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JACKING IN/OFF: ACADEMIC CYBERCRIT -- A RANDOM SAMPLING
Cyberpunk, a genre of commercial SF, remains the literary form
most centrally concerened with the rhetorical production of
complex imbrication between the
human subject and the electronically defined realities of the
Dataist Era.
Constituting both what is fascinating and generative about the
matrix itself
and the means of accessing its secrets, the feminine is
effectively the "soft" ware, the fantasy (and world) that exists
beyond the "hard" ware of the actual technological achievements
realized in the silicon chip. I am far from arguing for the
superiority of cyberpunk over the libidinal excesses of the
Surrealist movement, but I am proposing that cyberpunk
constitutes a discourse within
which many concerns and techniques of surrealism again become
relevant -- a
techno-surrealist production of new flesh, a terminal flesh.
In choice moments, Gibson reduces the naturalist mode to a
minimalist shock strategy. In other words, once he has unearthed
adventurous fathers and constituted a satisfying filiation for
cyberpunk writers, he can figure oedipal rebellion, reinterring
the fathers as "mainstream" and celebrating the sons as young
turks.
Where does this shard of twisted suburban wit come from? Is it a
belated symptom of the North American punk sensibility? The
negationist fantasy of class-conscious male privilege? Or the
self-projection of some repressed Schreberian desire to terrorize
the socialized body?
Nothing, it would seem, could be further from the polymorphous,
ectopian
fantasies that had prevailed in New Wave writing, which
cyberpunks rejected as "wet," "hippy," and "utopian." And their
success is celebrated as a form of
triumph to such an extent that we can hardly view Gibson's texts
as
deliberately dystopian, much as we might flinch at the
implications of such
triumphs. As always, this difference can best be demonstrated by
showing how
it is elided, in this case, in the universalist name of the
"species."
Cyberpunks' fascination with and energetic figuration of
technology represents the American cowboy as simultaneously
embattled and empowered. This
metamorphical transformational technology is paradoxical in that
it
simultaneously provides the vehicle of subversion for groups
marginalized or repressed by corporate culture. In other words,
cyberpunk envisioned itself as a site of distinctive cultural
interrogation and as a subversive genre that no longer deferred
to the clear boundary marking the possession and distribution of
power within society. That Sterling harks back to the 60s counterculture
to establish
political connections for cyberpunk, and thereby implicitly
reinstates the very lacuna the 70s feminist SF writers sought to
expose in their explorations of gender relations, is itself
provocative, particularly because it represents a peculiar
avoidance of rather obvious and immediate political SF
precursors.
Cyberpunk therefore poses a much broader challenge to theories
that conceive of the mediation between culture and society
exclusively as a relation between base and superstructure,
without taking into account the two primary departments of the
total social production. The second trope ordering cyberpunks'
techne is not a reversal but an erasure implied by the reversal.
Critics more attentive to these questions of difference and power
have seen the technologically colonized (cyborg) body as a new
phase of regulatory authority exercised by the corporate state.
But for now it should be emphasized that there is no evidence
that Gibson is intentionally alluding to Volume Two of
Capital. What is signified here remains un/ironic,
precisely the opposite of the resonance traditionally associated
with ocular metaphors. The ethical-political hesitancy of c-p,
its uneasy fusion of the utopian and dystopian register of sf
speculation, seems to me a quite appropriate response to the real
ambiguities of the information society, whose promise of
technological empowerment bears with it the threat of increasing
politico-economic surveillance and control.
This emphasis on the potential interconnections between the human
and the technological, many of which are already gleaming in the
eyes of research scientists, is perhaps the central "generic"
feature of cyberpunk. If the data constructs of the domestic or
familial corporations are metaphorically feminized, protected as
they are by feminine counter-intrusion membranes that result in
"bor[ing] and inject[ing]", so too are the interspacial zones in
the matrix. This is cyberpunk's colophon: the logo of simulated,
manufactured transcendence. I find it significant that the
"average" cyberpunk landscape tends to be choked with the debris
of both language and objects: as a sign-system, it is over
determined by a proliferation of surface detail which emphasize
the "outside" over the "inside." The cyberpunk narration indeed
speaks with the voices of the repressed desire and repressed
anxiety about terminal culture.
Cyberpunk negotiates a complex and delicate trajectory between
the forces of instrumental reason and the abandon of a
sacrificial excess. Of course to insist upon theoretical
consistency or historical grounding from a postmodernist
discourse that is essentially animated by - in Jean-Francois
Lyotard's now-classic formulation - an "incredulity toward
metanarratives" is probably paradoxical...
Perpetrators: Nicola Nixon, Andrew Ross, Rob Latham, Terence
Whalen, Neil
Easterbrook, Scott Bukatman Veronica Hollinger.
[Image: A lone cyberpunk wanders through the desert of the real
lost in
thought.]
[Caption: "What aspect of humanity makes us human? Our flesh?
Our CNS? Our
thoughts? Our handiwork? Our hormones? Where's that line over
which lies
inhumanity?"]
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