ABSTRACT
This chapter reads the first novel in Gibson’s Blue Ant trilogy, Pattern Recognition (2003). The novel is concerned with ‘faulty pattern recognition’ or ‘apophenia’, a psychological tic that has much in common with paranoia. I argue, following Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), that the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 (known as 9/11) constituted an anomaly in a pre-existing paradigm, one marked by the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the decade of relative stability and prosperity that followed. Pattern Recognition expresses a paradigm in crisis through visual culture as the main character, Cayce, attempts to find the maker of the ‘footage’, a series of mysterious films that have begun to appear anonymously online. The footage represents a pure visual artefact, uncontaminated by written language. Pattern Recognition has been read as a book about the circulation of affect in the post-9/11 landscape, as noted by Lauren Berlant. In the context of my work, Pattern Recognition continues to pose a gestalt perspective as uniquely human, but rather than fostering human exceptionalism it is used as a tool against humans, something that prevents them from seeing things as they really are.
