Istvan Csicsery-Ronay
Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism
As a label, "cyberpunk" is perfection. It suggests the
apotheosis of postmodernism. On the one hand, pure negation: of
manners, history, philosophy, politics, body, will, affect, anything
mediated by cultural memory; on the other, pure attitude: all
is power, and "subculture," and the grace of Hip negotiating
the splatter of consciousness as it slams against the hard-tech
future, the techno-future of artificial immanence, where all that
was once nature is simulated and elaborated by technical means,
a future world-construct that is as remote from the "lessons
of history" as the present mix-up is from the pitiful science
fiction fantasies of the past that tried to imagine us. The oxymoronic
conceit in "cyberpunk" is so slick and global it fuses
the high and the low, the complex and the simple, the governor
and the savage, the techno-sublime and rock and roll slime. The
only thing left out is a place to stand. So one must move, always
move.
Those are evocations; it's harder to say what the label actually
refers to. The best-known cyberpunk manifesto, Bruce Sterling's
introduction to the Mirrorshades anthology, cannily describes
the cyberpunk school's aspirations not in terms of conceits, but
as the reflection of a new cultural synthesis being born in the
Eighties, making it essentially a paradoxical form of realism.
Cyberpunk art, Sterling says, captures "a new kind of integration.
The overlapping of worlds that were formerly separate: the realm
of high tech and the modern pop underground [ix]."
This integration has become our decade's crucial
source of cultural energy. The work of the cyberpunks is paralleled
through the Eighties pop culture: in rock video; in the hacker
underground; in the jarring street tech of hip-hop and scratch
music; in the synthesizer rock of London and Tokyo. This phenomenon,
this dynamic, has a global range; cyberpunk is its literary incarnation . . .
Suddenly a new alliance is becoming evident: an
integration of technology and the Eighties counterculture. An
unholy alliance of the technical world and the world of organized
dissent--the underground world of pop, visionary fluidity, and
street-level anarchy. [x]
Heady stuff. An art reflecting these trends must surely be the
vanguard white male art of the age, a literature competing and
allied with video-games, MTV and no wave rock. But Sterling's
claims immediately raise some questions. The question of the "integration"
for one. What is this world of a high-tech pop underground? The
punk club world of Sonic Youth and Pussy Galore, acts never to
be simulated on MTV? The violently sexist stylized gangster-chic
of unsanitized ghetto rap? Where's the "organized dissent,"
and how does it jive with "street-level anarchy"? Sterling
hints at some new political attitude with technical know-how and
anti-establishment feelings, an "alliance," and "integration,"
a "counterculture." To put it mildly, it's hard to see
the "integrated" political-aesthetic motives of alienated
subcultures that adopt the high-tech tools of the establishment
they are supposedly alienated from. It seems far more reasonable
to assume that the "integrating," such as it is, is
being done by the dominant telechtronic cultural powers, who--as
cyberpunk writers know very well--are insatiable in their appetite
for new commodities and commodity-fashions. The big question for
Eighties art is whether any authentic countercultural art can
exist for long without being transformed into self-annihilating
simulations of themselves for mass consumption, furthering central cultural aims.
Given the chances of cyberpunk's success in the amusement-marketplace,
its potential for movie options, i.e., its ripe co-optability, one might suspect Sterling's enthusiasm for his "integration"
is based on less than thorough social analysis, if not on less
than sincere motives.
Another interesting question is exactly what cyberpunk literature
can offer that video games, hip-hop, and Rejection Front rock
cannot. At one point in Mirrorshades, Sterling speaks of
the "classic cyberpunk mix" of "mythic images and
technosocial politics" (125). But to my mind that is a very
different thing from the putative "integration"--closer
to the traditional ways of SF perhaps, but pretty far from the
street and counterculture.
It's also hard to see how Sterling's claims are borne out by the
writing associated with the Mirrorshades anthology. Right
off, one should be suspicious of any movement said to include
writers as remarkable, and remarkably different, as Greg Bear,
Rudy Rucker, and William Gibson. Bear's and Rucker's inclusion
among the cyberpunks smacks more of friendly endorsement than
of truly shared aesthetic aims. And it's hard to tell whether
Sterling means his "literary incarnation" to be a direction
within the popular science-fiction industry, a visionary style
transcending the SF ghetto-boundaries, or an artistic "integration"
of high and low culture, or all three. In the first case, "cyberpunk"
might actually be just an intra-professional label--like the old
"New Wave"--intended to distinguish a new, more daring
generation of writers from the old farts who once controlled the
means of literary production. The second and third require some
convincing proofs.
Maybe one shouldn't want too much "philosophy" from
a style that proclaims its allegiance to pulp hard SF as proudly
as Sterling does. Still, how many formulaic tales can one wade
through in which a self-destructive but sensitive young protagonist
with an (implant/prosthesis/telechtronic talent) that makes the
evil (megacorporations/police states/criminal underworlds) pursue
him through (wasted urban landscapes/elite luxury enclaves/eccentric
space stations ) full of grotesque (haircuts/clothes/self-mutilations/rock
music/sexual hobbies/designer drugs/telechtronic gadgets/nasty
new weapons/exteriorized hallucinations) representing the (mores/fashions)
of modern civilization in terminal decline, ultimately hooks up
with rebellious and tough-talking (youth/artificial intelligence/rock
cults) who offer the alternative, not of (community/socialism/traditional
values/transcendental vision), but of supreme, life-affirming
hipness, going with the flow which now flows in the machine,
against the spectre of a world-subverting (artificial intelligence/multinational
corporate web/evil genius)? Yet judging from even the best of writers in Sterling's anthology,
for cyberpunks, "hipness is all."
The postmodern sensibility has come to suspect the idea of depth,
"profundity," with a vengeance; true punks don't even
have to know how to play the instruments they perform with, true
hackers need no other goals than challenges to their programming
skills. Still, there's a line between suspicion, and a belief
that the truest cultural struggles of the strange Eighties are
style wars. Hip is a hard goddess. Who is so hip as to be above
Hip? There's a very tricky premise in that aesthetic, in presenting
the idea of cyberpunk's Meta-Hip as a mode that can transcend
the trash and competition for shelf-space of Eighties SF; for
if Sterling's cyberpunks are right, and win their aesthetic wager,
they lose: their style will die with the next trend in the telematic
culture-industry, with the next style to be certified as a hip
"integration." Hence, perhaps, all those self-destructive
artists in their works. Hence the second- and third-rate writing
that passes for style, not even worrying about art.
My suspicion is that most of the literary cyberpunks bask in the
light of the one major writer who is original and gifted enough
to make the whole movement seem original and gifted. That figure
is William Gibson, whose first novel, Neuromancer, is to
my mind one of the most interesting books of the postmodern age.
I suggest then that we think of cyberpunk not as a movement in
the U.S. and Japanese SF trade, but as a more encompassing aesthetic--as
it is embodied by Gibson and certain other postmodern artists.
Viewed like this, cyberpunk is a legitimate international artistic
style, with profound philosophical and aesthetic premises. It
has already produced a body of significant work in literature
(Gibson's novels) and especially in film: Riddley Scott's Alien
and Blade Runner, RoboCop, and Cronenberg's Videodrome.
It has its philosophers: Delleuze and Guattari, Jean Baudrillard,
and the Canadian Arthur Kroker; it even has, in Michael Jackson
and Ronald Reagan, its hyperreal icons of the human simulacrum
infiltrating reality.
I spoke of philosophy. Although the main point of the label "cyberpunk"
may be to signify the irreverence of the high-tech hipster, a
macho substitute for the neutre "hacker," the terms
of the oxymoron imply certain conceptual possibilities that the
most ambitious cyberpunk artists are very well aware of. Both
cybernetics and punk transcend familiar distinctions. Cybernetics
provides the pretext for the mechanized control of social life,
of the body itself, and all of it through the delicate nets of
non-machine-derived mathematical formulae. Cybernetics represents
the hardening and exteriorization of certain vital forms of knowledge,
the crystallization of the Cartesian spirit into material objects
and commodities. Cybernetics is already a paradox: simultaneously
a sublime vision of human power over chance, and a dreary augmentation
of multinational capitalism's mechanical process of expansion--so
far characterized by almost uninterrupted positive feedback. Cybernetics
is, thus, part natural philosophy, part necromancy, part ideology.
So is punk, but in reverse. A self-stupefying and self-mutilating
refusal to dignify or trust anything that has brought about the
present world, even the human body, all for the promise of an
authenticity so undefinable it can't ever be known, let alone
co-opted. Punk is sentimentalism's Schone Seele inverted:
it slam-dances angrily out of the world, playing "power chords"
to deafness. Yet for all that, it embodies philosophy. The punk
is a sarcastic mirror-reflection of the social-engineers' dream.
The punk pretends to be a soft machine, but the machine is savage
and intractable. "Cyber/punk"--the ideal postmodern
couple: a machine philosophy that can create the world in its
own image and a self-mutilating freedom, that is that image snarling
back.
This broader sense of cyberpunk reflects the increasingly pervasive
influence of a particular moment of science fiction on postmodern
culture: the moment when science fiction depicts what one theorist,
Zoe Sofia, calls the "collapse of the future on the present."
Beginning in the 50s science fiction writers began to abandon
the conventions of expansionist SF: heroic planetary exploration,
space travel without boredom, the dignity of aliens, small groups
of harmonious researchers, and in style, lucid, utilitarian prose
emphasizing the no-nonsense attitudes of adventurer-scientists
in command and control. The expansive forms of SF reflected the
optimistic and secure ideology of scientistic humanism, which
held that classical liberal virtues have some moral-ethical control
over the forces of technological production. Moreover, the mythologies
of the expansion of human consciousness into "outer space"
were to represent guarantees that they would be implanted or strengthened
in the future. The point of the expansive mode was to show that
human consciousness can contain the future. Its future was the
dominant ideology of the present purified of uncertainties. In
Asimov's robots, artificial intelligences were endowed with superhuman
ethics; majestically superior intelligences, like the Krell in
Forbidden Planet, fell pray to "monsters of the Id";
and radically different forms of being worked hand in hand with
human adventurers in Clement's Mission of Gravity, proving
the ideal synthesis of bourgeois technicism and bourgeois virtue
on all possible worlds.
Such expansion was usually represented as a sort of manic explosion,
in which projecticles of human consciousness fly giddily out into
"outer space," where they encounter either the variety
of being or the final proof of the universality of consciousness.
They either learn to learn more and better, or they learn to accept
the laws of moira. The important knowledge was to be gained
by spreading out. In SF's expansive phase, it did not matter whether
the "moral" was liberal-optimistic as Star Trek
or Freudian-conservative as Forbidden Planet; the truth
was discovered through exploration of what was not Earth. Hence,
the Earth was placed in a bubble that insured its safe and secure
historical development within liberal constraints.
In the 60s this vector was reversed, and most writers who used
science as a metaphor in their work dwelt on its inherent paradoxes,
its reverses, its self-defeating assumptions. Most of all, they
depicted the destruction of liberal ideology by autonomous technology.
Nowadays this SF of implosion dominates everywhere. Where there
was uncontrolled expansion, the afflatus of an expanding
technicist ego hallucinating cosmic humanism, now there is implosion,
a drastic, careening plunge toward some inconceivable center of
gravity that breaks up the categories of rationality by jamming
them together. While the expansion was fueled by the desire for
containment, implosion is fueled by the desire for dissolution.
The metaphor of implosion comes up often in theoretical writings
on the crisis of representation and politics in the postmodern
condition, especially in the work of Jean Baudrillard and Arthur
Kroker, who might be taken as the central theorists of cyberpunk
philosophy. Theory and metaphor follow practice here. The boom
fields of current scientific research--which are naturally the
favored topoi of current SF--also demonstrate this sharp inward
turn. Microbiology, data-storage miniaturization, bionic prosthetics,
artificial intelligence, particle physics, the world-shrinking
global grid of communication-and-control systems, and the marked
decrease in enthusiasm for space exploration (which must not be
attributed solely to the Challenger disaster): all these interests
require the radical shrinking of focus onto microcosms, and all
imply the impossibility of drawing clear boundaries among perceptual
and cognitive, indeed even ontological, categories. The current
scientific scene is entranced by the microstudy of boundaries
no longer believed to be fundamental: between life and non-life,
parasite and host, human and machine, great and small, body-brain
and cosmos. Expansive SF was based on historical analogies of
colonialism and social Darwinism, the power struggles of the old
against the new, the ancient against the scientific. The topoi
of implosive SF are based on analogies of the invasion and transformation
of the body by alien entities of our own making. Implosive science
fiction finds the scene of SF problematics not in imperial adventures
among the stars, but in the body-physical/body-social and a drastic
ambivalence about the body's traditional--and terrifyingly uncertain--integrity.
This is cyberpunk's formative culture. It is related to, and overlaps,
the literature of horror, especially the `70s and `80s's splash
and splatter films. But different values are involved in the two
genres. The horror genre has always played with the violation
of the body, since it adopts as its particular "object"
fear--the violent disruption of the sense of security,
which, precisely because it is a sense, works from within the
body, the house of the senses. Hence, in horror, the house/body's
integrity is generally threatened from within, using analogues
of disease and unconscious psychosomatic pathology, or by evil
entities that hate the flesh and wish not only to destroy it,
but to torture and degrade it. The demiurge of horror works out
a drama of pollution and curse--which terrorizes the mind by assuring
it it will feel the utmost conceivable pain.
The drama of pollution and curse has recently been raised, in
the horror genre, to a level of confusion and fury where splattering
brains and organs without bodies are required to show the punishment
of the physical. In the past, it was bad enough to violate the
dignity of life (anachronistically preserved in such current crimes
as "wrongful death" and "depriving of civil rights,"
i.e., homicide). Strangling and poisoning seem almost clean, intellectual
crimes nowadays, far less interesting than the savage dismemberments
we have come to expect. SF does not have to emulate such effects
from the horror genre (except perhaps to increase sales). But
as it concentrates increasingly on the vulnerability of the body,
it deals more and more with the ways in which science reveals
and creates new ways of intruding on that vulnerability. (Greg
Bear's marvellous Blood Music is a model of the way SF
can use the ambivalence of the scientific attitude to "redeem"
the devices of horror.)
Even when the same images or motifs are used as in the horror
genre, they have a different value in SF because they attack not
the image of the body, but the idea of the image of the
body, the very possibility of "imaging" the body (to
borrow a metaphor from cyber-medicine). This implies that the
object of attack is a calm, intellectual-rational still-point,
the locus of reflection and constraint that both science and much
art assume as the black box mediator of experience into design--the
prerequisite for conceiving of a psychodynamics, or indeed a psyche
in the first place. This is where the computer plays a decisive
role both as actor and symbol. For the computer represents the
possibility of modelling everything that exists in the phenomenal
world, of breaking down into information and then simulating perfectly
in infinitely replicable form those processes that pre-cybernetic
humanity had held to be inklings of transcendence. With the computer,
the problem of identity is moot, and the idea of reflection is
transformed in to the algorithm of replication. SF's computer
wipes out the Philosophical God and ushers in the demiurge of
thought-as-technique.
The horrifying element in implosive SF is the disruption of knowledge
in its most tangible form: the madness of the knower. Cyberpunk
is part of a trend in science fiction dealing increasingly with
madness, more precisely with the most philosophically interesting
phenomenon of madness: hallucination (derangement). Tales are
constructed around the literal/physical exteriorization of images
representing the breakdown of stable, standard-giving rational
perceptual and conceptual categories. So the most important sense
is not fear, but dread. Hallucination is always saturated
with affect. It is perception instigated by affect. The
threefold nightmare of the scientific mind is that such a process,
would it extend beyond the confines of individual skulls, will
create its own "other" reality, invalidate previous
articulations, and use the scientific mind as its agent, or its
victim. It is natural to expect that as technology proves more
and more able to construct the world in its own image (i.e., to
create simulacra to replace the "real" and the "original")--indeed,
to restructure the operations of the multinational capitalism
that enables it to exist--there will be an increasing sense of
its hallucinatory nature, its arbitrary yet overdetermining
power. For there seems to be little contest between the overdetermination
of technology and underdetermination of theory.
More and more SF treats hallucination as an object in the world--a
privileged object, since it does not merely exist among other
things, but changes their ontic status by its very "exteriorized"
existence. The trend began seriously with Philip Dick, J. G. Ballard
and the New Wave, the `60's fascination with hallucinogens and
altered states of consciousness; and already with Dick there is
difficulty distinguishing between mystical truths and machine
dreams. By the time we get to cyberpunk, reality has become a
case of nerves--i.e., the interfusion of nervous system and computer-matrix,
sensation and information, so all battles are fought out in feeling
and mood, with dread exteriorized in the world itself. The distance
required for reflection is squeezed out as the world implodes:
when hallucinations and realia collapse into each other, there
is no place from which to reflect.
What cyberpunk--at least in its most successful works--has going
for it is a rich thesaurus of metaphors linking the organic and
the electronic. Most of these metaphors lie ready to hand in the
telechtronics-saturated culture. Psychology and even physiology
are wiring, nerves are circuits, drugs and sex and other thrills
turn you on, you get a buzz, you get wired, you space out, you
go on automatic. They work the other way, too, of course: there
are "virus programs" constructed to work against other
information-systems' "immune systems." The advantage
these metaphors have over the more deliberate and reflective symbols
that usually go into the cybernetic fiction discussed in David
Porush's The Soft Machine, is that they are embedded in
the constantly shifting context of a global culture drawn into
ever newer, ever stranger webs of communication command and control.
The metaphors themselves have a life. And in the hands of a master,
like Gibson, the fuzzy links can become a subtly constructed,
but always merely implied, four-level hierarchy of evolving systems
of information-
processing, from the individual human being's biological processes
and personality, through the total life of society, to nonliving
artificial intelligences, and ultimately to new entities created
out of those AIs. In Neuromancer, each level of the hierarchy
is meaningless to itself, yet it creates the material/informational
conditions for the evolution of the next higher one, and all participate
in a quasi-cosmic "dance of biz."
Cyberpunk is fundamentally ambivalent about the breakdown of the
distinctions between human and machine, between personal consciousness
and machine consciousness. In almost every significant cyberpunk
work, the breakdown is initiated from outside, usually by the
pressures exerted by multinational capitalism's desire for something
better than the fallible human being. The villains come from the
human corporate world, who use their great technical resources
to create beings that program out the glitches of the human: the
Company in Alien seeking a perfect war-machine; the consortium
in RoboCop constructing the perfect crime-fighter; in Blade
Runner, Terrell Industries, who have created the Nexus-4 replicants,
the perfect servant-worker-warrior; in Videodrome the conspiracy
determined to wipe the Earth clean of anachronistic sadism-loving
people; in Neuromancer, the Tessier-Ashpool clan.
And yet, out of the anti-human evil that has created conditions
intolerable for normal human life, comes some new situation. This
new situation is then either the promise of an apocalyptic entrance
into a new evolutionary synthesis of the human and the machine,
or an all-encompassing hallucination in which true motives, and
true affects, cannot be known. Neuromancer's myth of the
evolution of a new cosmic entity out of human technology is perhaps
the only seriously positive version of the new situation--but
even it offers only limited transcendence, since the world is
much the same in Gibson's second novel, Count Zero, set
some years later.
Along with this ambivalent mythopoeia goes cyberpunk artists'
irresistible attraction to the nervous excesses of malaise. In
a universe where the forces of innovation are constantly tinkering
with human beings' own information-processing systems, through
telematics, drugs, and surgical intervention, the regulator of
experience (ego? self? spirit?) can no longer accept any experience
as worth more than any other. The only standard is thrill, the
ability to "light up the circuits" of the nervous-matrix,
sensation so strong that it can draw consciousness into the conditions
of its own possibility. Rather than putting the mind to sleep,
thrill keeps the mind alert, allowing it to keep up with the velocities
at which the production of sensation works. In Gibson's world,
human beings have nothing left but thrill. It is all that power
can offer, but it is also--the ambivalence again--the only way
to create new conditions, since old philosophical-moral considerations
mean nothing in a world where one can plug in another's feelings
or a while personality-memory complex through "simstim"
(simulated stimulus), assimilate a myriad of power-programs through
"microsofts" plugged directly into "cranial jacks,"
be rebuilt, redesigned with special features or resurrected through
nerve-splicing and elective surgery, or have one's consciousness
kept intact after physical death entirely through a program.
So cyberpunks, like near-addicts of amphetamines and hallucinogens,
write as if they are both victims of a life-negating system and
the heroic adventurers of thrill. They can't help themselves,
but their hip grace gets them through an amoral world, facing
a future which, for all intents and purposes, has gone beyond
human influence, and where the only way to live is in speed, speed
to avoid being caught in the web, and getting rubbed out by the
Yakuza, the AIs, the androids, the new corporate entities bent
on their own self-elaboration. Here the speed of thrill substitutes
for affection, reflection, and care, which require room and leisure
and relaxation; so there are no families, no art, no crafting
of natural materials, no lazy climbing out of the stream. (Where
there is a hint of valuable art in the future, it is by psychotics
or by marginal non-white folk who are somehow closer to the ancient,
the latter a sentimental motif particularly dear to Gibson). Movement
all the time: in plot, in theme, in style, and syntax. Huge amounts
of new information--neologisms, innovations, twists of plot, secreted
levels of hierarchy--are carried along an incredibly swift stream
of narrative. In the world: drugs, "biz," metal travelling
in cyberspace, orgasm without tenderness, and the constant, wearying
drive to do, which translates into impelled work. Ultimately,
sensation wears matter out. Humanity burns bright in its hotshot
suicide; it may live on as "The New Flesh," which may
not be flesh at all, and may preserve of us what we admire least.
The knowledge of "what we can do" and "what we
can hope for" is left suspended, unasked.
Human intelligence has become a case of nerves, and the meaning
of things, if it is to be revealed, will be by an intelligence
"not for us."
For us is thrill and work, and maybe hope
that we will be in the right place at the right time to find the
right combination of things, which will benefit our friends (unless
they betray us).
All of the ambivalent solutions of cyberpunk works are instances/myths
of bad faith, since they completely ignore the question of whether
some political controls over technology are desirable, if not
exactly possible. Cyberpunk is then the apotheosis of bad faith,
apotheosis of the postmodern.
I don't mean that as pejoratively as it sounds. It goes along
with the sophistication and ambivalence of cyberpunk artists that
they know that their art is in bad faith. But in a world of absolute
bad faith, where the real and the true are superceded by simulacra
and the hyperreal, perhaps the only hope is in representing that
bad faith appropriately.
But let's not get carried away. Cyberpunk artists acquire much
of their power like the poetes maudits before them
by dealing with the Devil. They aren't concerned with the implications
of cybernetic knowledge for knowledge and identity--the dizzying
process of constructing a self (as in McElroy's Plus)--or
the philosophical problems of imagining a truly artificial intelligence
(as in Lem's His Master's Voice or Golem XIV--the
latter, the ruminations of a "luminal" megacomputer,
the diametrical opposite of cyberpunk, in its meditative tedium).
For the one thing that cyberpunk is fascinated with above all
else, its ruling deity, is sleaze--the scummy addiction to thrill
that can focus all of a person's imaginative power on a sensation
that wipes out all discipline, and which at the same time sells
books, attracts movie options, and generates sequels. They are
not delirious fools. They know sleaze, because they have set up
shop in the belly of the beast. They are canny men--almost all
of them men (why would a woman care about a technological society
she had not role in creating?)--who have an uncanny sense that
the nightmarish neuromanticism is a powerful drug, too. Reflection
on thrill can be a thrill, too, when an audience grows used to
the technologies of reflection: replication, commentary, entertainment
tonight. This romanticism does not repress "the meat"
as the forebears did. This one has permitted itself enough distance
to demand that "the meat" show its unruly self, show
that it's not only not the enemy, but that it's the victim--it
can splatter, burst, writhe, pulsate, secrete, furiously publicize
its anguish. It is helpless and sad, against the powers of exteriorized
mind--whose modes are the hard, cruel, gunmetal cold, spiky, and
unyielding ways of self-proliferating hard stuff. The flesh is
sad, and then some--romance is a case of nerves.
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