= one of the main points of the lecture

• Preliminary Class Business
• Neuromancer: Identity in the Postindustrial Age
• Neuromancer: The Future of Corporate Life?
• What have I missed?
• References

Preliminary Class Business

• The nature of next week's readings: from contemporary to historical perspectives on information beginning with philosophers/theorists who take the broadest view
• Password for Goldsworth images for Monday's class
• One more reminder about the Ong text

Neuromancer: Identity in the Postindustrial Age

What the novel is "about" as presented at the level of character development: Who am I? What does it mean to be an individual in this 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"
  • Armitage/Corto, the "organization man" (p. 84) as schizo
  • Lady 3Jane, clones (p. 217) and perversity
  • Wintermute/Neuromancer under Turing Law (p. 132)
    
    
• How to live in the postindustrial age?
  
  
  • Individuality means making a "choice" (pp. 51, 79, 132-33, 167, 192, 244) (cf., Zionites, p. 103)
    
    
  • Individuality means accepting that one's freedom is limited. It means rejecting the transcendence of the "transhuman" or "posthuman" and remembering "the meat."
    
    
    • The false freedom of virtuality
      
      

      from Larry McCaffery's interview with William Gibson (Aug. 1986), pp. 272-73: WG:  . . . 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? WG: 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). Molly's sense of the way she is "wired" (pp. 25, 50)
        
        
      • Wintermute's "hardwired" limitation (p. 173)
        
        
      • Case's journey of self-discovery (pp. 37, 55-56, 152, 163, 239-40, 262-63)
        
        
    • Accepting the "meat" means memory work rather than knowledge work:
      
      

      Cybernetic memory ("hot RAM in the Hitachi," Dixie Flatline as ROM, Wintermute's appropriation of human memories) versus Human memory Dysfunctional human memory: Riviera's holographic image of his childhood in the Bonn rubble; Corto's memories of the war Functional human memory: Case's memories of Linda Lee; Molly remembering Johnny and Humanized Cybernetic Memory (Wintermute + Neuromancer, the keeper of "templates" of personality, pp. 243-44)

      
      
      
    • Accepting the "meat" means being able to feel, finding the "anger," finding an ethical reason to work (p. 192)

Neuromancer: The Future of Corporate Life?

• Is Neuromancer therefore just another clichéd story of a cowboy individualist going up against the Establishment?
  
  Cf., Timothy Leary's "The Cyberpunk: The Individual as Reality Pilot" (1991), p. 246 (citation): "Self-assured singularities of the Cyber Breed have been called mavericks, ronin, free-lancers, independents, self-starters, nonconformists, oddballs, troublemakers, kooks, visionaries, iconoclasts, insurgents, blue-sky thinkers, loners, smartalecks."
  
  
• Or does it imagine a viable, livable future for the corporate organization as well?
  
  
  • A review of the novel's meditations on the corporate form:
    
    
    • The atavistic clan-corporation using a technology of computers and cyrogenics: (pp. 203, 173)
      
      
    • Marie-France Tesspool's vision of a new kind of corporation using a technology of computers and cloning: (pp. 217, 229)
      
      
    • The meaning of the wasp-nest metaphor? (pp. 126, 269)
      
      
  • A review of the "dance" metaphor in the novel: (pp. 16, 44, 116, 249, 262)
    
    
  • A hypothesis:
    
    

What have I missed?

• [Discussion]

References

• Selected bibliography on Cyperpunk Fiction (see notes for Class 9)

Supplementary links for this class on Study Materials page