandizement, the video ended on a mysterious note: a slow pan towards a disconnected bundle of fiber-optic cable protruding from a reader's desk. What the director wanted to imply, I gather, was that the Library of Congress was ready for anything. On another level, however, the protruding cable suggested profound misgivings over the coming "information society." What would the Library's function be in the coming "age of the computer"? Would readers be reading? Would the Library still be engaged in its work of classification, cataloging and reference?

Book II:

<15> In 1997, I remember wandering into the Digital Library Visitor's Center in the interior court of the Madison Building. A maze of sterile-looking, particle-board cubicles had been erected in the room and the lights dimmed to a sepulchral twilight. In each of the cubicles sat computer hardware terminals somehow evocative of the Library of Congress's work on its National Digital Library (NDL): desktops, scanners, multimedia CD-jukebox servers. In the back of the court, to the far south, was a small stage set with two television monitors and a larger, projected screen in front of a few rows of chairs. Taking a seat with three other people, I looked above to the smoked windows enclosing the court; behind each glowed flat, flourescent lighting illuminating office cubicles not unlike those around us.

<16> I made small talk with a man whom I realized must be the National Digital Library Visitor Center's docent; he was worried about the sparse attendance and I reassured him that more people would come once the word got out. The young woman next to me asked, rather peevishly, how long the tour would take and I realized that, besides me, the "audience" had been drawn from the ranks of the Library's summer interns. Not all of them, seemingly, had come willingly.

<17> The docent moved to the stage and welcomed us to the Center. His talk -- one half-hour -- introduced the Library's home page (the "front door to the Library of Congress"), the digitized collections (e.g. the Houdini Collection, "California Gold: Northern California Music from the Thirties," etc.) and the Library's online catalog (then called LOCIS). After demonstrating each, he took questions (we asked none) and then invited us to move to the computers around the room and try the National Digital Library collections for ourselves. None of us stayed to take him up on this.

<18> And so our "tour" ended. I wasn't surprised that no one stayed to ask questions or browse the multimedia collections. Why should we have? We all had offices very much like these simulacra around us with the same desk-top computers and the same access to the Internet. Each of us could browse as many of the Library's collections as we wanted or, for that matter, anyone else's digitized collections, should we find the Library's inadequate or tiresome. In fact, I was unclear why we had to sit in the room at all. It wasn't for aesthetics: the Center looked like the abandoned headquarters of a telemarketing firm that had purchased its furniture from the back of a truck. But it really didn't matter: after all, wasn't the Library's homepage (www.loc.gov) the National Digital Library's "front door" and not the National Digital Library Visitor's Center? Wasn't the National Digital Library, by definition, accessible from anywhere and, by extension, located nowhere? Here, kindred to Thomas More, the National Digital Library gestures not only to an imagined future but -- with an nod to the Etienne-Louis Boullée's plans for the Bibliothèque du Roi -- to the history of biblio-topias itself (Chartier 1992).

<19> Just off the LC's Main Reading Room, split off into the close confines of Decks 16 and 33, sits the Reading Room's behemoth card catalog. Part of it used to occupy center stage in the vaulted Main Reading Room and dominate the readers' desks around it, but it was moved away shortly after the Library switched over to online cataloging in 1977 and installed terminals across from the Main Reading Room (Nelson and Farley 1991:55). Like an old appliance no longer used but too valuable to throw away, the card catalog is tucked safely out of sight, dissociated accept in name from the multiple rows of bright computer screens that are now the most frequent interfaces with the Library's cataloging. When you enter the dimly lit decks to look at the card catalog, the atmosphere is palpably different. Looking out of place and not quite fitting the cases they're packed into, the card catalog is not used very often. I cannot help but glance suspiciously at the other person in the card catalog room. Was he really using it or doing something else back there?

<20> The cards themselves, whether typed, printed or touchingly hand-written, are heavily worn now; some are missing. For the uninitiated, they fall into three categories. The first and second sort are filed by alphabetically by "main entry," usually a title or an author's name printed across the top of the card. The third sort -- differentiated from the first and second by a red bar -- is filed alphabetically by Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH), an alphabetical structure of terms, concepts and places assigned to most of the LC's collections in all formats. These three varieties of cards constitute access points to the catalog, the "portals" through which readers enter and "travel" from card entity to another. Some items have been given fewer than three access points, while others have been given more than three, as in cases of "added entry": additional personal names, corporate names, titles or series information. Although there is theoretically no limit to the number of added entries given in any one cataloged item and hence no theoretical limit to the number of places a card might be filed in the catalog, space has worked to minimize the number of entries. How much room would it take? How many hours might a reader spend going from drawer to drawer looking for added entries? How much would it cost?

<21> But is it that much different than the "digital" library? Isn't it still a vaguely proleptic version of "Earth"? The online catalog can multiply the number of access points one thousand fold, one million fold. But at the same time, it can't. One might provide one thousand access points to a catalog record without having to build new buildings, but one would still have to do the labor of selecting, writing, editing and re-checking those records for accuracy. You might have instant access to everything, but you still have to read, record, print and pay. Infinitely "transparent" information can only exist, paradoxically, outside of the institutions, social formations and practices information is supposed to serve.

<22> William Gibson's 1996 Idoru illustrates a world where research is more a matter of feeling one's way through tropological scapes of data than paging through an archive of manuscripts or chasing footnotes through old articles.

Laney was not, as he was careful to point out, a voyeur. He had a particular knack with data-collection architecture, and a medically documented condition-deficit that could toggle, under certain conditions, into a state of pathological hyperfocus [ . . .] he was an intuitive fisher of patterns of information: of the sort of signature a particular individual created in the net as he or she went about the mundane but endlessly multiplex business of life in a digital society. Laney's concentration- deficit , too slight to register on some scales, made him a natural channel-zapper, shifting from program to program, from database to database, from platform to platform, in a way that was, well, intuitive. (Gibson 1996:25)

Gibson's protagonist, Colin Laney, is the ultimate voyeur of late-modernity, a witness to the transubstantiation of subjects into data streams and to the "implosion of meaning" deep within Mcluhan's global village. In the late-capitalist triumph of simulcra and semiurgy over a world of subjects and objects, a person's 'digital signature' is their true self. Later in Gibson's novel, Laney is able to prevent a suicide by reading a woman's "trace" on the digital world: her purchases, communications, deposits and transfers. Indeed, cyberpunk frisson often hinges on penetrations of the telematic onto the material. But does Gibson's novel describe or prescribe our present? Or does it do both?

<23> I am sitting in the Main Reading Room of the LC's Jefferson Building, typing away on my laptop while, in this closed-stack library, I wait for books to be brought to me. They're taking a long time -- almost 90 minutes for books in the B schedule -- and I'm a little annoyed. At the end of the desk next to mine, on the other hand, a pile of books and bound serials is mounting. One after another, deck attendants deposit another cache of monographs until it looks like the books will slip off the desk onto the floor. It's a neat trick, I think, since I know that the Library now limits book requests to five per hour! Finally, a man sits down, bringing more books from his reader's shelf, and begins paging through all of the volumes he's amassed. He's taking sporadic notes, but it's clear he's not just reading through all of these sources. Rather, he's rapacious, never reading more than two or three contiguous sentences from any book. He's continually picking one up and putting another down, shuffling between indices, tables of contents and bibliographies. Whatever he's found, it's got him extremely excited; unable to contain his ebullience, he actually exclaims "fascinating," "extraordinary" and even "most interesting." I am bothered by his talking, but also envious that he can work up such enthusiasm. His approach -- supremely intuitive, electrified and telegraphic -- seems much more interesting than my pedestrian scholarship.

<24> One the other hand, the following is a fairly typical description of research in what has been variously called a "hypermedia" or "multimedia" environment.

One aspect of hypertext and hypermedia, for example, is its capacity to link sources in ways that disrupt the continuity of a narrative. A play or a novel is no longer a a text to be read through, but a series of bits of other information linked to other sources. The power of media is to create an archive of information, which the learner dips into as he or she wishes. One reads in rather through a document, and the author of the document merges imperceptively with the reader who queries it. (Dowler and Farwell 1996:10)

Book III:

<25> The imputed power of "hypertext" to escape the linearities of the Gutenberg world is one of the more consistently hyped attributes of the information age, particularly since the mass dissemination of Marc Andressen's Netscape in 1995 introduced multimedia to Internet users heretofore confined to ASCII files. But how is "hyperresearch" different from more quotidian forms of research? Or is this even an interesting question to ask? It is, after all, a logical slip to conclude that knowledge and knowing have shifted with the introduction of what amount to new container types. "Knowledge" -- whether instrumentally conceived as a transformation of data or as an actual philosophical problem -- does not inhere in the form of the text. And yet, what else would "information society" signal if not a different way of knowing, understanding and communicating?

<26> Jean Gawron's Dream of Glass (1993) recounts the story of an "interfacer" -- a software engineer who programs in a virtual reality environment called "underglass" -- who is transformed from human to a chimera of human-and-machine to, finally, something more than a machine: a self-aware, transcendent being of artificial intelligence. At first, she mistakes her new reality as the afterlife.

I'm in a new place asking: Is this death? Is this the music? [ . . .] For a time I float, orienting and reorienting, finding happy toes that point every which way. On the whole the afterlife is much like the underglass, just as we interfacers have always expected. [ . . .] There are differences. I am disemburdened. [ . . .] I am pure monad, cruising the soul stuff prior to choosing form and fate. It is good. It is really good. (Gawron 1993:337)

A few questions remain. Does the proclaimed degeneration in evolution take us from natural selection to kind of artificial selection, the product of technoscientific progress whereby the physical body of pedestrian man (Kierkegaard) will gradually lose its usefulness and bow out as a truly metaphysical body capable of replacing it emerges? (Virilio 1995:119)

Will we slip into "technological fundamentalism" as Virilio prophecizes? Or will we reborn into a fantasy space?

<27> Are the books, the catalog cards and the (putatively) Cartesian spaces of the Library of Congress drags on the "information age," keeping us from an escape velocity that would slingshot us into our wildest science fictions of information transparency and information propinquity? But these troublesome bodies that multiply and fibrillate--the books, the readers, the catalogs, the endless shelving -- are also the same bodies that enable all of the advances supposedly characteristic of "information society" in the first place. What, after all, is the "National Digital Library" digitizing if not the texts, access points and characteristic practices of the Gutenberg Age? In other words, isn't the virtual predicated on the obstinately physical? It may be ontologically impossible to imagine a truly "meatless" world; the information age is the drama of bodies intruding on aporetic virtuality, the return of the repressed.

<28> Finished with the Library, I walk down Independence Avenue and page through William Gibson's recent novel, Pattern Recognition (2003), at a Capitol Hill bookstore. Gibson's protagonist, Cayce Pollard, investigates an information age mystery involving enigmatic "footage" across a thoroughly Gibson-esque landscape of advanced capitalism, globe-trotting transnationals and machines that seem in many ways more sentient than the people who use them. The difference, however, is that this novel is set in the present: in the shadow, as it were, of September 11. Critics have heralded this as a new direction in Gibson's writing: his first non-SF novel. But is there really much of a difference between fictions of the future and fictions of the present?

<29> By the mid-1990s, however, this critical fascination with cyberpunk had leveled off and the authors who had pioneered the subgenre proclaimed its exhaustion (Sterling). But that apparent exhaustion only confirms cyberpunk's hegemony. By the late 1980s, its daring extrapolations seemed too much like cinema verite. Its novum -- the triumph of the cyborg and the virtual world over the "meat" of nature -- already seemed a forgone conclusion, its digitized, hyperactive protagonists already a part of history (Suvin 1988). Why was that? With a few, energetically hyped exceptions, we neither "dwell" in cyberspace nor "jack" into cyborg appendages.

<30> Part of the problem lies in seeing science fiction as a speculative genre when its strength lies in its descriptive realism. As I have pointed out elsewhere, successful science fiction hinges on its re-framing of the present in a novel, dislocating way (Collins 1995, 2003). It is, as Fredric Jameson has suggested, a historicizing form.

SF thus enacts and enables a structurally unique "method" for apprehending the present as history, and this is so irrespective of the "pessimism" or "optimism" of the imaginary future world which is the pretext for that defamiliarization. (Jameson 1982:153)

In the hyberbolic language of postmodern aesthetics, the future has become the preferred method of subtending past and future into a highly ironic present; "magic realism" turns out to be more evocative of the real than even the strictest socialist fiction.

<31> And this is why cyberpunk fiction seems to have faded off into a postscript; its lessons have already been absorbed, its revolutionary language already normative. To speak realistically of information technologies or the Internet is to use the smooth, spare copy of cyberpunk fiction, itself influenced by the language of advertising. The "information society" is only explicable in terms of the future, of its ultimate limits rather than its incipient, inchoate beginnings. This is why science fiction is popular in the twenty-first century while that of futurology has waned since its beginning in the 1950s: SF writers realize that their projects are less a forecast than an accentuation, a moment of the present magnified in an exaggeratedly refracting lense until it resembles another reality altogether.

<32> The central insights of cyberpunk -- never, perhaps, all that novel to begin with -- have simply become part of the more quotidian world of advertising, government and Time magazine. Despite the highly critical and even revolutionary tone many cyberpunk writers adopt toward the excesses of advanced capitalism, corporations have turned to cyberpunk for images to fuel their media and advertising machines. All manner of information-age industries and institutions rely on a bedrock of images and metaphors drawn from SF and cyberpunk (Gerlach and Hamilton 2000:262). Cyberpunk has become another node in a postmodern constellation emphasizing, on the one hand, time compressions and fractures, and, on the other, tendencies toward "ephemeralitry, collage, fragmentation, and dispersal" (Harvey 1989). In the process, the gap between the "present" and the "twenty minutes into the future" timespaces of cyberpunk has closed.

<33> These twinned developments result in a whole array of anachronisms and prolepses, including what David Harvey (1989:21) calls the "discounting of the future into the present." For theorists like Virilio and Kroker, this "future in the present" trope drives their hyperbolic evocations of simulation-ridden, postmodern scapes; their mythopoetic narrtaives of modernist eschatology are built upon the precession of the future into the present. "Futurism" becomes "realism" in the time compressions of advanced capitalism. Continuously on the tails of an emergent future, social description is always a matter of extrapolation and hyperbole, a questions of "speed" (Crogan 1999: Best and Kellner 1991:128).

<34> Can the different orders of information folded into the Library of Congress -- the book, the classed catalog, the card catalog, the digitized document, the online catalog, the search engine -- be neatly parsed into "past," "present" and "future"? Can we read off information society teleologies in the LC's myriad spaces -- virtual and physical? Or do all of these spaces co-exist -- albeit uneasily -- in the space of my research? Is my desk in the Main Reading Room an event horizon where present and future, corporeality and virtuality, collapse into chaotic, surging energy?

<35> Nothing so hyperbolic, I think. Similar to the figure of the Arcade for Walter Benjamin, we can read in the different orders of the Library both a critique of the present and the possibility for a future transcendence. Just as the Arcade expressed both the panicked, bourgeois division of the exterior from the interior, together with the impossibility of maintaining that dichotomy, the Library demonstrates that the drive for virtuality leads directly back to the physical, just as a catalog record initiates a (retrograde) motion that ends in the acquisition of a physical book (Gunning 2003). Perhaps we should look to an information society that enmeshes us more in our materiality rather than one in which we seek to supercede the physical.

<36> What the LC's "National Digital Library" and DARPA's "Total Information Awareness" project tell me is not that information is about to become transparent, instantaneous, infinitely liberating or infinitely oppressive (although all of these are possible outcomes). Rather, in the space between surveillance and its apotheosis, corporeality and virtuality, we can see that bodies and selves have become both problematic and promising, something to be elided as well as something with which to connect. In these institutional imaginaries, the messiness of shelves, books and readers, on the one hand, and the obstinate independence and unpredictability of fleshy selves, on the other, are problems transcended in one imagined "information society"; in another it is that fleshiness and unpredictability that vouchsafes information society in the first place.

Acknowledgments

Portions of this essay have appeared in my dissertation (Collins 1998). Thanks to staff at the Library of Congress for all of those books.

Notes

[1] All cataloging copy is from the Library of Congress (www.loc.gov). [^]

References

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