Vision, Technology, and Subjectivity in Mexican Cyberpunk Literature

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Stephen C. Tobin’s Vision, Technology, and Subjectivity in Mexican Cyberpunk Literature is a valuable chronicle of Cyberpunk in Mexico, a country not generally associated with the subgenre. Indeed, U.S. readers familiar with the foundational Japanese-indebted gambits of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson will likely be unfamiliar with most of the work here–primarily due to the cultural hegemony of the English Language. This book provides a fascinating media history of recent visual technologies in Mexico, reminding us how media and genres spill over from one place to another. Tobin orchestrates a nuanced reflection on the complicated, pervading dispersal of globalized media. In an age where boundaries between science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, and other subcategories are contested, Tobin’s new book proposes “specular fiction” (2). This designation points us in the right direction if we want to begin progressing our understanding of speculative cultural production. Tobin suggests a slight turn away from such hegemonic labels to root his definition at the nexus of literary and visual media–two spaces that, he contends, have grown increasingly intimate. Cyberpunk provides a useful nexus because, though realist texts feature ocular themes, a subgenre that can draw connections between older technologies and newer variations of “the e-image component” (12) is necessary. Tobin analyzes works from 1993 to 2014 to highlight just how turbulent the media landscape has been in recent decades.

Tobin is a scholar of Mexican culture on a larger scale, and his intervention into genre studies is doubly justified by his analytical roots in Mexico. It is a country where genre labels are more fluid, contrasting the market-driven genre labels of U.S. cultural production. While Tobin’s case studies can mostly be identified as science fiction, his theorization opens up specular fictions–narrative forms that entwine language and screens–as works present across disciplines. Such theorization allows Tobin to dodge some prickly generic disputes about “science fiction” and the sweep of “speculative fiction.” Rather, he contextualizes his intervention for literary and media studies more broadly by following the well-known work of Walter Ong and W.J.T. Mitchell, who have “argued that all media are mixed media, meaning that no media [sic] is purely visual” (4). With this mixed approach, Tobin performs literary analysis that utilizes literature as case studies to theorize media. Tobin’s key interventions contribute to SF scholarship, Mexico Studies scholarship, and scholarship that explores the growing camaraderie between literary and visual media studies. His focus on “specular fictions” does well to offer useful critiques for theorists of science fiction and cyberpunk. By building his definitions on the importance of a given visual technology for a literary work, though, he also theorizes something that can be identified and analyzed across disciplinary and generic boundaries.

In Chapter 1, his introduction, Tobin provides a useful comparative reading of Mauricio-Jose Schwarz’s “La pequeña guerra” [“The Little War”] (1984) and Francisco Amparán’s “Ex machina” (1994). The former, an earlier text, figures television secondarily. The latter, a later text, is a narrative primarily driven by the presence of television. The latter is a specular fiction, while the former is not. Here we see a way in which specular fiction remains compatible with Science Fiction theory–Amparán’s story uses television as the “novum,” or the technological mechanism that shapes the narrative world (In his landmark essay “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre,” Darko Suvin adapted “novum” from Frankfurt School theorist Ernst Bloch). Tobin adapts the term “scopic regime” from Media Studies, but the scopic regimes in focus are usually generated by a novum. This categorization of specular fiction serves most usefully as a temporal map that places geographical pressure on Mexico and the landscape in which it is situated. The fiction that Tobin highlights contains myriad visual technologies, from the television to the more speculative reality-distorting glasses. While some are more rooted in fiction than others, Tobin can move from foundational observations on cinema and television to the numerous screens that have exploded in popularity in the public life of the 2020s. With this progression through time, it becomes increasingly clear that this book about Mexico is more broadly about how Mexico is connected to, and increasingly resembles other global scopic cultures.

Chapter 2 grounds the book on a safe but sharp analysis of gender in the work of Gerardo Porcayo. It is safe because Tobin leans on Laura Mulvey’s now-classic analysis of the male gaze in cinema, which argues that the history of cinema has been dominantly constructed through a male-centric gaze. It is also safe in that readers who come to this book will be familiar with the prevalence of masculinist SF and Cyberpunk. The analysis allows Tobin to perform two key moves. First, he roots Porcayo as a foundational figure for Mexican Cyberpunk, a figure representative of the indelible influences of the US and the dominant masculinist foundations of the subgenre. Second, he establishes that Porcayo’s book is not limited to how specific visual technologies represent/influence perception and subjectivity, but how the gaze, on a broader scale, is a visually encoded social phenomenon.

Chapter 3 transitions into work that zeroes in on specific scopic regimes. Its focus on television makes it generally the heart of the book. Despite the range of visual media at play here, television is the most longstanding form-giving technology. Porcayo writes towards the beginning of the growth of television as a scopic regime, while the book ends with reflections on the proliferation of smartphones and computers which in the 2010s “still had not eclipsed television presence” (27). Television history also helps Tobin bring to light the “restructuring of the media industries within Mexico,” a “higher proliferation of images,” and the growth of the television market itself (27). These three areas open up analyses of “political legislation and privatization,” the “expansion of foreign oligarchic media companies” and the evolutions of the Mexican economy (27). In one striking detail about the shift from public to private media, Tobin reflects on the “media imperialism” that took place as US-based programming took hold of the Mexican television-watching public (27). Focusing on Pepe Rojo’s work, Tobin centralizes a theoretically informed writer through his story “Ruido gris” [Gray Noise] (1996) and the novel Punto cero [Zero Point] (2000). Two key strains arise here as Tobin further expands the net of globalism by juxtaposing an analysis of NAFTA and an analysis of the influence of European postmodernists Paul Virilio, Jean Baudrillard, and Slavoj Žižek on Rojo’s work. Tobin suggests that Jacques Lacan’s influence may be the most important to Rojo’s work. He offers a Lacanian analysis to tie the television to the home. Here, the spectacular violence that becomes regular viewing numbs individual viewers to bodily destruction. The critique illustrates how screens become a part of Rojo’s speculative literary form, as well as the political forms that emerge with the immediacy and pervasiveness of television news cycles.

Chapter 4, finally, is perhaps the most striking, at least insofar as the content of the case studies goes. It offers a comparative analysis of Eve Gil’s novel Virtus (2008), and Guillermo Lavín’s short story, “Él piensa que algo no encaja” [He thinks something doesn’t fit] (2014), using Debord’s Society as a Spectacle as a theoretical springboard. Debord’s theory leads to a theorization of the twentieth century as “one which involves a hypermediated realm of megaspectacles and interactive spectacle” (40). The analysis centers on Gil’s depiction of President Wagner, the center of a virtualized Mexican future. Wagner is a young, handsome politician who is carefully shaped and curated to appeal to the power of celebrity culture and telenovelas. Wagner is likened to the real-life President Enrique Peña Nieto, elected in 2012. Wagner’s fictional, highly publicized celebrity marriage mirrors that of Peña Nieto, whose marriage may have been a ruse to appeal to public cravings to blur the lines between the telenovela and reality. Wagner dies and becomes a hologram controlled by a mysterious group of powerful people. While Gil’s text relies on curated mass culture, Lavín’s uses VR glasses that render the world better than it is, suggesting that not only are individuals prone to ideological conditioning, but often they actively desire it. The analysis builds out Debord’s neo-Marxian critique to a critique of ideological conditioning as a spectrum. Subject formation proceeds under the pressure of dark media conglomerates, and through intimate individual engagement with the technology. This comparative analysis reflects on the relationships between mass culture and individual subjectivity. Perhaps most hauntingly, it meditates on Wizard of Oz-esque figures who work behind the veil to advertise, condition, and enforce power. Though the technologies of these stories are more speculative than those of the works discussed in the preceding chapters, they resonate with the familiarly fragmented and persuasive cultural dispersals of today’s smartphones, social media apparatuses, and corrupt powers that often work across national boundaries to maintain docile populations.

These works are predominantly dystopian, and Tobin carefully relies on theorizations of dystopias as critically reflecting on the times in which they are imagined. His engagements with these dystopias generate compelling arguments for the magnitude of power that visual technologies have to shape national cultures and individual subjects. Tobin’s scope is limited to a corpus that reflects on recent decades but leaves open the question of how specular fictions might be further explored. Following Nicholas Mirzoeff, he writes that specular fictions engage with visual technologies “defined as any form of apparatus designed either to be looked at or to enhance natural vision, from oil painting to television and the Internet” (6). Questions that might follow then: what happens when we stretch definitions of visual technology? Perhaps an apt question for cyberpunk specifically might be, can we identify specular fictions by the clothing worn in the texts? Can we identify specular fictions by how they represent plant and animal life? How do our formulations of specular fictions change when we bring more specifically semiotic theoretical lenses to them? If we are to bring specular fictions full circle by examining questions of genre, might we interrogate deeper history? Tobin carefully keeps the presents of the texts close to the chest to avoid vague proclamations about the future, which leaves these questions for other thinkers. Hopefully, they will be taken up by scholars working on SF, Mexico, and wider discourses of literary and media studies, all of whom should find useful insights in this book.

Josh Beckelhimer is a PhD Candidate in the English Department at the University of Southern California. He is a Visual Studies Images Out of Time Fellow and holds an MA from the University of Cincinnati. His work focuses on ecological cosmologies within speculative literary works by Zora Neale Hurston, Octavia Butler, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Rita Indiana. He focuses on the cosmological forms that literary writers use and interact with to reconceptualize colonial histories of the Americas, human relationships to the environment, and varying sciences and systems of ecological knowledge. He is particularly interested in writers who tap into expansive imaginative generic frames to go beyond basic understandings of material ecology.