Hacking the Society of Control: The Fiction of Hari Kunzru

Abstract

The prevailing tendency among critics is to read the fiction of Hari Kunzru through a postcolonial lens, emphasizing either his themes of fluidity and hybridity, or his cosmopolitan resistance to national boundaries. This essay takes a different approach by examining how Kunzru engages notions of political theology. Kunzru uses computer programming, for instance, as a metaphor for divine creation, so that in works like Transmission and Gods Without Men his protagonists, both programmers, confront the notion of hacking the divine "code." In Gods Without Men, this process is achieved through a computer program named Walter that is able to predict first the stock market, and then the course of historical events. Walter is named after Walter Benjamin, who argued that a concealed political theology underlies the logic of modern society. Following similar clues in Kunzru's fiction, this essay explores his diagnosis, on the one hand, of political theology's responsibility for the creation of a modern society of control, and the revolutionary potential of being able to subvert and manipulate that divine code, on the other. In a world where the hegemony of modern capitalism feels increasingly stifling, Kunzru offers a means of escape and resistance by turning society's code against itself.