-Caveat Lector-
Current events are making many of the insights and attitudes of the
Cyberpunk movement of the early 90s seem as prophetic now as they seemed
then. Here is an article I published (more an editing job than anything,
really, excising such phrases as "Prigoninic cathexis") in 1990.
Wade through the pretentious language and perhaps you'll see what I mean...
Chris
*******
CYBERPUNKTUATIONS
The following is composed of extracts from an article by MARK DOWNHAM on
Cyberpunk which appeared in London's VAGUE magazine . A disorganized
mixture of clear apercus and tortuous prolixity, it lends itself to
rearrangement and bowdlerisation. Here are a few of his more interesting
statements.
Chris
********************
OF CYBERPUNK FICTION
>>> Cyberpunk began as a loose generational nexus of writers swapping
letters, manuscripts, ideas.
>>> Cyberpunk crunches together neuro- and physical chemistry, genetic
biology, structural linguistics, cybernetics, bio-technology and cyborg
engineering into a fantastic series of fictions.
>>> There is no typical cyberpunk, although the general project does have
central themes, tenets, and topics. I'd say it is an eighties milieu -
nineties, post-2001 would equally do - it is a product of the interzone
between hard technologies/sciences and nihilo-romanticist surrealism. Its
precursors are Michael Moorcock, Langdon Jones, Harlan Ellison, Samuel
Delaney, Norman Spinrad, Brian Aldiss, John Varley, Philip. K. Dick,
Alfred Bester, the strange pulsing entropies of Thomas Pynchon, the
panic-theory of Baudrillard, the Situationist International, Larry Niven,
Roger Zelaney, H.G. Wells, the "programming phenomena" control-data buzz
of Guy Debord, and the seminal genius of J.G. Ballard.
>>> Cyberpunk was essentially initiated by J.G.Ballard in The Atrocity
Exhibition. Ballard details the collapse of a landscape through which lines
of deterritorialisation have proceeded to absolute tolerances, fractal
zones in which sheer contiguity replaces syntax...
>>> Ballard's work is an attempt to grasp the contradiction of
representational analysis of the future directly. These inundated
near-futures transform our own present into the recognisably determinate
past of something yet to come.
>>> Cyberpunk, as Philip K. Dick's novels and the films of David Cronenberg,
deals with a near-future world congested with the coming technologies of
everyday life and pushes the thresholds to the point where the psychoses
rip through and the Metrophage gets ugly...
>>> Thomas Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow explores the obliteration of
outdated territories, languages, affiliations, of any boundaries or forms
that have impeded the installation of cybernetics--the theory of messages
and their control is here intermeshed with the hegemony of what Pynchon
calls the mega-cartel, the zaibatsu, the multinationals.
>>> Cyberpunk is the literary incarnation of this colliding of fictional
worlds, between the high-octane five star fantasies of the multi-nationals
and the junk-cult feral scams of the street guerillas living off their
products, but fantastically mutating them.
>>> Certain central themes spring up repeatedly in Cyberpunk. Firstly, the
theme of body invasion, the target vehicle: prosthetic limbs, implanted
circuitry, cosmetic surgery, cyberspace, DNA, genetic alteration. Secondly,
the real hard edge of mind invasion: brain-computer interfaces, artificial
intelligences, neuro-chemistry--all the techniques radically redefining the
nature of humanity, the nature of the self.
>>> Cyberpunk is gorged with detail-it uses carefully constructed intricacy
and readily extrapolates into daily life. It goes for crammed or condensed
prose: rapid, dizzying, skidding bursts of novel information, sensory
overload, a special brilliant feeling that makes you crisp at the
edges--submerging the reader in the equivalent of a titanic blast of
information, great gulfs of linguistic intensity as the vasopressin hits.
>>> Cyberpunk has a strong garage-band aesthetic. It grapples with the raw
core of the near future--its myths, its ideas, its coming practices. It is
a pop culture which is theorizing itself into a more cohesive and
self-determined existence.
Of BLADE RUNNER
>>> Blade Runner is really about Roy Batty/Rutger Hauer/method actors in
general.
>>> The Cyberpunk must allow him/herself to be swept into the multiple
currents that cross the city and beckon at random, to clear a path through
a deliberately confused atmosphere of this fictive metropolis and
distinguish the real from the irreal even in the most indiscernible cases.
>>>Roy's murder of Tyrell is the most meaningful statement in the whole of
Cyberpunk : "It is a fearful thing to meet your maker."
Of the Media-Induced Experience: "THE SPECTACLE":
>>> For Baudrillard, television--chief purveyor of the Spectacle--is a
paradigm of failed escape combinations, of implosive effects, of remembered
codes that make you forget yourself to pieces; the Videodrome collapses any
distinction between receiver and sender, between the medium and the real.
Baudrillard's subject is locked into an uninterrupted interface with the
video screen in a universe of fascination.
>>> Through the 1960's television collaborated with the automobile in the
virtual annexation of all spaces. The television screen and car windshield
reconciled visual experience with the velocities and discontinuities of the
marketplace. As windows they seemed to open onto extensive space in which
autonomous movement might be possible-instead they have become apertures
that frame our transit through streams of disjunct objects and affects,
across disintegrating and hyper-abundant surfaces.
>>> The pervasive imagery of programming phenomena are now enveloping us-a
sensorily expanded data-chatter, image-flick world of digitized life and
languages mediated by video display screens--the formation of a discipline
shifting inevitably towards cyberspace.
>>>In Cyberpunk whatever drifts across the retinal socket, the screen, or
the home computer is part of the same homogeneity.
>>> Now the screens of the home computer and word processor have succeeded
the automobile as core products in an ongoing relocation and
hierarchisation of productive forces.
>>> Cyberpunk engages the whole notion of the Spectacle: the Videodrome,
the satellite media net, the multinational corporation--they are the stuff
of Cyberpunk and continually reappear in its fictions.
OF THE CONVERGENCE OF DISCIPLINES
>>> The differentials between the sciences and the humanities; the gulf
between literary culture, the formal structures of art and politics and the
culture of science, the world of engineering and industry--it's all
converging. The advances of science are deeply radical--potentially
revolutionary even, if utilised appropriately.
>>> Cyberpunk comes from the realm where the computer hacker has locked
into the post-art political culture and its discontents. Cyberpunk explores
interzones, especially those between the multi-nationals and street
cultures; the street always finds its own use for things, call them
technological artifacts or the virtual technologies of the Videodrome.
>>> In Cyberpunk, geographical frontiers no longer exist, and in their place
are being manufactured vast micro-electronic territories.
>>>The convergence of television, telecommunications, computers is creating
an ideology of technological determinism, and prefabricated futures which
mirror the present Spectacle.
>>>Cyberpunk both involves itself in and carries out a radical critique of
the processes involved, with a view to transformatory change.
OF SYSTEMS AND CYBERNETICS
>>> Cyberpunk is a pop-cultural fascination with cybernetic systems,
including a vast array of machines and apparatuses that exhibit
computational power. Such systems contain a dynamic, even if wasted,
quotient of intelligence. Telephone networks, communication satellites,
radar systems, programmable laser video-discs, robots, biogenetically
engineered cells, rocket guidance systems, videotex networks--all exhibit a
capacity to process information and execute actions. They are all
cybernetic in that they are self-regulating mechanisms or systems within
predefined limits and in relation to predefined tasks.
>>> Cyberpunk uses the computer and AI to symbolise the entire spectrum of
networks, systems, and devices that exemplify cybernetic or automated but
intelligent behaviour.
>>> There are no truly entropic or closed systems in Cyberpunk as there are
in Situationist theory; all processes impinge upon and are effected by
other processes in some way. Systems feed energy into each other. Feedback
exists between systems that are not in themselves closed but contingent
upon other systems. A system is closed when entropy, virtual technologies,
the Videodrome, gas or electricity bills dominate the feedback process, that
is when the measure of energy lost is greater than the measure of energy
gained. A candle is a good example.
>>> There is no more opposition in the Cyberpunk territory between the
abstractions of money and the apparent materiality of commodities; money and
what it can buy are now fundamentally of the same substance.
>>> Cyberpunks not only understand that cybernetics is a conveyance of
information theory and cognitive psychology, but that these are the
dominant phenomenologies of a virtual society. For instance, the problem of
tracking anti-aircraft weapons against extremely fast targets has led to
research into, and the development of, intelligent mechanisms capable of
predicting future states faster than the unaugmented human brain can do.
Never strike where your opponent is, but at the space they will occupy in
the future.
Of the Media-Induced Experience: "THE SPECTACLE":
>>> For Baudrillard, television-chief purveyor of the Spectacle-is a
paradigm of failed escape combinations, of implosive effects, of remembered
codes information theory and cognitive psychology, but that these are the
dominant phenomenologies of a virtual society. For instance, the problem of
tracking anti-aircraft weapons against extremely fast targets has led to
research into, and the development of, intelligent mechanisms capable of
predicting future states faster than the unaugmented human brain can do.
Never strike where your opponent is, but at the space they will occupy in
the future.
>>> Cyberpunk makes clear that information is a name for the content of what
is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it and make our
adjustments felt upon it-to live effectively is to live with adequate
information, the fictions of Cyberpunk.
>>>Cyberspace as described by William Gibson in Neuromancer was prefigured
in Nicola Tesla's 1901 plan for a world system of totally interconnected,
planetary communications. He believed he could engineer a globe unified by
the universal regulation of time and fully traversed by flows of language,
images, and money-all reduced to an undifferentiated flux of electrical
energy.
OF THE AIMS OF CYBERPUNK
>>> Cyberpunk is a radical interrogation of the virtual technologies at work
in contemporary society.
>>>Situationist Cyberpunk flicks aside the general form of Marxist
analysis...and suggests that the classical definition of productive forces
is too restrictive and expands the analysis further into the whole murky
field of significations, transmissions, communications, materialisations,
reifications- programming phenomena.
>>> Cyberpunk attempts to de-mythologize the established cultural codes, in
order to decipher concealed strategies of domination, desire, will, power,
and the will to power. Cue dry ice, smoke, Leni Riefenstahl.
>>> Cyberpunk is hammering away against a system of appearances that is so
thoroughly of the social/material that its operations are indistinguishable
from those of the entire hegemonic order. They are the hegemonic order.
>>> One of the key roles of the expanding electronic grid is to articulate a
new social and geopolitical stratification based on immediacy of access to
data. The aim of Cyberpunk is to create a state of temporary gridlock in
order to insert certain secrets of its own.
>>> For Cyberpunk, the computer is much more than an object; it is also an
icon and a metaphor that suggests new ways of thinking about ourselves and
our new environments, new ways of constructing images of what it means to
be human.
>>> Cyberpunk is potentially a a scrambled mass of referential fictions
stolen from the near future in search of an operational strategy for the
living of life, which in itself is increasingly experiencing slippage into
the virtual technologies of the near future.
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