Escape Velocity

by Mark Dery

  even harder, since all the duties of the traditional housewife will still be there in addition to the opportunity (need) to earn a wage via computer networks. . . . Telework is technology’s gift to conservatives, and bodes decidedly ill for feminists.62

  Coming to terms with the essentially cyborgian nature of life in cyberculture is therefore a prerequisite for the empowerment of feminists who dream of a new world disorder. Technologies possess either repressive or liberatory potential, depending on who controls them, implies Haraway; to retain control of their physiologies and their destinies, women must abandon binary oppositions that demonize science and technology and deify nature. She writes,

  Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. . . . Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.63

  Transgressions

  Proceeding from Haraway’s assumption that nature, human and otherwise, has become unnatural, feminist theorists have embarked on investigations of what Anne Balsamo calls “body transgressions”—inquiries into female bodybuilding, tattooing, and other “unnatural” acts that force us to reconsider our ideas about sex, gender, and humanity.64

  “Inquiries” is perhaps too neutral a term here: Theories such as poststructuralism, which is dedicated to the demolition of hierarchies, are sometimes used in the service of agendas that merely invert those hierarchies. In such cases, what began as a refutation of “totalizing” ideologies-grand, unifying theories whose universality is achieved at the expense of intellectual diversity–becomes itself a general-purpose ideology whose facile corrective for all of our social ills is a resistance to fixed boundaries of any sort. “A Cyborg Manifesto,” for example, is maddeningly short on practical politics for working-class borgs and disappointingly long on odes to “partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity”—as if such abstract qualities could mean anything, apart from the noise and dirt of everyday lives.65

  This dynamic is at work in uncritical celebrations of female bodybuilding, gender reassignment, and other body transgressions that give little thought to the problematic worldviews these activities sometimes represent. Such excesses abound in the postmodern theorist Arthur Kroker’s fatuous rhapsodies about “electric flesh” and the “hyper-modern body.” Here is an excerpt from a dizzy paean, coauthored with Marilouise Kroker, to a transsexual named Toni Denise:

  She is not just a guy who warp jumped into a woman’s body by surgical cuts, but the first of all the virtual bodies, that point where Disney World becomes flesh: a double movement involving the endless remaking of sexual identity and an abandonment of the (gendered) past.66

  To the Krokers, Toni Denise is Haraway’s Utopian cyborg concretized, “a creature in a post-gender world.”67 She is the “perfect tran-sexual [sic] woman,” oscillating between her identity as “a man-made woman” and a “man who could say no to cellulite, and yes to silicon [sic] breasts.”68 But as Stuart Ewen and Naomi Wolf have convincingly argued, far too many women are already “man-made” in mind and body. And the Disney World futurism of silicone breasts is lost on women whose bodies and lives bear the scars of Dow Corning implants.

  If we knew more about the day-to-day existence of Toni Denise (we are told only that she “works” the drag queen bars of Tallahassee, Florida), we might be able to read the stories written in those “surgical cuts.” Unfortunately, the psychological, sociological, and economic factors that have made her what she is are lost in cyberbole about “warp jump[s],” “virtual bodies,” and “gender signs turn[ed] inside out”; she has been transformed from an actual being in a social body to a virtual ride in an academic theme park. In his critique of the body language of Krokerian postmodernism, Scott Bukatman writes,

  If the narration of dissolution often seems ecstatic in tone and promise, it also frequently ignores the real-world politics of new bodily technologies. . . . The real bodies at stake are often forgotten while consuming . . . the Krokers.69

  Meat Hell

  –mindbody meatbody deathbody stinking sagging shitting fetus bursting organs hanging buried alive in a coffin of blood oh god not me don’t let it be me got to get out of this bucket of tripe it’s sucking me down throwing me up take it away this pulsing writhing spurting spinning body-go-round, BODY–

  —David Skal70

  The opposition of the dead, heavy flesh (“meat,” in compu-slang) and the ethereal body of information-the discorporated self-is one of cy-berculture’s defining dualisms. The belief that the body is a vestigial appendage no longer needed by late twentieth-century Homo sapiens-Homo Cyber-is not uncommon among obsessive programmers, outlaw hackers, video game junkies, and netsurfers cruising electronic bulletin board systems.

  “I’M . . . TRAPPED IN THIS WORTHLESS LUMP OF MATTER CALLED FLESH!” rants a BBS user whose “pseud” (on-line pseudonym) is MODERNBODYMODERNBODYMODERNBODY. “I WANT TO BE FREE TO CRUISE THE WIRES AND MOLEST PEOPLE’S APPLIANCES. . . . LONG LIVE THE NEW FLESH! FUCK THE OLD FLESH!”71 Giving vent to a body loathing born of a Nietzschean will to power, MODERNBODY quotes the last words of Max Renn in Cronenberg’s Videodrome, just before he mutates into a video hallucination (“long live the new flesh”). Simultaneously, he evokes Cyberjobe in the movie The Lawnmower Man, who announces his transmutation into a digital deity by ringing every phone on the planet in unison (“I want to be free to cruise the wires and molest people’s appliances”).

  MODERNBODY and those like him are well represented in the fandom of cyberpunk SF, a genre that draws its narrative juice from the polarization of cyberspace and the physical world. William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the urtext of cyberpunk, can be read as a lengthy meditation on the mind-body split in cyberculture. “The key to [the protagonist] Case’s personality is [his] estrangement from his body, the meat,” Gibson has noted.72 In a radio interview, the novelist revealed that his 1984 novel was largely an extrapolation of

  some ideas I’d gotten from reading D. H. Lawrence about the dichotomy of mind and body in Judaeo-Christian culture. That’s actually what I was thinking about, and it’s all in there [in] that wool-gathering Case does about the meat and what it needs.73

  Gibson later clarified this remark when he said that what he calls his “‘Lawrentian’ take on things” derives from “Lawrence’s interpretation of the crucifix,” which Gibson sees as “completely appropriate to our society because it’s a literal nailing of the body onto a cross of spirit and [mind].” A confirmed sensualist, Lawrence declared, “My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true.”74

  Case would look decidedly out of place in a Lawrence novel. He is an outlaw hacker for hire, a down-on-his-luck information rustler who had once “worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers who provided the exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data.”75 His name says it all: A hard case out of a noir novel, a head case banged around by rough living, he is the postmodern descendant of T. S. Eliot’s hollow men, all steely exterior, with no psychological interior. His body is a spent shell, his mind elsewhere-lost in memories of his exploits as a hotshot console cowboy, when he used a brain socket to physically connect his nervous system to a “custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness” into the neon-streaked matrix, where “data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system” appear as towers, cubes, and pyramids in a virtual reality version of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City.76

  For Case, the flesh is literally toxic: In a moment of weakness, he had pilfered something from his employers and in retribution they had “damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin,” rendering him physically unable to “jack” into cyberspace:

  For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars h
e’d frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.77

  Salvation comes in the form of a mysterious outfit that recruits Case to crack the security programs of an enigmatic AI (artificial intelligence) for reasons unknown even to the operative who contacts him, a prosthetically enhanced cybermoll named Molly Millions. The outfit’s surgeons restore Case to cyberspace compatibility, guaranteeing his cooperation with a walking-time-bomb scheme familiar from techno-thrillers. If the caper is successful, the slowly dissolving toxin sacs they have planted in his arteries will be removed, enabling Case to roam the matrix freely; should he fail, they will be left to melt, returning him to his fallen state.

  Case exemplifies what Andrew Ross has called the “technocoloniz-ation of the body.” Bodies, like every square foot of public space and the natural environment, are corporate property in Neuromancer’s near-future dystopia. A smooth operator’s eyes, “vatgrown” like the genetically engineered eyes of Blade Runner’s replicants, say nothing about their owner and everything about brand-name affiliation: “[S]ea-green Nikon transplants” in a “tanned and forgettable mask,” they are the furthest thing from windows of the soul.78 Salaryman serfs in Japanese corporate fiefdoms are tattooed with their company logos and “above a certain level [are] implanted with advanced microprocessors that [monitor] mutagen levels in the bloodstream” to ensure mutation-free employees (the futuristic equivalent of drug-free employees).79 Meanwhile, in the upper echelons of the zaibatsus–the all-powerful multinationals that are themselves “vast single organisms, their DNA coded in silicon”—the captains of industry have remade themselves through the “gradual and willing accommodation of the machine, the system, the parent organism” into “both more and less than people.”80 Even Molly, the former “meat puppet” (prostitute) who has bootstrapped herself into the lucrative profession of “street samurai” with the aid of costly surgery, is simply a meat puppet of another sort. Although she exudes the coiled power of the high-tech assassin (her artificial nails conceal scalpel blades, her eye sockets are sealed with mirrored lenses that provide night vision and a constant stream of data), she is still hired muscle, a foot soldier whose body will always be someone else’s weapon.

  This is only nominally science fiction: Gibson carries current trends in corporate culture (mandatory drug testing, health-care-related hiring policies that bar employees from smoking on the job or off, the use of cosmetic surgery by “unemployed males ‘competing with younger people’” to gain a competitive edge in the job market) to their ultimate conclusion.81 Even Neuromancer’s posthuman zaibatsu kingpins have one foot in the present. The Japanophile W. David Kubiak mentions an Osaka executive who, “before destroying evidence and himself to thwart an investigation of his firm,” wrote, “‘I am but one. The kaisha [corporation] is many. My life is transient. The kaisha is forever!’”82

  The present-day gulf between the information-rich yuppie elite and the swelling ranks of the minimum-wage service industry or the criminalized poor is writ large in Neuromancer’s body politics. Case inhabits a future-tense version of the two-tiered, neo-Dickensian America of the eighties and nineties, “an age of affordable beauty” where money can buy a “blandly handsome blend of pop faces” or “shoulders bulging with grafted muscle”; haute couture modifications (flesh “tattooed with a luminous digital display wired to a subcutaneous chip”); and even practical immortality: A 135-year-old wheeler-dealer named Julius Deane, “his metabolism assiduously warped by a weekly fortune in serums and hormones,” has his DNA code reset each year by genetic surgeons.83 The underclasses, by contrast, undergo anatomical makeovers to improve their salability in the marketplace or as rites of passage into the punk gangs that are the urban jungle’s postmodern primitives.

  Neuromancer is permeated by a fatalistic resignation to the futility of any attempt at a political power shift: Case and Molly are utterly apolitical, aspiring to the peak of their professions-the glamorized corporate soldier of fortune-and nothing more. Although as quasi-autonomous agents they are arguably better off than the undifferentiated megalopolitan masses (“a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies of need and gratification”), their fleeting tastes of freedom and power consist, ironically, of bodily sensation.84 Case’s disembodied POV banks and rolls through cyberspace like that of a top-gun pilot (“Headlong motion through walls of emerald green, milky jade, the sensation of speed beyond anything he’d known before”).85 Molly stalks the urban combat zone with predatory speed and off-kilter grace (“She seemed continually on the verge of colliding with someone, but people melted out of her way, stepped sideways, made room”).86 Kinesis replaces political action.

  But the “horizonless” infinity of the matrix and the endless iterations of the Sprawl-the cityscape that stretches from Boston to Atlanta-offer only the illusion of unrestricted movement: in a world where nation-states have been swallowed up by multinationals and the imaginary geography of the matrix is dominated by icons of corporate capital, the rights of the individual are bounded on every side. In Neuromancer, writes Ross,

  the decisions that count are always being made elsewhere, in circumstances well beyond the control of interested stiffs like Case or. . . Molly. . . . Despite the technical education in the workings of power that they undergo, such people are usually even less in control of their futures at the end of a Gibson adventure than they were to begin with.87

  Fusing stoic resignation, existential ennui, and future shock in the flattened affect that characterizes Homo Cyber, Molly shrugs off the directionless violence of her pinball existence with the throwaway line, “I guess it’s just the way I’m wired.”88 Like the autistic astronauts in Stanley Kubrick’s 2007: A Space Odyssey or Deckard, the deadpan, monotoned flatfoot in Blade Runner, the borged and morphed humans in Neuromancer are, as Donna Haraway put it, “frighteningly inert”; their machines-especially the self-aware AI, Wintermute, who is behind the novel’s machinations-are “disturbingly lively.” Ultimately, it is the machines who command their own destinies in the truest sense. The consciousness that is Wintermute attains a sort of godhood when it fuses with an AI called Neuromancer and becomes one with the All-in this case, the matrix.

  Case’s rewards, at the end of the novel, are a fresh pancreas-the better, presumably, to indulge in the amphetamines that seem to be his greatest carnal pleasure-and a new cyberspace deck that offers instant (if illusory and transitory) escape from meat hell. If religion is the opiate of the masses and Marxism the opiate of the intellectual, then cyberspace is the opiate of the twenty-first-century schizoid man, polarized between mind and body.

  Original Syn

  This equation serves as the springboard for Pat Cadigan’s Synners, a cyberpunk novel about soulless electronic transcendence, among other things. For Visual Mark, a virtuoso virtual reality synthesizer, or “synner,” the body is “meat-jail,” as it is for Case. Opting for a brain socket, he plugs his mind directly into the worldwide computer network (“the System”), which enables Mark to immerse his audience in his full-sensory, rock-video dreams. His baptism into unfettered bodilessness sounds unmistakably like being born again: “The sense of having so much space to spread out in-a baby emerging from the womb after nine months must have felt the same thing, he thought.”89

  Mark soon decides to remain permanently plugged in, forgoing the bother of removing his brain-wires to eat or use the bathroom. He slows his metabolism to a near halt in a stunt characterized by a doctor as fakirlike, although his own description of it-“I took the video mainline”—is closer to the Mark. Curled up in a fetal ball, guts locked, he calls to mind William Burroughs’s self-portrait in Naked Lunch as a mainlining heroin addict: “I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of terminal addiction.”90

  Like Burroughs’s “users” (a term shared by smack sh
ooters and Mac owners), Mark–a terminal addict in the literal sense–purchases otherworldly omnipotence at the price of total impotence in the meatworld. In fulfillment of MODERNBODY’s fantasy, he “cruise[s] the wires and molest[s] people’s appliances” with impunity: Surveillance cameras (ubiquitous in the twenty-first-century L.A. of the novel) become his eyes, computer console speakers his voice boxes, the measureless vastness of global cyberspace his dominion. Meanwhile, perversely, plaintively, his body yearns for his return:

  [T]he meat missed him. It sent out feeble signals, dumb animal semaphore: come back to the nest, little Sheba. . . . If he could have given the disconnect command from this side, it would be over in a twinkling. So long, meat, write if you get work. But he couldn’t access any of the commands from where he was. The commands only took orders from the meat, and that poor old meat wasn’t about to cut him loose. . . . If he could just get someone . . . to come in and yank the connections out of his skull.91

  Ultimately, Mark’s prayers are answered by the cerebral stroke he suffers while jacked-in-one of the “intercranial meltdowns” that are a calculated risk among “socket people.” The power surge transfers his consciousness to the net, enabling him to abandon the despised meat at last. When his old flame and fellow synner Gina peers into his body’s dying eyes, watching his consciousness drain away, the computer-bound Mark stares back with what is already a partly artificial intelligence. In a secular gloss on the transcendentalist vision of the self united with the Supreme Mind, he has become one with the billions of bytes stored in the System: