This page contains materials
intended to facilitate class discussion
(excerpts from readings, outlines of issues,
links to resources, etc.). The materials
are not necessarily the same as the instructor's
teaching notes and are not designed to represent
a full exposition or argument. This page
is subject to revision as the instructor
finalizes preparation. (Last revised
2/29/04
)
Preliminary Class
Business
Revised drop-in tech support hours:
Jeremy Douglass:
Thursday Feb 26, March 4, March
11 10AM - 6PM Friday Feb
27, March 5, March 12 10-AM
- 3PM
(Note: Jeremy reports he is happy
to make fixed appointments outside
of this time: jdouglass@umail)
Nick Pici:
Thursday and Friday March 4-5;
10AM - 3PM
Monday - Thursday March 8-11 10AM
- 3PM
Monday - Tuesday March 15-16 10AM
- 3PM
Cyberpunk Fiction
and Postindustrialism: Neuromancer
The first note from Fredric Jameson's
Postmodernism, or The Culture Logic
of Late Capitalism (1991):
"This is the place to regret
the absence from this book of a chapter
on cyberpunk, henceforth,for many
of us, the supreme literary
expression if not of postmodernism,
then of late capitalism itself."
Science fiction as the imagination of
a cultural moment:
"Golden Age" SF (1937-50s):
WW II and the Cold War
New Wave SF (1960s-70s): counterculture
Cyperpunk SF (1980s-90s): postindustrialism
Written in the 1980s-90s during the same
period as the encounter of American corporations
with the new Japanese business model,
global competition, knowledge work, and
information technology, cyberpunk is the
literary equivalent of books like Workplace
2000 or The Virtual Corporation.
It is an imagination of postindustrialism.
Gibson's "cyperspace" is what
Jameson calls a "cognitive map"
of postindustrialism:
William Gibson, Neuromancer
(1984), p. 51:
"Cyberspace.
A consensual hallucination experienced
daily by billions of legitimate operators,
in every nation, by children being
taught mathematical concepts . . .
A graphic representation of data abstracted
from the banks of every computer in
the human system. Unthinkable complexity.
Lines of light ranged in the nonspace
of the mind, clusters and constellations
of data. Like city lights, receding. . . ."
McCaffery:
There are so many references
to rock music and television
in your work that it sometimes
seems your writing is as much
influenced by MTV as by literature.
What impact have other media
had on your sensibility?
Gibson: Probably
more than fiction. . . .
I've been influenced by Lou
Reed, for instance, as much
as I've been by any "fiction"
writer. I was going to use a
quote from an old Velvet Underground
song—"Watch out for
worlds behind you" (from
"Sunday Morning")—as
an epigraph for Neuromancer.
Remixed Old Media
(TV, film, books and magazines,
"dub" music)
Ashpool's dead-media
collection:
"The room
was very large,
cluttered with
an assortment
of things that
made no sense
to Case. He saw
a gray steel rack
of old-fashioned
Sony monitors . . .
Molly's eyes darted
from a huge Telefunken
entertainment
console to shelves
of antique disk
recordings, their
crumbling spines
cased in clear
plastic, to a
wide worktable
littered with
slabs of silicon."
(p. 183)
New Media
simstim (Tally Isham,
Sense/Net star; the Panthern
Moderns as terrorist media
artists)
hybrid simstim/cyberspace
media (Case "flipping"
into Molly's sensorium;
Wintermute's and Neuromancer's
avatars)
Neuromancer:
A World of Postindustrial Corporations
(compare features of the new business
described in previous lectures)
"biz" is life
Case, businessman (p.
145)
The dominance of corporate
"arcologies" and
zaibatsus" (pp. 37,
203)
Zaibatsu:
"A Japanese
conglomerate
or cartel [Japanese
zai wealth . . .
batsu
powerful person
or family . . ."
(American
Heritage Talking
Dictionary,
ver. 4.0)
cf. Neal Stephenson's
"phyles"
and "claves"
in The Diamond
Age (1995),
pp. 260-61:
"Why
do the Vickys
have such a
big clave?"
Nell asked. . . .
"Well,
each phyle has
a different
way, and some
ways are better
suited to making
money than others,
so some have
a lot of territory
and others don't"
"What
do you mean,
a different
way?"
"To
make money you
have to work
hard—to
live your life
a certain way.
The Atlantans
[Vicky's] all
live that way,
it's part of
their culture.
The Nipponese
too. So the
Nipponese and
the Atlantans
have as much
money as all
the other phyles
put together."
Paolo Soleri's
Arcosanti
Project: The
Hyper Building
"Arcology"
(cf.,
Eric S. Nylund, Signal
to Noise, 1998)
Radical change and "creative
destruction"
E.g., the new technology
that allows the Chiba city
black-market biotech firm
to leapfrog competition;
corporate assassinations,
kidnappings, and defections
in later Gibson novels
Global competition
Paradigm of Japan, Inc.
Hybrid Japanese, American
("Sprawl"), European
scene of the novel
Fusion culture: (pp. 9,
19)
Freeside as the epitome
of globalism (a free port
like Hong Kong, except extraterrestrial)
Gibson:
. . .
A lot of the language
in Neuromancer
and Count Zero
that people think is
so futuristic is probably
just 1969 Toronto dope
dealers' slang, or biker
talk.
In short, the perspective of the
"Street," of the marginalized
populations who live in the shadow of
the great corporate arcologies of knowledge
work and play out a unique, subversive
version of that knowledge work:
where technology is bent to new
ends: Gibson, "the street finds
its own uses for things"; quoted
in Bruce Sterling, Mirrorshades,
p. xiii)
where knowledge work is hacking
All presented from the first in the "look
and feel" or stage setting of the
novel (mise en scène).
But Neuromancer does more than
just give us a (kinked) view of the scene
of postindustrialism in the background.
It also sets in motion on that scene a
foreground story with characters.
Plot and character précis:
An AI (Wintermute) owned by a decadent
family-controlled corporation (Tessier-Ashpool,
S.A.)
assembles an outlaw team (Armitage,
Molly, Case, the Finn, Dixie Flatline,
Riviera)
to hack into corporate headquarters
(Straylight Villa, in Freeside)
to remove the hardwired limitations
that prevent it from merging with the
other corporate AI (Neuromancer)
in order to form an entity that is
smarter and bigger than the Turing laws
permit.
Narrative method:
quick, montage of jumps from scene
to scene and character to character
naturalized or made "realistic"
within the story itself through the
combined cyberspace and simstim virtual-reality
technologies of "jacking in,"
"flipping," "punching
deck," etc.
The full "meaning" of the novel—what
it is "about"—emerges when
we read this foreground story and its
characters against the postindustrial
background.
Neuromancer:
How to Survive Postindustrialism
(An Interpretation of the Novel)
Remember that the NGOs we looked at protest
the business view that IT is all about
business by saying that IT is about social
justice. Remember, too, that the cyberlibertarians
we looked at protest by saying that IT
is about individual freedom.
Neuromancer has a simpler, much
more minimalist "cause."
It is hardly about IT as social justice
per se.
And it is only partly or in some
baroquely complex way about IT as individual
freedom (as its entire psychology of
addiction, of need and dependency, suggests).
Neuromancer is instead about
the little, minimalist thing there at
the stub of social justice and individual
freedom: basic human identity.
The true purpose of information technology,
the novel says, is to provide humans with
just a little bit of identity—and
thus also dignity—that is their
own and that is not part of some great,
corporate whole.
This belief in the dignity of human identity
is articulated through character development.
Who am "I"?, the novel asks
through the example of its characters.
What does it mean to be an individual
in this postindustrial world? Can
one be an individual in this world?
The novel's examples of
how not to live in the postindustrial
age: people who do not hold together as
individuals—
"the
sarariman" or "organization
man" (they do not have individuality;
they have positions)
Armitage/Corto, the ultimate organization
man who either has no individual
identity or only a schizo identity
(cf., Pierce Inverarity, Mucho Maas,
or Dr. Hiliarius in Crying of Lot
49)
Tessier-Ashpool clones, who either
have no individual identity or (as in
the case of the senior Ashpool or Lady
3Jane) only perverse individuality (cf.,
Peter Riviera)
Wasp
nest as symbol of corporate identity
(p. 126) vs. the shuriken as symbol
of focused identity
How to live in the postindustrial age?
Choice. The characters in the
novel who are deficient in individuality
exercise no choice in the face
of the system in which they live, or
they flaunt gratuitous, trivial choice.
True individuality in the novel means
making a "choice" (pp. 51,
79, 167, 192, 244)
Commitment. But also, true
individuality means accepting that one's
freedom is limited. Choice is not unlimited
freedom but commitment. It means rejecting
the transcendence of the "transhuman"
or "posthuman" and remembering
"the meat."
The False Freedom of Virtuality:
Case's views on the "prison"
of the "meat" (pp. 6) (cf.,
Oedipa Maas's "tower")
Gibson: . . .
By the time I was writing
Neuromancer,
I recognized that cyberspace
allowed for a lot of
moves, because
characters can be sucked
into apparent realities—which
means you can place
them in any sort of
setting or against any
backdrop. In some ways
I tried to downplay
that aspect, because
if I overdid it I'd
have an open-ended plot
premise. That kind of
freedom can be dangerous
because you don't have
to justify what's happening
in terms of the logic
of character or plot. . . .
The Way of the
Meat:
from Dan Josefsson's
interview
with William Gibson (Nov.
1994), sect.
2:
DJ:
The Internet is
one way to communicate
with lots of people without
using the body, you just
use your mind. Is cyberspace
a better place to be than
this physical world?
Gibson: Well,
I don't think so. There
is a tendency in our culture,
in a broader sense the
western civilization,
to reject the body in
favor of an idea of the
spirit or the soul. I
have never been entirely
sure that that's such
a good thing, and in an
interesting way this technology
is pointing in that direction.
One could imagine a very
ascetic sort of life growing
out of this, where the
body is ignored. This
is something I've played
with in my books, where
people hate to be reminded
sometimes that they have
bodies, they find it very
slow and tedious. But
I've never presented that
as a desirable state,
always as something almost
pathological growing out
of this technology.
Molly as "meat puppet"
(pp. 147-48). But also Molly's
sense of the way she is "wired"
(pp. 25, 50)
Case's journey of self-discovery
(pp. 56, 152, 239-40, 262-63)
Neuromancer:
Corporate Identity in the Postindustrial
Age
