Over at Significant Objects, William Gibson just published a new story. Now, the Significant Objects project is really interesting and I’ll probably get back to blogging about that, eventually, but for now I’m interested in Gibson’s concept of ‘Dreamtime’, future fossils and glyphs.
It’s well-known that Gibson is extremely interested in how ideas become real and how the future makes its way into our present. This is not just because of him coining the word ‘cyberspace’ but rather an ongoing preoccupation of his, which has led to a connection with cool hunting; something Gibson terms node-spotting in his novel Idoru.
Gibson’s short story deals with an ashtray apparently once owned by his friend’s dad (Gibson’s complicated relation to his own dad has itself been the topic of an earlier work – “Agrippa”). This friend’s dad worked at the Pentagon and had access to the weapons being developed. These projects were, as Gibson terms it, liminal; not yet fully developed, yet they do exist in some people’s imagination and as drafts, outlines, etc.
These designs are what Gibson has referred to as ’semiotic ghosts’ before (in his short story “The Gernsback Continuum”); something that exists in a potential space – it is somehow suspended between being and non-being. While it doesn’t exactly exist, it also doesn’t exactly not-exist. This is the glyph of the ashtray depicting the Hawk missile system. The existence of the ashtray creates solidity to the Hawk missile system; if the ashtray exists, so must the missile system.
The ashtray is a material sign that something spectral will (perhaps) exist. We may read the glyph of something perhaps-to-be, but only as the perhaps-to-be but of a higher order than other projects. This is a perfect example of future hauntology; things that do not actually exist but might. In fact, the HAWK (Homing All the Way Killer) missile system was developed but Gibson’s thoughts hold true anyway, since he is simply pointing out that even wayward things have a potential and that these potentials impact our present.
“Future fossils”, then, are the objects that never turned out, that never materialized and left behind glyphs, ghosts and other specters.