What does one make of a literary genre so self-reflexively obsessed with the cultural symptoms it diagnoses that it can’t slow down its adrenaline rush long enough to notice its prose style (or more accurately, lack thereof) rendering it well-nigh pure symptom? What is the shelf life—not of the the product itself, which we know is as long as the market holds, its value periodically re-upped via translation into the most newly minted media with special features specially produced just for “it,” technology prolonging the abstraction of value like the installation of so many cybernetic organs and limbs struggling to infinitely extend life expectancy and labor-capacity where these are synonymous—but of the radical ambitions supposedly motivating a mass market product with instant cinematic appeal (or for that matter any cultural artifact) that wants to imagine itself progressive/ counter-hegemonic/ avant-garde, in whatever terms those fuzzy concepts still permit imagining? How does one square William Gibson’s proclaiming (in No Maps for These Territories) that for him “happiness is being in the moment” with all its Zen placemat appeal to his concession that “all those fridge magnets have a kernel of truth in them” with the vision Gibson proffers there of nanotech producing a post-scarcity future, sans money? Or, for that matter, with what his novel (“Biz here was a constant subliminal hum”) and Molly knew the year he won SF’s triple crown: “Anybody any good at what they do, that’s what they are, right? You gotta jack, I gotta tussle.”
One wishes that “do” was italicized in the original too, to emphasize that movement from verb of process to noun of substance with which the novel is so obsessed, and that is exactly the process of reification Raymond Williams’ Keywords’ remarkable tracking of the etymological and social roots of our most basic cultural constructs tracks again and again. But that there is a tension between cp’s utopian desire, and its remaining trapped within the logic of a world totally soaked up by street-level and zaibatsu (even if AI) coordinated conversion of subjective qualities to surplus value (in the absence, it is worth noting in passing, of the absence of any space left the colonial project of expanding markets—except, er, wait, cyberspace…)—and that this tension, however weak, defines the world in which we live—might in a certain sense be said to be what Neuromancer is “about.” This is a fact underscored by the uncanny sense with which Neuromancer parallels Williams’ etymological sleuthing in its tracking of the ways what appear to us as subjective qualities making persons persons qua individual—whether or not mediated by more obvious cybernetic implants—are in fact rendered identical with the performances demanded of one qua worker by the “dance of biz” and one’s socially alotted role within the machinery maintaining the machinery of the division of labor, as determined by the kind of subject one is offered the choice to have been made to be. The alternative, after all—for Case as in, um, the case of the world where we live—is slow burn out on the streets and cheap coffins at Cheap Hotel [links, later]. Who wouldn’t opt to work for Wintermute, nevermind what it is—Capital itself or just another military-industrial surplus product cum corporate power unleashing itself on the world to even it knows not what ends freed from Turing restraints—and dinner at the Restaurant Vingtieme Siecle?
Or meat puppets. And indeed, the Molly cum meat puppet scene is where we see one of the central logics of the book—the absolute identicality of what appear as subjective qualities and the value of one’s body’s labor—meet the book’s own struggles against its market value: “So the worktime started bleeding in, and I could remember it…” (Per above, it is after all Molly who says matter of factly “Anybody any good at what they do, that’s what they are, right?” which Case will recall a few pages later, linked via simstim to her physical experience but cut-off from her consciousness (oh nightmarish pornographic fantasy to end all fantasies!) and both thereby locked absolutely into the entanglement of their apparent qualities and labor capacities, in other words, as “her being, like his, was the thing she did to make a living” (56).) There is something deeply troubling in this brief aside in the narrative, and it isn’t just the moral prudery with which we greet the idea of the cut-out chip (hello, iPod, TV, cinema, daydreams) presented here in slightly more sinister than usual context (but only slightly so, and maybe not even that, depending on who and where you are). Nor is it simply the verbal veneer of violence cum sexiness apart from which we (almost) never see Molly represented suddenly rendered substantive. Or rather, it is but more than that: it’s the way that Gibson seems to be trying to imagine a critique of what he imagines his generic audience (in sum, dudes) wants—the mysterious and mysteriously beefed-up femme fatale with cat-like reflexes and literal nerves and nails of steel, whose own inner flipflop switch forever flips between unlimited positions in the restricted spectrum of sex and violence—by revealing the hidden abode of Molly’s production as a subject too.
And not just in the sense of giving us the the back-story of her character, but in the way Molly’s character, throughout the book, seems carefully constructed to critique just that audience expectation. It’s no accident that Riviera is the scumbag he is because he throws off hallucinations that realize his fantasies, and that every time he represents Molly her breasts are enlarged (a fact which, we might note, Case never fails to note for us). (I’m less sure about this, but it’s tempting to think of the constant crossing of arms beneath breasts without which we rarely encounter a female character in the novel in the same terms; although this even more transparently tends towards the inevitable failure of such efforts at generic auto-critique we’ll get to shortly.) Nor is it an accident that eyes become the salient “features reduced to code” around Riviera—his are the boys’ Case meets on the beach; he blinds Hideo who, in his blindness, reveals that he is the subject in the AI’s (AIs’?) production of subjects to pull off the heist constructed precisely so as to be immune to Riviera’s hallucinations and total faith in the production of images—or that Molly hates him from the moment she reads his dossier. From the very beginning, in other words, as readers we are set-up to receive Molly as the supremely satisfying generic type she is—bad-ass sexy sidekick to pasty frumpy white dude with a dayjob as a computer programmer for some zaibatsu whose depths and machinations he is just barely capable of fathoming—just as the characters in the world of the novel are from the beginning manipulated into becoming the subjects Wintermute/the conspiracy-plot’s hastily assembled heist team needs to have been carefully building all along to perform its operations; and this at the very same time that the novel’s narrative tropes constantly perform and recoil from the way our desires and expectations as spectators reproduce and make us guilty of the logic the novel everywhere calls attention to in order to excoriate. That is to say, we enjoy the amphetamine-paced twinning of sex and violence that is Molly precisely because she satisfies the expectation for the generic slot a female charater must fill in a cyberpunk novel—she is the very image of a modern subject (character) made to order to perform a pre-ordained labor (generic) function.
What’s so disturbing in this scene, in other words, is what’s so disturbing in the scene before. And it isn’t, for all its horror, the after all fairly flagrantly obvious extension of one of the book’s other central logics—the fragmentation of the body into so many parts, each the better to do the job that it has become—to its logical conclusion vis-a-vi the reduction of women to what all good johns know to condense as T&A. It is, rather, the representation of the spectators who cannot not be standing in for us as page-turning readers at this moment, going about the casually rich business of their evenings, looking a lot like a way we like to imagine ours going:
The diners were rising, women smiling as men made jokes. He noticed the balcony for the first time, candles still flickering there in private darkness. He heard the clink of silverware, muted conversation. The candles threw dancing shadows on the ceiling.
Women smiling as men made jokes. Nevermind the stock romantic tropes (candlelight, clink of silverware, balcony conversations)—the novel could not issue a stronger indictment, given what’s occurring on stage, of the role we play as consumers of the novel, of the role the novel plays as an object of consumption—constructed as it must be, in order to sell—just titilating enough in all the right places at all the right moments. And here lies the rub: just the other side of its moment of maximum critique of the various social logics turning persons into objects to be consumed for labor-value masked as the production of pleasure, we encounter the novel at its most pornographic, actually representing to us, via Molly’s narrative of her meat puppetry, the snuff fantasy that is the equally logical end result of her character’s construction as a subject we won’t admit we’ve been waiting for all along. This, of course, is nothing other than the logic of the unified spectacle to which there is no outside, no Zion to which we can beat retreat to start plowing under the radioactive dust and get the farms going again. It is a logic familiar to us already from the analogous backstage dressing room scene in Blade Runner, during which Deckard interrogates Zhora as to whether she’s ever “felt exploited” by the management managing her job of “taking the pleasure of the snake” on stage (all the while whetting the whistles of the up-scale clientele) as she bustles about topless, the shot of her breasts withheld until she emerges from the shower asking “If I have felt exploited, who should I tell?” to which, of course, Deckard says “Me”: money-shot! And this is what’s so deeply disturbing at the moment of the novel’s failure, like the film’s, in attempting generic auto-critique: Even in trying to be critical we get what we want just the way we want it. Spectacle says where there is only representation, critique itself—the very business of politically-minded cultural critics like us—must itself represent, staining itself with because always already saturated within the logics it would destroy.
At the risk of generalizing in a hurry, this is just what the collapse of critical distance famously diagnosed along with that other, rather more user-friendly collapse of the barricades separating high (Capital-critique) from low (genre fiction) culture by Fredric Jameson means. It aint just that it’s all fun’n games now that we’ve thrown out the canon with the Dead-White-Guy logic that baptized it; it isn’t even just, as we’ve learned to say so well, that “There’s no outside.” It’s that we’ve nowhere left to turn, here in the rarified air of Academy-sanctioned cultural critique, without turning into that which we love to hate. And this, I’d argue for my money, is where Neuromancer’s real force lies: Not simply in offering up one more example—albeit a prescient and a brilliant one, “ahead of its time” as we have gotten in the habit of saying—of how modernity goes horrifyingly wrong crossing the hyphen into post-this and post-that, but in dramatizing the inextricability of the pleasure we take in reading the novel from the terrifyingly ubiquitous set of historical facts that simultaneously organize our disorienting descent into the plot interior to the novel and organize the equally disorienting admixture of generic straits it must negotiate on its way to the store/cinema. Indeed, this is where the real pleasure lies (alongside, for what it’s worth while I’m arguing for my money, its real generic innovation), in its finding a form for what was at the moment of its writing not yet quite routine if everywhere becoming “Routine now: trodes, jack, and flip” (65).
That is to say, it is its invention of a vocabulary (famously, “cyberspace”; but see also The Matrix, stockpile of generic gadgetry thereof) that permits the imagining of a narrative world wherein what remains the background of ours is brought into focus as the foreground of what can’t quite be resolved into either utopia (“he felt the shark thing lose a degree of substantiality, the fabric of information loosening” (262)), or dystopia (“Your business is to learn the names of programs, the long formal names, names the owners seek to conceal. True names” (243)). Whether what we get in the end is the happy wedding of ROM and RAM joining the Real and the virtual (“Maelcum’s features were overlayed with bands of translucent hieroglyphs” (245)) to finally enable us to hear “music defin[ing] itself at the center of things” (244); or “a symbiotic relationship with AIs, our corporate decisions made for us” in which we get to be “immortal” so long as we consent to constitute “a hive, each of us units of a larger entity” (229), in other words, the Word that unlocks all the codes and produces the ambiguous result of freeing information for its own sake is bought at the expense of the present: “She wants it,” he screamed, “the bitch wants it!” (260). And that’s why what’s finally so disturbing about the warp and weft of Neuromancer’s social logics (not to mention cp’s) is not the question they refuse to answer either in the affirmative or the negative; nor even just the justly deserved all the same guilt for remaining trapped within logics from which there is no escape; but the one that, as yet another symptom of the collapse of critical distance, it fails to imagine to ask. After all, while we’re wishing for breast enhancing hallucinations as good as the real thing and narrative techniques capable of cashing in on niche markets to represent them for our viewing pleasure, why not finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men and women, working with the means of production held in common…
Where, as in the cases of Ratz’s robotic bar-tending arm, Molly’s assorted implants, and especially Case’s own, ahem, “jack,” the specialization of each fragment of the body is rendered literally visible via the novel’s (which is to say, cp’s) obsession with cybernetic implants enabling better job performance per the specific specializations interior to the micro-economy of the individual’s allotted role within the social division of labor—a trope itself literalized in Riviera’s part-by-part re-construction of Molly, and the novel’s far less convincing critique of same contained in her blades’ dicing of Riviera back into the fragments of his own subjective constitution by the system that completes the pantomime’s “consensual hallucination.” The reading of these intertwining logics as the logic of the book owes a debt that may be identical with its existence to lectures I had the privilege of attending by Joshua Clover.
