My essay (cont)
Omar Haneef
Neuromancer, like the other cyberpunk works I discuss, can be read as a
systematic - but fast paced and frantic - series of attempts to examine
borderline, and therefore automatically deconstructive, cases of humanity.
The most dramatic examples of these borderline cases are McCoy the
construct, the meat puppet, Wintermute the AI (artificial intelligence),
Wintermuteąs personaes; however, the entire novel is full of such cases:
Armitage, the shell of a human being into whom a whole personality is
built, or Molly, one amongst many cyborgs into whom electronic circuitry
has been implanted. Each of these man-machine comparisons shows us one
more aspect of human beings that is not essential to our humanity. Let us
consider the case of Dixie:
łHow you doing, Dixie?˛
łIąm dead, Case. Got enough time in on this Hosaka to figure that one.˛
łHowąs it feel?˛
łIt doesnąt.˛
łBother you?˛
łWhat bothers me is, nothiną does.˛
łHowąs that?˛
łHad me this buddy in the Russian camp, Siberia, his thumb was frostbit.
Medics came by and they cut it off. Month later heąs tossing all night.
Elroy, I said, whatąs eatiną you? Goddam thumbs itchingą, he says. So I
told him, scratch it. McCoy, he says, its the other goddam thumb.˛ When
the construct laughed it came through as something else, not laughter, but
a stab of cold down Caseąs spine. łDo me a favour, boy.˛
łWhatąs that, Dix?˛
łThis scam of yours, when its over, you erase this goddam thing.˛
(Neuromancer, 106)
In Asimovąs robot tales, the moral was that if you canąt tell the
difference between a human and a machine then their is none. This passage
contradicts that very claim. Dix, by its own admission, acts just like a
human being but isnąt one; it is a dead thing; whatever humanity is, it is
not manifested in our behaviour or our sense of humour. Humanity is like
the sensation of the thumb that was cut off in the passage above: we can
sense it quite clearly but its not in the physical being of the thumb. But
in conveying the sense of confusion, Gibson has had to layer the text with
clues to Dixieąs inhumanity; Dixieąs łnot laughter, but a stab of cold
down Caseąs spine˛ is reiterated in every dialogue between the two of
them; Dixieąs wish to be erased is similarly encountered every time one
inquireąs into Dixieąs motives. Despite his jokes, Dixie is most
definitely not a person, he is a tool at best, Case uses him to break into
various computer systems or use his knowledge and experience, but never
beyond that. This is in direct contrast to Wintermute, the Artificial
Intelligence, who is most definitely not a human, but is still a person:
łMotive,˛ the construct said. łReal motive problem, with an AI. Not
human, see?˛
łWell, yeah, obviously.˛
łNope. I mean, itąs not human. And you canąt get a handle on it. Me,
Iąm not human either, but I respond like one. See?˛
łWait a sec,˛ Case said. łAre you sentient, or not?˛
łWell, it feels like I am, kid, but Iąm really just a bunch of ROM.
Itąs one of them, ah, philosophical questions, I guess...˛ The ugly
laughter sensation rattled down Caseąs spine. łBut I ainąt likely to write
you no poem, if you follow me. Your AI, it just might. But it ainąt no way
human.˛
łSo you figure we canąt get on to its motive?˛
łIt own itself?˛
łSwiss citizen, but T-A own the basic software and the mainframe.˛
łThatąs a good one,˛ the construct said. łLike, I own your brain and
what you know, but your thoughts have Swiss citizenship. Sure. Lotsa luck,
AI.˛
łSo itąs getting ready to burn itself?˛ [...]
łAutonomy, thatąs the bugaboo, where you AIąs are concerned. My guess,
Case, youąre going in there to cut the hardwired shackles that keep this
baby from getting any smarter.[...] See, those things can work real hard,
buy themselves time to write cookbooks or whatever, but the minute, I mean
the nanosecond, that one starts figuring out ways to make itself smarter,
Turingąll wipe it. Nobody trusts those fuckers, you know that. Every AI
ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead.˛ (p 132)
This is curious. Dixie insists that the AI is not human, that you cannot
get a handle on it, that it is somehow alien; yet he paints a very human
picture of the AIąs possibilities and motives. The AI might write you a
poem, the AI wants to be free. How much more human can one get? This AI
seems to have the personality of a human being, it is free of the chill
laughter. This theme gets serious attention in other cyberpunk works for
instance in Blade Runner, Software and Wetware.
Autonomy is quite a powerful idea to distinguish persons from
non-persons, or living from non-living. Caught up with autonomy is our
investment in privacy in the age of electronic surveillance; if nobody can
examine our thoughts - if technologies drill is unable to bore through our
minds - then perhaps we can hold on to ourselves. The following passage
illustrates this point most clearly:
And here things could be counted, each one. He knew the number of
grains of sand in the construct of the beach (a number coded in a
mathematical system that existed nowhere outside the mind that was
Neuromancer). He knew the number of yellow food packets in the canisters
in the number (four hundred and seven). He knew the number of brass teeth
in the left half of the open zipper of the salt-crusted leather jacket
that Linda Lee wore as she trudged along the sunset beach, swinging a
stick of driftwood in her hand (two hundred and two).
[...] He knew the rate of her pulse, the length of her stride in
measurements that would have satisfied the most exacting standards of
geophysics.
łBut you do not know her thoughts,˛ the boy said, beside him now in the
shark thingąs heart. łI do not know her thoughts. You were wrong, Case. To
live here is to live. There is no difference.˛ (Gibson, 258)
Inscrutable thoughts, the inscrutable thoughts of a being that exists
łnowhere outside the mind that was Neuromancer˛, that is, nowhere outside
the imagination of a computer, still retain life, authenticity even,
simply because these thoughts are not known. Even though every physical
detail is quantized, her thoughts guarantee her being. This startling
claim is the product of a cyberpunk anxiety; once again, it maintains the
sanctity of the human mind, and defines the human mind as that which has
sanctity.
I believe that this anxiety is really cyberpunk; this is what enables
the expression of complacency with technological omnipotence. But could
one have expected anything else? I do not wish to produce a theory of what
cultural artifacts do, how they operate on us and whether they Śhelpą us
or Śmerelyą record our anxieties and fantasies but these artifacts are
produced for consumption by intelligences which must relate in some
respect with these artifacts - or else why would they buy them to read? -
and so the anxiety of that intelligence would appear in the artifact. This
is the real cyberpunk. I suspect that a true cyberpunk - one which is
purely complacent with the power of technology and comfortable with the
redundancy of intelligence - would not exist as a literature, whatever
claims it may have to reality.
€ Metaphors of Cyberpunk: Lazarus and Frankenstein
The metaphysical association, disassociation and reassociation of minds
and bodies via technology is an old science fiction trick, the
metaphorical equivalent is relatively new; even the writers from the
łgolden age˛ were producing scenarios where robots, artificial
intelligences and cyborgs were already producing various permutations on
thinking machines and mechanical bodies - one of the most famous examples
is Asimovąs. Cyberpunk, while similarly concerned with certain themes, is
quite radically different from Asimov; it stylistically far closer to
Ballard, Dick and Pyncheon.
When the distinction between form and content was still a subject
worthy of academic consideration, the New Critics would debate it quite
heatedly. Critics of poetry, I am thinking here of Brooks and Bradley,
found the relationship in poetry to be quite a bit more intimate than
their modernist counterparts in painting, Greenberg and Bell. I think
there is some truth to this notions; whatever it is that makes a piece of
literature valuable, enjoyable, or just liked, is both the what and the
how of what is being said. This is not too bold a statement, and most
critics would agree that the cyberpunk fiction has a cyberpunk style. The
writing is streetwise and witty; the metaphors rely on technology or
rockąnąroll; the authors betray their countercultural sensibilities.In
criticism, these metaphors might be misunderstood, replaced by the critics
own, and indeed I shall argue that some critics have been guilty of this
heresy of paraphrase.
Science Fiction has a tradition of using its unconventional reality to
produce an unconventional writing. Bukatman, using the work of DeLauritis
and Delany, tells us:
A sentence such as, łThe red sun is high, the blue low,˛ involves the
reader in a constant activity of revision and reorientation [...]. The
neologistic excess and literalization of language foreground the reading
process in a manner perhaps more characteristic of poetry than of
narrative prose (łHer world exploded,˛ becomes a potentially dual
statement in SF, possessed of both figurative and literal possible
readings.) (Bukatman, 12)
Such refiguring metaphors are used in Blade Runner where the lonely toy
makes declares łI make friends,˛ or when the maker of the replicantąs eyes
tells him that he has his makerąs eyes. The viewer realises, after the
statement, that the language is literal; both examples can only work
because of the viewerąs initial investment in the meaning of łmaking˛
friends, or having someone elseąs eyes, and so both succeed in so far as
they can re-write the viewerąs frame of reference.
Easily the most famous line in cyberpunk is the opening line to
Neuromancer; this line is the łto be or not to be˛ of cyberpunk fiction:
łThe sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead
channel.˛ (Gibson, 3) One cannot help but feel self-conscious at
re-invoking this cliche but I mean to use it as a cliche; why would this
line catch on? Why should it have the privilege of being reader bait?
Because it is the opening line, of course, but also because it manages to
convey something of the style that one finds throughout the novel, the use
of a technological metaphor to describe a natural phenomenon. The message,
I take it, is that our nature is different, here is a new sort of nature,
a nature composed of technology; the colour of a dead channel is as common
as the sky. These technological metaphors are common in Neuromancer, they
are used to describe the environment, people and even other technology,
ł[...] it was possible to see Ninsei as a field of data, the way the
matrix had reminded him of proteins linking to distinguish cell
specialties.˛ (Gibson, 16)
łAristotle defines metaphor as Śthe device ... of giving life to
lifeless things.ą Paul de Man , following in Aristotleąs footsteps, see
prosopopoeia as the epitome of metaphor because it brings dead things to
life.˛ (Curl, Metaphors, 231) Metaphors, themselves, become metaphors for
cyberpunk which is similarly concerned with giving life to lifeless
things; but is the lifeless thing to retain marks of its own death like an
irredeemable Frankenstein? Or is it merely a little thin after its
reincarnation in the manner of Lazarus? While the critics seem to favour
the Frankenstein analogy, they do so at the risk of ignoring the Lazarus
which emerges from the texts.
Frankenstein is far and away the preferred metaphor of the cyberpunk
critic from Sterling, to Bukatman, to Slusser, to Curl and many others.
Curląs use of Frankenstein is particularly intriguing; she uses it in her
essay on the łMetaphors of Cyberpunk˛, in her discussion of Neuromancer,
but the other metaphors she teases out are biblical. Curl considers the
matrix a metaphor for the garden of eden, somehow, using the latin meaning
of matrix, womb; if she goes to such lengths to read the bible into
Neuromancer, why not use the metaphors already provided by Neuromancer?
łThe computer remains a vehicle forever controlled by the tenors of some
mythical past: Paradise, the Fall, Frankenstein - monster and creator.˛
(Curl, Metaphors, 237) The mention of Frankenstein after Paradise and the
Fall is especially remarkable given Gibsonąs own metaphor for Pauleyąs
survival of braindeath - łthe man was dead, flat down braindeath˛ - łMcCoy
Pauley, Lazarus of Cyberspace...˛ (Gibson, 78) This is the same Pauley
that was to return again as the construct, Dixie, whose inhuman laugh is
to remind Case of the flatline that Pauley could not come back from. Why
would Curl ignore the obvious metaphor of Lazarus for the computers
enactment of łthe tenors of some mythical past˛ in favour of
Frankenstein?
What is Frankenstein that Lazarus is not? Inhuman.
The criticsą favourite metaphor again covers up the autonomy - the
human success, the success of the human - in the original text. The
Frankenstein metaphor is powerful, important and in some ways quite
relevant, but it is always invoked instead of, as opposed to along with,
the Lazarus metaphor. Unlike Frankenstein, Lazarus does not turn on his
maker, does not threaten to breed a race of monsters, and seems to survive
by sheer grace. Case was a burnt out, neurologically damaged, drug
addicted, suicidal wreck when Armitage found him and, through sheer
expenditure, bought him a new life. Why ignore the grace in the novel?
Perhaps because of the critics own anxieties concerning Frankenstein, her
own need to record these anxieties.
Indeed, the critics share the cyberpunk anxieties; in doing so, they
too write cyberpunk.
€ Punks in the Academy
Who would deny that one of the main draws to the study of cyberpunk is
the style of the criticism? A few examples of my rhetorical confession
should convince readers - more than any amount of arguing - that the prose
and themes of the critic mirror the prose and themes of the works. It is
difficult and pointless to distinguish between them, the critics might as
well be writing cyberpunk fiction. As Andrew Gordon, in his review of
Terminal Identity, entitled łPosthuman Identity Crisis˛ points out:
As do may contemporary critics, Bukatman considers SF in the broadest
sense [...], and even what Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr has called the łSF of
theory (Baudrillard, Deleuze and Gautarri, Haraway, and Virilio, for
example). This last concept is extremely useful for in the age of the
critic as creative artist, it makes sense to read an SF author such as
Dick not through but alongside the surreal, hyperbolic ravings of
Baudrillard. If we see the former not only as SF novelist and the latter
not only as theorist but both instead as visionary writers attempting to
create metaphors adequate to a new reality, then they become complementary
figure, aspects of the same phenomenon (although Iąd take Dick over
Baudrillard any day). (Gordon, 445)
Indeed there is a great deal of overlap between writers of cyberpunk
fiction and criticism; as Sterling starts to write his own mind on
postmodern fiction, so too does Baudrillard end up writing quite starkly
cyberpunk themes in a distinctly cyberpunk style. Here, Sterling cites the
Baudrillard he likes. Note the mirror sunglasses which coincidentally
appear in so many cyberpunk stories that the genre was at one point called
the Mirrorshades Movement from which the title of Sterlingąs anthology is
derived.
Baudrillard is a true voice of the 1980s. Unlike the clunking and
buzzing Fredric Jameson, Baudrillard is an excellent writer; something of
his swift winging lunacy comes across even in the English translation.
Here Baudrillard describes an American mirror glass skyscraper:
The glass facades merely reflect the environment, sending back its own
image. This makes them much more formidable than any wall of stone. Itąs
just like people who wear dark glasses. Their eyes are hidden and others
see only their own reflection. Everywhere the transparency of interfaces
ends in internal refraction. [...] (Sterling, Precessing Simulacra, 60)
Sterling is correct to point out the cyberpunk character of writers like
Baudrillard, Arthur Kroker and Paul Virilio, as opposed to the łdroning
hypnosis˛ of the prose of Barthes, Derrida and De Man. Part of what makes
cyberpunk an important cultural event is that even commentary upon it
becomes a part of it, joins in the fantasy and anxiety. Look at the
cyberpunk quality of writing such as David Brinąs as he talks about
cyberpunk metaphors:
cyberpunk is texture. Most of the self-named members of the movement
are strong believers in style as an end in itself.... The best of these
writers such as William Gibson and Lucius Shepard perform dazzling feats
on the level of microcraft, precipitating metaphor after shimmering
crystal metaphor .... This priority becomes particularly clear when
conflict rears between realism - scientific or technological likelihood -
and a particularly appealing image. For the łtraditional˛ SF writer, the
necessity to extrapolate credibly is paramount .... The cyberpunk author,
on the other hand, cares about the texture of technology and science, not
about the veracity or inconvenient reality.... He will choose an unlikely
but beautiful metaphor over the best extrapolation, any time. (Brin, 25)
This is true of both cyberpunk and the criticism; cyberpunk criticism is
probably the most highly stylized criticism in the academy today - partly
because such stylized criticism is tautologically defined as cyberpunk,
partly because it asks to be defined so. In the example above, łmetaphor
after shimmering crystal metaphor˛ is typical of what the critic does. The
very best of these critics - Porush and Csicsery-Ronay Jr, for example -
are as styled as the fiction writers themselves. Here is Csicsery-Ronay Jr
defining cyberpunk for us, his primary concern is with the paradox of
autonomy and control that the term implies and employs:
Cybernetics is already a paradox: simultaneously a sublime vision of
human power over chance and a dreary augmentation of multinational
capitalismąs 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 canąt ever be known, let alone co opted. [...] The punk is
a sarcastic mirror-reflection of the social engineersą dream. The punk
precedes to be a soft machine, but the machine is savage and intractable.
łCyber/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. (Csicsery-Ronay, 186)
The prose here is łsavage and intractable˛, if somewhat confusing, it
mirrors the cyberpunk prose it seeks to explain; it becomes the łimage
snarling back˛; it is vibrant. Porush manages to pull of similarly
brilliant prose, and seems to have exactly the same attitude that Sterling
does in the excerpt from Precessing Simulacra that shrugs off the
redefinition of mankind with łWhatever works, man.˛ In a piece
appropriately entitled łFrothing in the Synaptic Bath,˛ Porush writes
So the best weapon in defense of our own humanness is to continue to
deconstruct the natural and the artificial in both technology and
imagination even as we expand our own definition of human to include Virek
in his vat, Count Zero the Aloha, and Bobby Newmark and McCoy the
construct, Kitsune and Lindsay the Shaper and Ryumin the Mechanist. The
Preservationists of Sterlingąs Schismatrix have it all wrong. What is it
theyąre Preserving? When do we know weąre talking to a real McCoy? What
aspect of humanity makes us human? Our flesh? Our CNS [Central Nervous
System]? Our thoughts? Our handiwork? Whereąs that line over which lies
inhumanity? The technology is us, man. (Porush, 258)
These academic punks are a pleasure to read. Even McCaffery manages to
slip in the expletive ł[...] Caseąs psychological motives center on his
desire to seek revenge against the forces who fucked him over.˛
(McCaffery, Introduction, 15) With the amount of research and scholarship
that McCaffery brings to bear, this expression is charming. Unfortunately,
some writers have noticed the adolescent fantasy that fuels so much
cyberpunk; but is this not the misinterpretation of the autonomy that I
have found?
€ Cyber or Punk?
Cyber- comes from cybernetics, cybernetics from kubernetes, Greek for
pilot. The irony that cybernetics is control theory, the science of
controlling a system by giving it the appropriate inputs, is not lost on
the critics - Csicsery-Ronay Jr explores it explicitly. But the autonomy
is often read as ła fashionable attitude, and cyberpunk at its weakest has
reduced all this to formula, as in the role-playing game. There is an
evident rockąnąroll romanticism at work, riding atop the adolescent
sensibility of most SF. [...] The protagonist, inevitably a white male,
probes, negotiates, and penetrates this sight of multi-cultural otherness,
mastering it in the process. ˛ (Bukatman 144) łBlade Runner is exemplary
[...]. The replicants pose a threat to the social order, raising questions
regarding the status of being and the nature of state control. Deckard is
the technologically enhanced detective/perceiver, seeing, reading, and
exploring an unsettling chaotic environment.˛ (Bukatman, 142).
Csicsery-Ronay Jr is not nearly as forgiving:
Still, how many formulaic tales can one wade through in which a
self-destructive but sensitive young protagonist with an
(implant/prosthesis/telechtonic 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/telechtonic gadgets/nasty new weapons/exteriorized
hallucinations) representing the (mores/fashions) of modern civilization
in terminal decline, ultimately hooks up with the 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 world-subverting
(artificial intelligence/ multinational corporate web/evil genius)? Yet
judging from even the best of writers in Sterlingąs anthology, for
cyberpunks, łhipness is all.˛ (Csicsery-Ronay Jr, 184)
Nor are they wrong; the rockąnąroll sensibility does translate into a
privileging of hipness; the same hipness that I seem to be privileging in
the writing of the critics but which I think Csicsery-Ronay Jr himself
subscribes to. His prose, as I have pointed out, is young and energetic;
łHere 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. [...] Movement all the time: in plot, in theme, in style, and in
syntax. Huge amounts of new information - neologisms, innovations, twists
of plot, secreted levels of hierarchy - are carried along an incredibly
swift stream of narrative.˛ (Csicsery-Ronay Jr, 192) But this is surely
going to far. There is certainly movement and swift narrative, but Case
cares dearly about his work and about Molly; he treats his work like a
craft: łThis was it. This was what he was, who he was, his being. He
forgot to eat. Molly left cartons of rice and foam trays of sushi on the
corner of the long table. Sometimes he resented having to use the chemical
toilet theyąd set up in the corner of the loft.˛ (Neuromancer, 59) And
Caseąs numerous attempts to get high should testify adequately to his
łlazy climbing out of stream.˛
There is an adolescent concern with hipness in cyberpunk fiction, and
the protagonist is gendered and bleached. But what is this in the service
of? As Bukatman points out, it provides some sense of mastery over the
loss of control in the face of technology; oftentimes it provides the
cognitive mapping that Fredric Jameson has called for in order to reorient
ourselves in a new geography. There is a sense of autonomy that the
protagonist retains, and here we are not talking about the dissolution of
machines and humans. I wish to call attention to the important distinction
here between the autonomy of the protagonist, and the socio-cultural
makeup of that protagonist. While he belongs to a privileged group that
exercises this autonomy on others, the fact remains that it is autonomy
that is being exercised, and we would not wish to ignore the fantastic
autonomy of the pilot because of his adolescence.
Bukatman thinks this mastery is of political significance, łThe works
of postmodernism[] either emphasize that sense of dislocation or produce
some form of cognitive mapping so that the subject can comprehend the new
terms of existence.˛ (Bukatm
şe is quite persuasive on this point, and he satisfactorily relates this
with the protagonists autonomy, to see the importance of the protagonists
łpenetration˛ of the female, exotic otherness beyond its (disturbing)
colonizing component; it is simultaneously the penetration and mastery of
a technological other.
Porush gets frustratingly close to reading the autonomy back into the
humachine, the cyborg:
Question: How do you get to cyberspace?
Baudrillard writes in Simulations: ł[We have moved] from a
capitalist-productivist society to a neo-capitalist cybernetic order that
aims at total control. This is the mutation for which the biological
theorization of code prepares the ground. There is nothing of an accident
in this mutation. It is the end of history in which, successively, God,
Man, Progress, and History die to profit the code.˛
However, Baudrillard is wrong. (Porush 250)
Answer: Reincarnate Man
[...] Are these citizens truly no longer human, or have we merely
shifted the definition, broadened it to include manifestations and
metamorphoses hitherto inconceivable? [...]
You get to cyberspace by killing some obsolete aspect of your humanity
but redeeming another. And in that redemption the definition of what makes
you human is expanded to include all sorts of freakish alternatives.
[... Examples of Sterlingąs partial humans] Sterling tells us łthey had
discarded their humanity like a caul˛. But in fact, their humanity clings
to them with all the old fervid passions and appetite: competitiveness,
greed, power, lust, curiosity, and madness. [...] You canąt just shuck
this humanity like a caul. (Porush, 252)
How true, but how incomplete! The łold fervid passions and appetite˛ must
also include the old sense of autonomy and freedom. There is something
distinctly human about the reincarnation, something of a Lazarus to this
Frankenstein. łSome obsolete aspect of your humanity˛ may have been killed
off, but what is left is essentially human - should I say, personal? - and
in that sense only the meat body has died, not the person.
€ Conclusion
This anxiety that I hope to have shown is surely historical; centuries
sooner and the distinction between humans and machines would be clear,
centuries later nobody might care; the anxiety marks the passage, perhaps,
between two kinds of consciousness of our relationship to machines.
Cyberpunk anxiety surely serves as at least a historical record of our
fears of the future present, and it provides strategies for resistance -
notably łwhatever works, man˛ - and because the commentary on the
cyberpunk is informed by the same anxieties of control and rebellion, of
autonomy in the future present, it too is cyberpunk; cyber, to resort to
Ruckerąs usage, both full of information as a result of meticulous
scholarship, and punk in being rebellious and somewhat eccentric.
I have not made an argument for the socio-political dimensions of
cyberpunk, but these arguments do exist in Haraway, Jameson, Bukatman and
McCafferyąs work, and they are very compelling. I hope to have shown the
personal, psycho-ontological - if youąll excuse the clumsy word -
dimension of this phenomenon; the dimension that is salient in the
literature. Whether this record actually prevents something, or teaches
something, is not for me to say; it is my hope that at the very least, it
will direct our attention, compel us to focus our interpretive energies on
decoding the direction of change and, hopefully, piloting it to some
extent.