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Eventually, even the out of the way topic within the topographic is mapped and storied. In Dassin’s Night and the City, made in political exile in London, the whole of space has become telegraphic. There is no escape. This completes the first level. Topology begins when the topical ceases to have any autonomy, when the line along which communication flows closes the gap between map and territory. The open frontier is enclosed in a field of calculation. History and geography cease to dwell between the topical and the topographical, always rushing to keep up. History and geography are subsumed within a topology, which tends towards a continuous field of equivalent and exchangeable values, instantly communicable everywhere. Where the topical was once bounded within the lines of the topographical, it is now connected along the lines of the topological. The fixed geometry of topography gives way to the variable forms of topology, in which the lines connecting points together lend themselves to transformation without rupture from one shape to another. The storyline of outward movement is complete; the gamespace of interior play commences. Welcome to the second level.

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Film Noir comes to an end when it is no longer possible to imagine anything great but evil lurking out of bounds. If something passes undetected for any length of time it is because it has no value. The era of the great openly declared villains is over. In topological times, the bad guys pass as normal or corrupt the law. Cinema as the machine for imagining the open space outside the line is consigned to the past. Topology announces its new ambitions through radio and particularly television, a signal for everywhere and nowhere, potentially interested in anyone or anywhere, a Candid Camera. The key genres for working out the subsumption of the topographic into the topological are the situation comedy and the game show. On a game show, anyone can be taken out of everyday life and brought into the magic circle of television; on a sitcom, television can extend itself to the everyday life familiar to the average viewer, anywhere. Sitcom and game show announce the coming of a topology in which all of space might be doubled simultaneously, without lag, by lines of image, lines of sound, which as yet still broadcast out of central nodes. The lines run only one way and indiscriminately, but incorporates anyone and anything of value. What is excluded, from its point of view, has no value. The romance of the outsider is dead.

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What completes topology and prepares it for the next — unknown — level is when the line splits again, into analog and digital. The analog lines of radio and telephone and television give way to digital lines, which reach back to the precedent of the telegraph, but extend its digital code to an increasingly flexible and all embracing web of communication lines. Gradually, the digital extends and expands to the whole of telesthesia. The internet incorporates text, sound, images, then moving images. The cyberspace of the internet becomes mobile and portable and turns into the cellspace of mobile telephony. This combination of the speed of telesthesia with the digital code is what makes possible a vast and inclusive topology of gamespace. This is the third level: The world of topology is the world of The Cave. Any and every space is a network of lines, pulsing with digital data, on which players act and react. In work and play, it is not the novel, not cinema, not television that offers the line within which to grasp the form of everyday life, it is the game. Julian Dibbell: “…in the strange new world of immateriality toward which the engines of production have long been driving us, we can now at last make out the contours of a more familiar realm of the insubstantial — the realm of games and make believe.”*

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Start over with another new world. (This time with a little gamer theory.) Welcome to the first level: The novel is a line of a certain type, which opens towards certain possibilities, a storyline. It arises at the moment when topic gives way to topography. For Georg Lukács, what is to be valued is the historical novel and its ability to trace a line across an historical moment and reveal the forces at work in it. “It is the portrayal of the broad living basis of historical events in their intricacy and complexity, in their manifold interaction with acting individuals.”* The historical novel shows historical events through secondary characters, perhaps not unlike the reader, and an historical event as being at the same time a transformation of everyday life. And yet the novel suffers from this paradox: To illuminate the topographic, the novel has to hide its own form. If it explores the possibilities of the line within its pages it opens itself to a ‘formalism’ that leaves the reader behind.