|
Neuromancer: A Counter-Imagination of
Postindustrialism
Written in the 1980s-90s during the same period as the encounter
of American corporations with the new Japanese business model,
global competition, restructuring, knowledge work, and IT, cyberpunk
is the literary equivalent of books like Workplace 2000
or The Virtual Corporation or The Road Ahead.
It is a "near-future" prophecy or imagination of postindustrialism:
- An imagination of postindustrial mass consumerism
- The world as "Biz" (p. 145): Freeside station
as giant mall or Hotel Bonaventure
- The world as Media:
- old media (TV, film, books and magazines, Ashpool's
dead-media collection) and new media (simstim)
- Gibson's characters as media pastiches ("cowboy,"
"gangster," "moll," "samurai")
(p. 213)
- the Panthern Moderns as terrorist media artists
- Wintermute's avatars
from Larry McCaffery's
interview
with William Gibson (Aug. 1986), p. 265:
LM: 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?
WG: 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. |
-
An imagination of postindustrial corporatism (compare
principles of "workplace 2000")
- Life in the corporate "arcology" and "zaibatsu"
(pp. 37, 203)
Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti
Project: The
Hyper Building "Arcology"
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." |
|
- Global competition (fusion culture: Americas, Europe, East)
(pp. 9, 19)
- Creative destruction with a vengeance
- Knowledge work ("Johnny Mnemonic") [extrapolated
into a future of "smart" bodywork, or biotech: cyborg
implants, medical tech; cf., Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire]
- Restructuring: Gibson's meditation on the corporate organizational
form (to be discussed later)
- Teamwork: Case's multidisciplinary work "team"
- facilitator: Armitage
- IT specialist: Case
- Security: Molly
- Electronic countermeasures: Finn
- Con man/salesman: Riviera
- Transportation: Maelcum (of Zion)
- Consultant: Pauly McCoy (aka Dixie, Flatline)
- Outsourced media specialists: Panthern Moderns
- Information Technology ("cyberspace," "the
matrix")
(An
Atlas of Cyberspaces)
|
Neuromancer,
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. . . ."
Michael Benedict, ed.,
Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1992) [on the construction of computer
"cyberspace"]
|
-
But also a counter-imagination of postindustrialism
- Countercultural perspective (Beat/Hippie culture as manifested
in drugs and hacking; silicon the ultimate drug, pp. 4-5)
- Subcultural perspective (youth subcultures, p. 58; reggae
subculture)
|
from Larry McCaffery's
interview
with William Gibson (Aug. 1986), p. 269:
WG: . . . 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.
|
- Life on the "Street": the perspective of the
permanently downsized, temped, flex-timed, and stressed
(contrasted with the regimented counter-corporate
world of organized crime, the Yakuza)
- Subversive and black-market IT: street tech (p. 11) (Gibson,
"the street finds its own uses for things"; quoted
in Sterling, Mirrorshades, p. xiii)
- All presented viscerally in the "style" or "special
effects" of the novel
Cf., Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, Dir.,
1982): "Tyrell
Corporation" | street
scenes | various
scenes
- Neuromancer is a "patchwork" world underlying
the media collage (pp. 103, 176, 48; "dub," p.
104), cf. "the bridge" in Gibson's Virtual
Light (p. 70)
- The synaesthetic impact on the body (pp. 31, 154, 241/244)
- General principle of the work's style: a formal dialectic
of sharply-focused, autonomous fragments vs. flow,
fluidity (pp. 154; cf., the cloisonné head and
the novel's concept of automata, p. 74)
- Gibson's hypertextual narrative style: jumping, cutting,
"flipping" (cf., the Panther Moderns, p. 62; hacking,
p. 167)
|
from Larry McCaffery's
interview
with William Gibson (Aug. 1986), p. 277:
WG: . . . When I said I was
prone to information sickness, I meant I sometimes
get off on being around a lot of unconnected stuff—but
only certain kinds of stuff, which is why
I'm having trouble handling the input right now.
I have a friend, Tom Maddox, who did a paper on
my work. He's known what I've been up to for a long
time—he says I display "a problematic
sensitivity to semiotic fragments." That probably
has a lot to do with the way I write—stitching
together all the junk that's floating around in
my head. One of my private pleasures is to go to
the corner Salvation Army thrift shop and look at
all the junk. . . .
|
|
