Neuromancer, day 2

1)  The matrix 2)  Data made flesh 3) Biospace

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miscellaneous

-  brain-in-a-vat: Dollhouse + Sense/Net -  spaces and environments: Ninsei, the Sprawl (BAMA), L-5 archipelago & Freeside, Straylight, cyberspace

Paul Virilio, Open Sky

opening of The Matrix

-  from digital to visual: a suppression of the matrix

-  genre: humanity under siege; threat of a complete simulacrum

How does this play out in Neuromancer?

Case has to resist becoming the matrix, to stop himself from fusing with the entity that Wintermute becomes

What does the secret link to the mother in the background suggest?

“She commissioned the construction of our artificial intelligences. She was quite a visionary. She imagined us in a symbiotic relationship with the AI’s, our corporate decisions made for us. Our conscious decisions, I should say. Tessier-Ashpool would be immortal, a hive, each of us units of a larger entity.” (220/229)

How does this play out in Neuromancer, III?

-  “hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames” (52)

-  “Molly’s simstim broadcast had become a still frame, her fingers frozen on the girl’s cheek…” (179/185)

Managing the threat of the digital, cont…

-  “The landscape of the northern Sprawl raised confused memories of childhood for Case” (82/85) -  Riviera’s childhood nightmare: “Children. Feral, in rags. Teeth glittering like knives. Sores on their contorted faces. The soldier on his back, mouth and throat open to the sky. They were feeding.” (203/210)

-  But: why is Neuromancer a 13 y.o. boy?

Defining features of the human

-  Blade Runner: empathy, memory -  Neuromancer:

-  time-access memory -  not self-awareness: “She dreamed of a state involving very little in the way of individual consciousness….Animal bliss. I think she viewed the evolution of the forebrain as a sort of sidestep. Only in certain heightened modes would an individual – a clan member – suffer the more painful aspects of self-awareness.” (209-210/217) -  emotion: “old alchemy of the brain and its vast pharmacy – his hate flowed into his hands” (253/262)

Case’s transformation

-  “His brain was deep-fried. No, he decided, it had been thrown into hot fat and left there, and the fat had cooled, a thick dull grease congealing on the wrinkled lobes” (133/138)

- “It belonged, he knew – he remembered – as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked.” (231-32/239) - “Beyond ego, beyond personality, beyond awareness, he moved…” (253/262)

continued

‐  “it was his own darkness, pulse and blood, the one where he’d always slept, behind his eyes and no other’s” (254/263) -  previously: “passenger behind her eyes” (55/56)

-  and: “the cyberspace matrix was actually a drastic simplification of the human sensorium” (54/55)

Binaries of the text

-  biological and technological -  human and machine -  “natural” and artificial

Blurring of the same

- “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

-  Shurikens: “these were the stars under which he voyaged, his destiny spelled out in a constellation of cheap chrome” (12)

Modalities of being

-  Hackers have direct mental access to cyberspace

-  Artificial Intelligences live within cyberspace -  “constructs” hold personalities downloaded into computer memory -  human cloning (Hideo)

Data made flesh

“it was possible to see Ninsei as a field of data, the way the matrix had once reminded him of proteins linking to distinguish cell specialties. Then you could throw yourself into a highspeed drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh in the mazes of the black market” (17/16)

Metaphors: human + machine

-  interface -  downtime -  brain dump

Bruce Sterling on cyberpunk

-  reaction to “standard human liberalism” -  “post-humanist” -  belief and hope that “technological destruction of the human condition leads not to futureshocked zombies but to hopeful monsters”

Sterling’s contributions to cyberpunk

-  Schismatrix (1986) -  Edited collection of stories: Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986)

-  Gibson & Sterling, “Red Star, Winter Orbit” (1983)

Bruce Sterling on cyberpunk, cont.

-  transcendence through technology -  romanticism of the outlaw/punk/rebel/hacker -  “the proper mode of critical attack on cyberpunk has not yet been essayed. Its truly dangerous element is incipient Nietzschean philosophical fascism: the belief in the Overman, and worship of will-to-power”

Question

How does Neuromancer present the relationship between the individual agent and the corporation, the hive, the clan?

The corporation

“Power, in Case’s world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn’t kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory. But Tessier-Ashpool wasn’t like that, and he sensed the difference in the death of its founder. T-A was an atavism, a clan. He remembered the litter of the old man’s chamber, the soiled humanity of it, the ragged spines of the old audio disks in their paper sleeves. One foot bare, the other in a velvet slipper.” (196/203) 

Wasps & hives

“Horror. The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the hatching cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly, the staged progress from egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp. In his mind’s eye, a kind of time-lapse photography took place, revealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun, hideous in its perfection. Alien.” (122/126)

The body as code

“It belonged, he knew – he remembered – as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read.” (231-32/239)

DNA

“The islands. Torus, spindle, cluster. Human DNA spreading out from gravity’s steep well like an oilslick.” (99/101)

Wintermute: “Part of my DNA, sort of…” (165/171)

Cosmetic work

-  “affordable beauty” (3/4) - Armitage: “The handsome, inexpressive features offered the routine beauty of the cosmetic boutiques, a conservative amalgam of the past decade’s leading media faces.” (45)

- “their youth was counterfeit, marked by a certain telltale corrugation at the knuckles, something the surgeons were unable to erase” (153/159)

- Julius Deane has “genetic surgeons reset the code of his DNA” (12)

Tissue engineering

“vatgrown flesh” (14) “The eyes were vatgrown sea-green Nikon transplants. He was flanked by his joeboys, nearly identical young men, their arms and shoulders bulging with grafted muscle.” (22/21)

Genetic engineering

“grow it on a collagen base, but it’s mink DNA” (120/124)

“The trees were small, gnarled, impossibly old, the result of genetic engineering and chemical manipulation. Case would have been hard pressed to distinguish a pine from an oak, but a street boy’s sense of style told him that these were too cute, too entirely and definitely treelike.” (124/128)

Biocapital

“you wind up in the clinic tanks, spare parts” (5)

“genetic materials and hormones trickled down to Ninsei along with an intricate ladder of fronts and blinds” (11)

cloning

- Hideo, “clone boy” (243) - “Big money, very shy of media. Lot of cloning. Orbital law’s a lot softer on genetic engineering, right? And it’s hard to keep track of which generation, or combination of generations, is running the show at a given time.” (73/75-6) - attempt to grow a horse, “to code ‘em up from the DNA” (88)

Experimental populations

Night City a “deranged experiment in social Darwinism” (7) and “deliberately unsupervised playground for technology itself ” (11)

Questions for discussion

-  How does Neuromancer engage biospace? -  What can we make of these lines from the construct/Dixie: “I mean, it’s not human. And you can’t get a handle on it. Me, I’m not human either, but I respond like one.” (127/131)

-  Why do we never learn the code? -  Why does Molly leave Case?