Borgesâs IPad
In one of his earliest narratives, âThe Mirror of Inkâ [âEl espejo de tintaâ], 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-MasmudÄ« (CF 60â62/OC 1.341â43).1 Al-MasmudÄ«, whose brother had been put to death by Sudanâs capricious and cruel governor, Yaqub the Afflicted, had been taken captive but managed, through his divinatory talents, to ingratiate himself with the tyrant. The two came to participate regularly in a ritual which, the narrator tells us, was always the same: al-MasmudÄ« 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-MasmudÄ« 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 Yaqubâs eager gaze as he peered into the ink. At first the images were static but, with practice, al-MasmudÄ« learned to animate them according to his hostâs 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 Yaqubâs 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-MasmudÄ« remove the mask. The sorcerer initially resists, fearing that to reveal the figureâs identity would unleash some kind of terrible divine retribution. Dismissing al-MasmudÄ«âs 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 conjured up a representation of his own demise, the despot watches in horror as the final preparations are made for his execution. âHe was possessed by the mirrorâ [âestaba poseĂdo por el espejoâ], the narrator tells us, and âhe did not even try to turn his eyes aside, or to spill out the inkâ [âni siquiera tratĂł de alzar los ojos o de volcar la tintaâ] (CF 62/OC 1.342). It is as if Yaqubâs 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.
âThe Mirror of Inkâ is one of Borgesâs lesser-known stories and has never received a great deal of attention from critics. Perhaps its conclusion 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 to read the text in the way that we are now. To read âThe Mirror of Inkâ 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 compulsively 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-MasmudÄ«âs conjured-up scenes with Netflixâs on-demand catalogue; and Yaqubâs 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
Iâm simplifying, of course, and we shall have more to say later about the dangers of casually reading Borges in a naĂŻvely anachronistic way. But for now let us push on with our contemporary re-imagining of âThe Mirror of Ink.â If the story feels fresh and current, perhaps it is because the protagonistâs situation seems to resonate with our own: we too intuit that there is a complex relationship between our desiresâand even our identityâand 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 sought to domesticate. That Borges, the symbol par excellence of a genteel 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 âThe Mirror of Inkâ that were faithful to its vision while enlarging upon it, we could do no better than to entrust the script to Charlie Brooker. Brookerâs Black Mirror seriesâcreated in 2011 for Channel 4 in Britain and acquired by Netflix in 2014âhas become a reference point in popular culture for its provocative exploration of the unanticipated and unadvertised 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 (Longden). The anthological nature of Black Mirror, with each episode standing logically independent of the others, has allowed Brooker to take on a freewheeling and unfettered approach to a wide range of complex topics, 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 program begins. Black Mirrorâs stylized opening title sequence manages to foreground some of the same themes we have already touched upon in Borgesâs âThe Mirror of Inkâ even as it brings to light a host of new questions. 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 backdrop was not in fact a buffering icon native to their own device but rather an element embedded in the programâs title sequence. Within seconds, the spinning ball resolves itself into animated geometric shapes; these, in turn, resolve into the programâs now familiar âBlack Mirrorâ 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 shattering 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 sidewalk 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 Brookerâs 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 questions 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 corollary 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 measure 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 narrative have by now become so familiar that our current cultural landscape has not become oversaturated with them, so much so that any media artifact 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 can be little doubt that his work gave now-familiar metafictional principles 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 Brookerâs work comports with Borgesâs, even if it would be too much to claim that it constitutes a direct modulation of it into a visual key. Just as Yaqubâs scrutiny of the mirror of ink finally discloses to him his own problematic place on a Möbius strip in which life and representation finallyâand fatallyâmerge, the viewer of Brookerâs Black Mirror also finds herself drawn into a feedback 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 crucial ways with the moment of the characterâs (or, more importantly, the readerâs or viewerâs) anagnorisis or moment of self-recognition. If Borges helps to lay the conceptual groundwork for the self-referential dimensions 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 ĆœiĆŸek is fond of making. ĆœiĆŸek is skeptical of what he identifies as the quintessentially postmodernist 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 oneâs self-awareness with regard to oneâs place within a determinate conceptual or ideological framework, is not only to leave the underlying substructure 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 i...