Partial Arguments: Don’t Shoot the Genre of Bad News
(cites and sites to follow; all that passes below subject to revision)
Given cp’s self-evident and self-avowed concern with, we are repeatedly told, alternative futures as a way of addressing our (now past) present and relations therebetween, it’s remarkably short-sighted when it comes to its own past and near-present. The self-interest motivating the hubris that re-writes history for market value in Sterling’s more hyperbolic moments[1] is one way of making sense of this. To that account’s notion of the 1980’s as an “era of reassessment, of integration, of hybridized influences, of old notions shaken loose and reinterpreted with a new sophistication” effectively debunked by Csicsery-Ronay Jr. and Suvin (with a little help from our own Julieh’t), I’ll just add that Dude, Reagan was president, remember? Nevermind the description of what we usually mean when we say ‘68 applied to the painfully long, slow dirge for what it was and wasn’t that was the 1980s: The generic hybridization cp prides itself on as its signal intervention into the cultural arena (whether this be of high tech know-how and pop-cultural awareness, hard science and high lit, genre appeal and avant-garde techniques, etc.) was everywhere else playing out as, oh, I don’t know, Monopoly—trickling down into the marketable ranks of airport paperbacks, might we say? That everything everywhere was turning out to be the world writ small was not such a good thing, if you happened not to be a cp enthusiast or, say, living anywhere in the Third World that (as it does so much of the post to oru modernity) underwrites the stock plots cp torques and critiques.
This aint to knock cp for being what it was: its generic claim to fame for “its premium on information density” (in Brooks Landon’s useful phrse); its constant questionings of future presents and their (our) pasts eliding into one another via narrative techniques modeled on video processes that make of the cp novel “a mirror you can edit,” in John Shirley’s words; its preoccupation with hallucination—not least that consensual one Gibson famously dubbed cyberspace—Csicsery-Ronay Jr. describes as “perception instigated by affect” (about which more anon); and perhaps above all the way these combine to ask us to ask the question Suvin poses as the one cp poses itself as a genre—“is cp the diagnostician of or the parasite on a disease?”—strike me as features still more than salient enough to recommend it as a privileged object of analysis belonging to the conditions of whatever we mean when we say postmodernity (although it is not the privileged object its more fervent promoters take it to be, from within the moment of their own critical campaigns to get it re-shelved alongside the other shelves of Serious Literary Stuffs For Critical Contemplation). These features are symptoms, after all, of the world we live in, not just conceptually but actually: Any cultural analysis worth its weight in grants and tenure, then, must concern itself with just these questions, and those these beget (see post to follow, given world enough and time).
This is however to observe that it’s curious (read: sad but predictable), given its predilection for worrying over just these problems of thinking the present of future pasts, how opaque its own specific literary history and place therein appear to remain to it. And here what seems most telling is not the more obvious critiques of the cash value always already lurking inside its particular generic tropes and the macho-chauvinistic adolescent audiences prepared in advance to receive them, though these remain important and compelling pieces of the puzzle usefully drawn out by Csicsery-Ronay Jr. and Veronica Hollinger. What seems most telling is the way that Burroughs operates again and again as the horizon of cp’s creators’ and (more to the point) both its promulgators’ and critics’ horizons for imagining the source of its ammphetamine-paced narratives. It really wasn’t Brion Gysin in room 15 of No. 9 rue Git-le Coeur with a Stanley blade in 1960: Burroughs’ cut-ups were already old hat and (as Jasper notes in the comment stream to that query) that hat had already passed through a lot of hands and been on a lot of heads.
You can choose your own names for this constellation—and tweak the data by claiming Burroughs was the first major translator of the technique into narrative; I aint qualified to speak on that score—but over in the countries where they make linebreaks and paintings, to say “The once radical-seeming cut up production model of William Burroughs is tame stuff” as a way of bringing 1980s products down to earth vis a vi the radicality of their 1960s variants is to ignore (or dismiss) the particular history of the technique as a technique: Picasso, Braques, the Dada and Surrealism shortly to follow, Tzara, Zaum, Schwitters, Lettrism and detournement. And, depending how you count your chickens (per Jasper’s insightful extension per Debord) these particular developments can each be traced in relation to a lineage with its own history that passes all the way back through Mallarme to Lautreamont. To do so is to tell a rather different story about cp: What was new with Burroughs wasn’t the technique, it was the fact that by the time Jack and Allen showed up to shuffle the pages of the Word Hoard on the floor of Burroughs’ opium den in Tangiers,[2] the technique could be made into a book deal, even if it had to don the garb of pulp first. And as cp’s practitioners and promoters ought to know, that means it had long ago passed from the world of technique into the machinery of representation.
[1] “The term [“cyberpunk”] captures something crucial to the work of these writers, something crucial to the decade as a whole: a new kind of integration. The overlapping of worlds that were formerly separate: the realm of high tech, and the modern pop underground….”
[2] It’s worth noting the particular differences between the modes of production in question here as well: Burroughs wrote all of the Word Hoard himself, which is a different game than one in which the words are literally being pulled out of a hat, whether that hat is accidentally located blablah, or holds (example of foundstuffs), etc. Cut up does not mean the same thing in all countries at all moments in time, in other words, be those countries genres and moments moments of publication or, y’know, countries and historical moments when imagining meant real negation, being ahead of the times in the sense of radically of them rather than belated recognition of the past.
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