Gibson and Stephenson

For the purposes of this post I'm going to assume that everyone has read both Stephenson's Snow Crash and Gibson's Virtual Light. Given the publication dates (Snow Crash 1992, Virtual Light 1994) it seems logical to assume that Gibson was, at the very least, influenced by Stephenson's work. Given the incredible similarities between the main characters of the novels: in Snow Crash Hiro Protaganist is a hacker/former security guard/pizza delivery guy/all around nice guy with no real idea what's going on, while the spunky Y.T. is a teenage courier and in Virtual Light Berry Rydel is a former copy/security guard/all around nice guy with no real idea what's going on, while his companion Chevette Washington is also a spunky teenage courier. What's really fascinating about the two novels is that while SC is a parody of the cyberpunk genre pioneered by Gibson, VL seems to be a reaction to the excesses pointed out by Stephenson.

While Neuromancer (1984) and Winter Market (1986) both depict a world in which both the highest of the high and the lowest of the low have access to or at least knowledge of, the technology which have altered their worlds, Virtual Light takes a step down, easing away from the excesses of cyberpunk. Unlike Y.T., for instance, Chevette Washington is a street kid who lives rough and makes her courier deliveries on a bicycle, not a semi-magical skateboard. It is her theft of a pair of sunglasses that sets off the action of the novel. But these are not the ubiquitous mirror shades of either Stephenson's SC or Gibson's earlier work. Chevette is so disenfranchised that she doesn't even know what virtual reality (or virtual light as the novel deems it) is. This is a far cry from Gibson's Sprawl universe, in which Winter Market and Neuromancer are set, or even in SC where everyone seems to be plugged in to the technology of the day. Even Berry Rydel, the novel's hero, who occupies a higher economic niche than Chevette, has only just barely heard of virtual light technology. Stephenson's work, while definitely a parody of cyberpunk, qualifies as post-cyberpunk as defined by Lawrence Person. It's characters are integrated into their society, technology in the form of the metaverse is society, and so forth. What's really interesting is that Gibson, the father of cyberpunk has also achieved post-cyberpunk status in his novel Virtual Light.

Blade Runner

Sepia photograph. Faded, tattered and worn. It's interesting that the film chose these types of photos, despite the fact the given the date of Blade Runner, the characters parents and grandparents would appear in modern photographs. So the choice of medium was deliberate. Sepia is unreliable in the same way that human memory is: it gets blurry around the edges, fades in uneven patches and can be almost unrecognizable after the passage of many years. It would be interesting to see how the replicants' memories compared to human ones. Humans, and replicants, might define themselves by their memories, but memories are subjective, flawed, and easily distorted by time and new experiences. Whether human or artificially implanted all memories are for anyone is a "padding," a way to put current reality into some sort of context. Replicants are no less real because their memories happened to someone else. Everyone's memories happened to someone else-their younger selves who oftentimes are incredible different from the current "real" person. If their memories serve to shape their current personalities then they are just as authentic as anyone else's. The fascinating difference between book and movie is that in the movie only replicants have false memories. In the book, through Mercerism, humans share one another's experiences. Iran "remembers" the joy of getting a new animal, not through her own experiences, but through being connected mechanically to someone else. They are also "implanted" with Mercer's memories, which are doubly false, being not their own, and being not memories, but film stock. At least the replicants are receiving real human experiences. Are Rachel's memories of playing doctor with her brother and the spider outside her window any less real than Deckard's just because they happened to Tyrel's niece instead of her? In almost every respect she is Tyrel's niece. What we remember about ourselves helps us to define who we are at the moment. For humans memories fluctuated and warp in the passage of time. I suppose an argument could be made that what makes the replicants other than human, besides their construction, is the fact that they, having computers for brains, would not suffer the sort of memory degradation that afflicts human. It's interesting that in both book and movie the replicants are far superior to the rather pathetic humans. In the book, despite their short life spans it seems likely that the replicants, with their superior bodies and minds, are far more capable of withstanding the dust and kipple that cover the earth. In the movie the replicants are larger than life, living lives far grander and more exotic than that of the humans around them. "The candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long." Despite their incredibly short life spans and their deficiencies in empathy, it is very easy to see the seductiveness of the replicants, and why humans despise them so greatly.

Who owns the Machines?

In both William Gibson's Neuromancer and the movie Ghost in the Shell cyborgs and AIs achieve a transcendental reality in which the Net provides them with the ultimate freedom. The AIs Wintermute and Neuromancer merge to form a super AI, an ultimate form of intelligence, who then, in the perfect freedom on the net, discovers and converses with alien life. In Ghost the newly born cyborg/AI hybrid says that the Net in infinite and discards her/his/its old life of service and servitude for an unknown, but presumably freer future. It's interesting that in both Neuromancer and Ghost that it is a hybrid that achieves this ultimate reality. The idea of sex and childbirth have been co-opted and altered to achieve the same ends: a new organism made up of elements of its parents, but unique unto itself. The hybrid imagery present in both of these texts is interesting when it is contrasted with the racial imagery in either Entrada by Mary Rosenblum or Deep End by Nisi Shawl. The hybrid reflects a construction of race that glamorizes the exotic, the half-breed, or the mixed race. This can be an empowering form of hybridization, one that bring the two parent races closer together, or it can simply be another group of people used as objects of fear, fascination, or sexual desire.
A hybrid is a being of mixed race. In Entrada and Deep End race remains deeply problematic for society. It is either a barrier for advancement or a criminalized state of being. Both Neuromancer and Ghost romanticize the hybrid, making it either a creature of great power: Wintermute/Neuromancer, or a post-sexual object of limitless potential: Project 2501/Major Kusanagi. They have, in a sense, transcended race. This is not possible in the world of Entrada in which Mila Aguilar, even if she becomes wealthy will always be primarily defined by the color of her skin. A different problem lies in wait for Wayna in Deep End. She if forced to define race without skin color as a guide. While there is the potential to read a black women in a white body as a type of cyborg, there is certainly nothing liberating about the experience.
Even the liberated cyborgs of Neuromancer and Ghost become problematic when you consider that both are completely reliant on technology for their survival. The combined AI, though free of the corporation that created it, can still only exist in cyberspace, which in turn only exists in the computers of human beings. Its sentience, its very existence is dependent on the human society that created it. As for the newborn of Ghost, it has been illegally downloaded into a child cyborg's body (and wow does that raise issues about the society in question). While the net might be infinite, the body hosting the consciousness requires an elaborate and highly technical support system to maintain it. Both Wayna and Mila, pure racial characters, are far freer at the end of their stories.

Cyborgs and Human Nature

An examination of Donna Haraway's essay "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" reveals some interesting ideas about technology, feminism, and the future. Unfortunately it is riddled with incomplete arguments and elitist prose. Full text can be found at http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html

Haraway fails to make any real connection between a physical cyborg, that is, a sentient cross of organic and inorganic matter, and this mythical marxist-feminist theory that she claims will revolutionize feminism and ultimately lead to some utopian ideal. Haraway rapturously describes the way in which cyborg technology blurs the lines between what most would consider "naturally" human and a new form of humanity of limitless possibilities.

These are some fragments of Haraway's essay that I find particularly fascinating, and powerful in regards to her ideas about the factual and actual cyborg.

"By the late twentieth century in the United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks -- language tool use, social behavior, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal."

"The second leaky distinction if between animal-human (organism) and machine. Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organism and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert."

And finally:

"The third distinction is a subset of the second: the boundary between physical and non-physical is very imprecise for us."

Now it isn't necessary to agree with everything Haraway says here, especially about the boundaries between man and animal, to realize that human technology has brought us to the point where thing are getting a little strange out there. And in here. To me this is some of Haraway's best work. Her descriptions of how the physical cyborgs blur the lines of reality and how they could very well force of redefining of the concept of humanity are very convincing.

Unfortunately she then goes of into the meat of her argument: that the physical cyborg has become a mythical and political cyborg. That women of color, of mixed race, marginalized, oppressed, fragmented and splintered are mythical cyborgs capable of fusing their fractured identities in a whole greater than the sum of its parts and in which a "cyborg identity" is incredibly politically powerful. Now I don't have a problem with this concept. It's fascinating and, I think, very much a possibility. Except Haraway has prefaced this argument with an entirely unrelated, or unconvincingly related, argument about the physical cyborg; that is the combination of organic and inorganic matter into a sentient whole. Now the overarching metaphor is clear: a mixing of unlike or disparate elements into a new whole, but to me she weakens her very powerful argument about the new coalition style feminism in which women (and men) of all races, ethnicity, languages, and classes might network themselves together in order in enact political change, by dangling the distraction of, well a Terminator, in front of the reader. Not only is it a distraction, but it can be read as potentially insulting as well.

For instance:

"Figuratively and literally, language politics pervade the struggles of women of colour; and stories about language have a special power in the rich contemporary writing by US women of colour. For example, retelling of the story of the indigenous woman Malinche, mother of the mestizo 'bastard' race of the new world, master of languages, and mistress of Cortes, carry special meaning for Chicana constructions of identity. Cherrie Moraga (1983) in Loving the War Years explores the themes identity when one never possessed the original language, never told the original story, never resided in the harmony of legitimate heterosexuality in the garden of culture, and so cannot base identity on a myth or a fall from innocence and right to natural names, mother's or father's. Moraga's writing, her superb literacy, is presented in her poetry as the same kind of violation as Malinche's mastery of the conqueror's language -- a violation, an illegitimate production, that allows survival. Moraga's language in not 'whole'; it is self-consciously spliced, a chimera of English and Spanish, both conqueror's languages. But it is this chimeric monster, without claim to an original language before violation, that crafts the erode, competent, potent identities of women of colour."

Fancy language aside, what she saying is that this poet took two languages, English and Spanish, two languages belonging to cultures that raped, pillaged, and murdered her gender and her entire race and fused them into a potent weapon enabling her to speak out and making her a political force. Here she is a mythic cyborg as Haraway has conceived it. But to compare someone who has appropriated and twisted the language of oppression into the language of empowerment (a mythic cyborg) to a guy with an artificial heart (a physical cyborg) is to insult the mythical cyborg and confuse the issue for the reader.

Another aspect of Haraway's work that I find unconvincing is her idea that cyborgism will lead to an utopia. Her argument for this is convoluted, but as I understand it, is basically that because cyborg blur the boundaries between life and non-life, human and animal, and eventually between man and woman that at some point all categories will become obsolete. Dualism will fracture in a myriad of options, categories, fusions, and alternatives that constantly flux and change. Haraway sees this as an opportunity. She must have a much higher opinion of human nature than me, since what I see are more opportunities for discrimination, marginalization, and hierarchical structuring of society.

The science fiction story The Pretended by Darryl Smith, though primarily concerned with the construction of racial identity, has a vision of the cyborg that is useful to examine in juxtaposition with Haraway's essay. Here cyborgs most certainly are the bastard children of mankind; they are a "recreation" of the black race that had been wiped out by the dominant white culture. Rather than being some sort of "potent fusion" as Haraway would have it, they are instead of race of slaves, carefully programmed and controlled. I think the main point that Haraway missed is that cyborgs, by their very nature, are constructs, built by someone else. Therefore it is inevitable that the people constructing them have an agenda for doing so. And since it is neither cheap, nor easy, to build a cyborg (within our own time or the foreseeable future) there is little likelihood of cyborgs being free beings with the ability to be a potent political force. Rather, it is far more likely that they will simply be one more tool wielded by those entrenched in power (who, after all, have access to the best toys) as simply one more tool in their arsenal of hegemony.