Neuromancer was quite something. It took me about 90-100 pages to understand what was going on in the book, but once I passed that point and was able to abandon all the preconceptions and rules that I had previously attributed to the world, it made more sense. I felt reading Gibson’s work allowed me to picture cyberspace, “the matrix”, information and existence without matter, etc. in a new way. Old rules of vision and gravity didn’t exist and I could formulate an alternative picture of how the world is organized. I can understand why Hayles states “William Gibson’s vision of cyberspace had a considerable effect on the development of three-dimensional virtual reality imaging software” (21). It is interesting how the connections between the pursuits/results of science and those of literature form a circuit where each in influenced by the other and influences it in return.
I am finding Hayles really engaging to read and very helpful as well. By looking at the body of work, or movement of posthumanism in general Hayles provides a useful background with which to approach the texts we are reading, both theory and fiction. I was also really intrigued by her model for the different stages of cybernetics. Her reflections on replication and innovation was clearly defined and laid out for this specific case but also provides an interesting tool for looking at changes over time and their overlapping compartments and often diverging goals.
I was flipping through book called Digital Art by Christiane Paul, and was struck that many of the authors and ideas we have been reading were referenced. A number of works stood out to me as particularly relevant to our class. One artist, Kazuhiko Hachiya, creates interactive systems where the viewer/participant is forced out of their normal state of being. For example, in Inter Discommunication Machine, two people wear headsets that project both the auditory and visual stimulus that they each experience into the others headset. This added device allows a person to step into another field of perception without being able to alter it. The boundaries between the people are being broken by the overlapping visions.
Hayles articulates what I think is the most convincing conception of the post-human condition that we have come across so far. We have been talking a lot about ‘distributing the self’ throughout dynamic networks, but she goes a step further; it is just as reasonable to posit our existence as beings comprised of a number of varied selves acting together to constitute a human actor. Hayles writes “each person who thinks this way begins to envision himself or herself as a posthuman collectivity, an “I” transformed into the “we” of autonomous agents operating together to make a self” (p.6)... instead of a 'distributed self' its 'consolidated selves', eh?
She then introduces the concept of ‘feedback loops’ to deal with her thoughts on information flow. This is a very profound mechanism that is used throughout the physical world to maintain information entropy. Indeed, the modern biological consensus on the nature of terrestrial life is a model of constant flux—almost every bit of genetic information (and I mean ‘bit’ in the informational sense) serves in some way to regulate the expression of the entire genome, making the living cell an environment wherein constant, elaborate feedback loops maintain the status quo.
She goes into an involved discussion on the nature of informational freedom, and the paradoxical ‘fact’ that to be freely accessible information must be encoded in physical media. This is certainly true of all virtual information—anything one finds on the internet seems to be completely free from physical restrictions, yet this is only made possible due to some small area of some vast server farm being devoted forever to recording and replicating that piece of data.
However, this model for physical storage media fails when analyzing the human (or indeed merely biological) mind. Whereas machine intelligence algorithms are preset, optimized and discretely either ‘on’ or ‘off’, the human neural decision matrix is largely probabilistic. That is to say, a piece of information is maintained through a long-standing feedback loop through several delicately configured neuron networks. As long as the relationship of triggering impulses along this chain of devoted cells is perpetuated and the cycle is allowed to continue, the sensory input or synthesized decision can be accessed for inspection as a memory. What is significant here is that at no point is the information hard-coded into any medium. If you were to disassemble a computer and reassemble the pieces, the memory would remain more or less intact despite having been removed from the consensus device. If you were to remove any particular neuron, or shut down electrical activity in the brain, then no matter how the injury was remedied the desired information could not be reproduced. With this in mind, perhaps her discussion of the nature of information bears some further examination.
side note-- If you haven't been to the MoMA's 'Design and the Elastic Mind' exhibit yet, you all should absolutely go. I went a couple days ago, and I'm definitely going back soon.
I agree with Ryder-- Hayles seems evolutionary in describing the internet as a consolidated self distribution. She has a sort of Hegelian "Spirit" view of the modern conception of body consciousness. She's clear in asserting that we understand our bodies as machines, our intelligence as information. I'm interested in how she looks at "embodiment" and consciousness, as well as in the distinction made between the mind and body. She lays out a really intriguing juxtaposition between the informational circuits of the postmodern, computer-like mind and the biological organism or human body.
Again, like Hegel, Hayles is largely concerned with consciousness as perception and subjectivity. But she makes claims about a kind of collective subjectivity in the postmodern world of virtual machine bodies. As usual, I find myself engaging in the question of WHY we maintain the subjectivity that we do. Why does cyberspace seem more connected to our psychological consciousness than our physical bodies? Why is it that we've appropriated so many limitations to our bodies, only to use machines to overcome the limitations? Why does the object have so much agency; why is the physical self lost? What is comfortable about being out of touch with physicality?
I really liked Hayles' discussion in chapter two about pattern and randomness, and comparing humans to texts. She writes, "Because they have bodies, books and humans have something to lose if they are regarded solely as informational patterns, namely the resistant materiality that has traditionally marked the durable inscription of books no less than it has marked our experiences of living as embodied creatures" (29). It is interesting that humans (and books) fear being reduced to an informational pattern, because, as she points out later, mutation is impossible without a pattern to disrupt. This fear works to remind us of Hayles' final warning in the chapter, "as we rush to explore the new vistas that cyberspace has made available for colonization, let us remember the fragility of a material world that cannot be replaced" (49). It is not that the human body must necessarily be privileged, but that we remember that even the idea of the "brain in a jar" relies on the materiality of the brain and of the jar. A reminder of the material world in the midst of a discussion of information, codes, and pattern/randomness was comforting and quite welcome in my opinion.
I'm with sarah on Neuromancer - it took me a while before I gave in and just read the story without trying too hard to fit the events and plot into my own understanding of what is possible. It was like Gibson was writing in a dialect foreign to me, and I had to observe the use of different words and concepts before I understood what they meant. One of the big themes in the novel seems to be the embodiment or disembodiment of what is "human" - an idea which Hayles addresses in the first chapter of How We Became Postmodern. Another big theme is reflexivity, which can be seen in the interrelations and overlapping between Armitage, the Finn, Wintermute, Neuromancer, Riviera, et al. I think I would have understood more of Neuromancer and more of its relevance had I read the Hayles chapters first, and better understood these concepts conceptually before seeing them illustrated in Chiba City and elsewhere. So Hayles was very elucidating and helped me make some connections between themes in posthumanism and the plot of Neuromancer.
One such connection is the idea of the mind as text, an idea discussed by both Gibson and Hayles. On p. 170, the Finn tells Case, "Minds aren't read...I can access your memory, but that's not the same as your mind." In other words, the Finn is expressing the idea that Hayles illustrates with DNA/genetic expression and the body of a book / the book's message. "The entanglement of signal and materiality in bodies and books," Hayles explains, "confers on them a parallel doubleness" (29). Gibson explores this doubleness - actually, in his world, a more than doubleness - of identities in the ambiguous realities of the characters in his novel.
"Doubleness" also relates to another theme that I would like to investigate: the ideas of "death" and "life" in Neuromancer. These are hugely present in the novel - the Finn and other personalities snarkily reminding Case that they are dead, or not alive; Linda Lee dying and existing again; the whole trope about living in coffins... In a sense, the idea of posthumanism is by definition a transgression of the life/death boundary - and Gibson seems to be expressing that.
I found that reading Neuromancer helped me understand some of Hayles' concepts that at first seemed very abstract. In the opening of Chapter 1 Hayles discusses how she was alarmed at the commonly accepted notion "that mind could be separated from body." I didn't share Hayles' immediate reaction, and it was hard for me to think about the concept of embodiment until I read the scene in Neuromancer when Case first "simstims" into Molly's body. The narrator explains, "For a few frightened seconds he fought helplessly to control her body. Then he willed himself into passivity, became the passenger behind her eyes." This passage helped illustrate the irrevocable connection between mind and body that Hayles discusses by conveying the frightening and disorienting effect for Case when his mind is separated from his own body. It was also interesting how in the book Case, who derives joy from traipsing around cyberspace without his body, is ultimately controlled by Armitage because there are enzymes implanted inside of him. I think this highlights some of the contradictions inherent in the mind/body relationship because Case both wants to be free of his body, yet he can't go and do his own thing in cyberspace because of poison within his own body - the predicament is illustrative of why he wants to exist without his body and also why he can't. This was an interesting plot point because it plays on the helplessness of humans due to never really being able to know what is inside of our bodies (and in Neuromance even Finn can't tell with a scan.)
I was really intrigued by Hayles’ emphasis on the physical as a necessary medium for information. The idea of the mind as an autonomous unit that can thrive on its own is taken down a notch. Even in a virtual ping pong game, Hayles notes that one still needs to wear the wired glove in order to partake in the tournament. The mediator/container is just as important as the object it carries—if not more so, for without it, the entire object could be rendered useless.
In accordance with much of our classroom discussion, Hayles focused on the give and take of object interaction. I really enjoyed her discussion of someone sneaking into a building by fooling the machine with a code that insinuates they’re someone else. But aren’t they? They’re themselves, plus the code. As Hayles explains, “We become the codes we punch” (46). It is not you who is the perceived threat to the system, rather it is the you-code, a new hybrid, that is now a threat.
On page 48, Hayles explains how new media can affect perceptions of old media, carving and shaping their niches. (Her example is books). As technology progresses (inevitably, Hayles argues), we cannot help but judge our old world by the new standards. “How did we ever live without cell phones?” comes to mind. ~Samantha
Neuromancer had me captivated from the offset, even if it did send me for a loop every so often. It was easier to read once I accepted not the irrelevance of possibility/impossibility, but the irrelevance of technical jargon and just started enjoying the integration of typified human body and Gibson's imagined environment. Particularly loved getting into Straylight and the T-A amalgamate, and thus also Wintermute, and Neuromancer - and I suppose that encompasses everything, but it was just FUN when Gibson gave up being lowkey about his hybrids and started expounding on them through the mouths of characters.
A bit in the beginning of Hayles helped clarify something I hadn't realized was bugging me, until she said it - liberal humanism is about [unification through] cognition surpassing the body, where posthumanism emphasizes [unification through] cognition as necessarily enacted through the body. This theme is rife in Neuromancer as well, with the cowboy derision of 'meat'-state and the objectification of form and sex. But it wasn't objectification at all you realize eventually, it's a synthesis of the world changing and sucking the body into its new form.
Favorite part in the beginning of Hayles was definitely about 'I'/'we', distributive/collective. It seems to me that in every situation we encounter, the 'I' must be redefined and pinned down, before proceeding. Where the self, the identity, the greater set of me and it, us and them, is to be defined, is an almost... inevitable aspect of our daily interactions. Thus 'I' is already fluid in purely linguistic terms, before stepping it up to the distribution/multiplicity of self. So when defining the multiple 'I's of a distributed self, unifying under a single 'I' of the hybridized self, what is being defined against? What is excluded?
Neuromancer was awesome! Definitely 'terrifying and compelling' earlier described. Although I still can’t say I understood half of the technology on first read, there was definitely a real moment of reward when all the foreign vocabulary finally fell into place (for me, this was not till ¾ of the way through). It was also full of themes we’ve been discussing in class—tensions which technology brings between slavery and liberation, alienation and new intimacies. Technology like Molly’s mirror-shaded eyes created distance, while the ‘simstim’ (simulated stimulation) device allows more intimacy than I’m personally comfortable with. I was continuously struck by how eerily close to our world it seemed.
In recounting the logic in which human have become ‘bodiless information,’ Hayles recalls Haraway’s ‘control strategies:’ “This separation allows the construction of a hierarchy in which information is given the dominant position and materiality runs a distant second.” (12) This statement rings especially true while reading these materials in a University setting in the wake of midterms and scholarship deadlines. Generally speaking (and with a few notable exceptions), we’re as students, expected to conform to ideals of efficiency. In most cases, our products (timely assignments, readings and test scores) are held high above the actualities of embodied experience (when fatigue sets in and our brains refuse to cooperate!)
What I love about Hayles and Haraway, is that we are given hope. Hayles traces what has been taken apart/erased, in order to reassemble later. She writes, “This book is a ‘rememory’ in the sense of Toni Morrison’s beloved: putting back together parts that have lost touch with one another...” It seems this might have been Gibson’s intent as well. Hayles move to rebuild interestingly mirrors Case’s path to reembodiment by the end of the novel (he gets his body back—well, at least a new liver). Gibson’s use of the symphony’s CODA in his conclusion in a reinforces this dynamic of rebuilding. At the same time as Hayles notes, Gibsons novel, being highly influential to 3-D computing, also helped perpetuate the same dynamics many of us are trying to escape.
Yet like Haraway, Hayles promptly makes us aware that our situation is more complex. We cannot simply shift our perceptions to be regain our lost embodiment. How we engage with the posthuman world is not only determined with how we think of ourselves, but also by our relations of collective sum of how others view themselves. But, by recognizing our position within greater power networks, we seem to be able to regain some agency by conceiving of ourselves as cyborgs. Since we were never quite ‘whole’ to begin with, we rebuild using what we can (usually fragments and recycled, reappropriated parts).
The two interesting things that I thought about after reading Neuromancer were:
1. Thinking about the book as relating to the concept of reflexivity, which Hayles claims is "the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates." (8) If Gibson published his work at a time that preceded Cyborgian theory and the concept of the hybrid, then can it be considered the "system within a system" of Haraway/Latour-ian thought? If so, to what extent?
2. Assuming that the context of when Neuromancer was written was irrelevant (this is clearly a dangerous move), the fact that the text has such a unique lexicon is fitting to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on language and culture, which claims that language shapes the way that people within a culture perceive and apprehend the world. Gibson succeeds in creating a language in Neuromancer which reflects a culture and society that is outside of our own; either that or his text provides the platform for a society which may already exist but only seems out of reach because of our skewed "cultural perspective".
10 comments:
Neuromancer was quite something. It took me about 90-100 pages to understand what was going on in the book, but once I passed that point and was able to abandon all the preconceptions and rules that I had previously attributed to the world, it made more sense. I felt reading Gibson’s work allowed me to picture cyberspace, “the matrix”, information and existence without matter, etc. in a new way. Old rules of vision and gravity didn’t exist and I could formulate an alternative picture of how the world is organized. I can understand why Hayles states “William Gibson’s vision of cyberspace had a considerable effect on the development of three-dimensional virtual reality imaging software” (21). It is interesting how the connections between the pursuits/results of science and those of literature form a circuit where each in influenced by the other and influences it in return.
I am finding Hayles really engaging to read and very helpful as well. By looking at the body of work, or movement of posthumanism in general Hayles provides a useful background with which to approach the texts we are reading, both theory and fiction. I was also really intrigued by her model for the different stages of cybernetics. Her reflections on replication and innovation was clearly defined and laid out for this specific case but also provides an interesting tool for looking at changes over time and their overlapping compartments and often diverging goals.
I was flipping through book called Digital Art by Christiane Paul, and was struck that many of the authors and ideas we have been reading were referenced. A number of works stood out to me as particularly relevant to our class. One artist, Kazuhiko Hachiya, creates interactive systems where the viewer/participant is forced out of their normal state of being. For example, in Inter Discommunication Machine, two people wear headsets that project both the auditory and visual stimulus that they each experience into the others headset. This added device allows a person to step into another field of perception without being able to alter it. The boundaries between the people are being broken by the overlapping visions.
Hayles articulates what I think is the most convincing conception of the post-human condition that we have come across so far. We have been talking a lot about ‘distributing the self’ throughout dynamic networks, but she goes a step further; it is just as reasonable to posit our existence as beings comprised of a number of varied selves acting together to constitute a human actor. Hayles writes “each person who thinks this way begins to envision himself or herself as a posthuman collectivity, an “I” transformed into the “we” of autonomous agents operating together to make a self” (p.6)... instead of a 'distributed self' its 'consolidated selves', eh?
She then introduces the concept of ‘feedback loops’ to deal with her thoughts on information flow. This is a very profound mechanism that is used throughout the physical world to maintain information entropy. Indeed, the modern biological consensus on the nature of terrestrial life is a model of constant flux—almost every bit of genetic information (and I mean ‘bit’ in the informational sense) serves in some way to regulate the expression of the entire genome, making the living cell an environment wherein constant, elaborate feedback loops maintain the status quo.
She goes into an involved discussion on the nature of informational freedom, and the paradoxical ‘fact’ that to be freely accessible information must be encoded in physical media. This is certainly true of all virtual information—anything one finds on the internet seems to be completely free from physical restrictions, yet this is only made possible due to some small area of some vast server farm being devoted forever to recording and replicating that piece of data.
However, this model for physical storage media fails when analyzing the human (or indeed merely biological) mind. Whereas machine intelligence algorithms are preset, optimized and discretely either ‘on’ or ‘off’, the human neural decision matrix is largely probabilistic. That is to say, a piece of information is maintained through a long-standing feedback loop through several delicately configured neuron networks. As long as the relationship of triggering impulses along this chain of devoted cells is perpetuated and the cycle is allowed to continue, the sensory input or synthesized decision can be accessed for inspection as a memory. What is significant here is that at no point is the information hard-coded into any medium. If you were to disassemble a computer and reassemble the pieces, the memory would remain more or less intact despite having been removed from the consensus device. If you were to remove any particular neuron, or shut down electrical activity in the brain, then no matter how the injury was remedied the desired information could not be reproduced. With this in mind, perhaps her discussion of the nature of information bears some further examination.
side note-- If you haven't been to the MoMA's 'Design and the Elastic Mind' exhibit yet, you all should absolutely go. I went a couple days ago, and I'm definitely going back soon.
I agree with Ryder-- Hayles seems evolutionary in describing the internet as a consolidated self distribution. She has a sort of Hegelian "Spirit" view of the modern conception of body consciousness. She's clear in asserting that we understand our bodies as machines, our intelligence as information. I'm interested in how she looks at "embodiment" and consciousness, as well as in the distinction made between the mind and body. She lays out a really intriguing juxtaposition between the informational circuits of the postmodern, computer-like mind and the biological organism or human body.
Again, like Hegel, Hayles is largely concerned with consciousness as perception and subjectivity. But she makes claims about a kind of collective subjectivity in the postmodern world of virtual machine bodies. As usual, I find myself engaging in the question of WHY we maintain the subjectivity that we do. Why does cyberspace seem more connected to our psychological consciousness than our physical bodies? Why is it that we've appropriated so many limitations to our bodies, only to use machines to overcome the limitations? Why does the object have so much agency; why is the physical self lost? What is comfortable about being out of touch with physicality?
I really liked Hayles' discussion in chapter two about pattern and randomness, and comparing humans to texts. She writes, "Because they have bodies, books and humans have something to lose if they are regarded solely as informational patterns, namely the resistant materiality that has traditionally marked the durable inscription of books no less than it has marked our experiences of living as embodied creatures" (29). It is interesting that humans (and books) fear being reduced to an informational pattern, because, as she points out later, mutation is impossible without a pattern to disrupt. This fear works to remind us of Hayles' final warning in the chapter, "as we rush to explore the new vistas that cyberspace has made available for colonization, let us remember the fragility of a material world that cannot be replaced" (49). It is not that the human body must necessarily be privileged, but that we remember that even the idea of the "brain in a jar" relies on the materiality of the brain and of the jar. A reminder of the material world in the midst of a discussion of information, codes, and pattern/randomness was comforting and quite welcome in my opinion.
I'm with sarah on Neuromancer - it took me a while before I gave in and just read the story without trying too hard to fit the events and plot into my own understanding of what is possible. It was like Gibson was writing in a dialect foreign to me, and I had to observe the use of different words and concepts before I understood what they meant. One of the big themes in the novel seems to be the embodiment or disembodiment of what is "human" - an idea which Hayles addresses in the first chapter of How We Became Postmodern. Another big theme is reflexivity, which can be seen in the interrelations and overlapping between Armitage, the Finn, Wintermute, Neuromancer, Riviera, et al. I think I would have understood more of Neuromancer and more of its relevance had I read the Hayles chapters first, and better understood these concepts conceptually before seeing them illustrated in Chiba City and elsewhere. So Hayles was very elucidating and helped me make some connections between themes in posthumanism and the plot of Neuromancer.
One such connection is the idea of the mind as text, an idea discussed by both Gibson and Hayles. On p. 170, the Finn tells Case, "Minds aren't read...I can access your memory, but that's not the same as your mind." In other words, the Finn is expressing the idea that Hayles illustrates with DNA/genetic expression and the body of a book / the book's message. "The entanglement of signal and materiality in bodies and books," Hayles explains, "confers on them a parallel doubleness" (29). Gibson explores this doubleness - actually, in his world, a more than doubleness - of identities in the ambiguous realities of the characters in his novel.
"Doubleness" also relates to another theme that I would like to investigate: the ideas of "death" and "life" in Neuromancer. These are hugely present in the novel - the Finn and other personalities snarkily reminding Case that they are dead, or not alive; Linda Lee dying and existing again; the whole trope about living in coffins... In a sense, the idea of posthumanism is by definition a transgression of the life/death boundary - and Gibson seems to be expressing that.
- Hannah Schmidt
I found that reading Neuromancer helped me understand some of Hayles' concepts that at first seemed very abstract. In the opening of Chapter 1 Hayles discusses how she was alarmed at the commonly accepted notion "that mind could be separated from body." I didn't share Hayles' immediate reaction, and it was hard for me to think about the concept of embodiment until I read the scene in Neuromancer when Case first "simstims" into Molly's body. The narrator explains, "For a few frightened seconds he fought helplessly to control her body. Then he willed himself into passivity, became the passenger behind her eyes." This passage helped illustrate the irrevocable connection between mind and body that Hayles discusses by conveying the frightening and disorienting effect for Case when his mind is separated from his own body. It was also interesting how in the book Case, who derives joy from traipsing around cyberspace without his body, is ultimately controlled by Armitage because there are enzymes implanted inside of him. I think this highlights some of the contradictions inherent in the mind/body relationship because Case both wants to be free of his body, yet he can't go and do his own thing in cyberspace because of poison within his own body - the predicament is illustrative of why he wants to exist without his body and also why he can't. This was an interesting plot point because it plays on the helplessness of humans due to never really being able to know what is inside of our bodies (and in Neuromance even Finn can't tell with a scan.)
I was really intrigued by Hayles’ emphasis on the physical as a necessary medium for information. The idea of the mind as an autonomous unit that can thrive on its own is taken down a notch. Even in a virtual ping pong game, Hayles notes that one still needs to wear the wired glove in order to partake in the tournament. The mediator/container is just as important as the object it carries—if not more so, for without it, the entire object could be rendered useless.
In accordance with much of our classroom discussion, Hayles focused on the give and take of object interaction. I really enjoyed her discussion of someone sneaking into a building by fooling the machine with a code that insinuates they’re someone else. But aren’t they? They’re themselves, plus the code. As Hayles explains, “We become the codes we punch” (46). It is not you who is the perceived threat to the system, rather it is the you-code, a new hybrid, that is now a threat.
On page 48, Hayles explains how new media can affect perceptions of old media, carving and shaping their niches. (Her example is books). As technology progresses (inevitably, Hayles argues), we cannot help but judge our old world by the new standards. “How did we ever live without cell phones?” comes to mind.
~Samantha
Neuromancer had me captivated from the offset, even if it did send me for a loop every so often. It was easier to read once I accepted not the irrelevance of possibility/impossibility, but the irrelevance of technical jargon and just started enjoying the integration of typified human body and Gibson's imagined environment. Particularly loved getting into Straylight and the T-A amalgamate, and thus also Wintermute, and Neuromancer - and I suppose that encompasses everything, but it was just FUN when Gibson gave up being lowkey about his hybrids and started expounding on them through the mouths of characters.
A bit in the beginning of Hayles helped clarify something I hadn't realized was bugging me, until she said it - liberal humanism is about [unification through] cognition surpassing the body, where posthumanism emphasizes [unification through] cognition as necessarily enacted through the body. This theme is rife in Neuromancer as well, with the cowboy derision of 'meat'-state and the objectification of form and sex. But it wasn't objectification at all you realize eventually, it's a synthesis of the world changing and sucking the body into its new form.
Favorite part in the beginning of Hayles was definitely about 'I'/'we', distributive/collective. It seems to me that in every situation we encounter, the 'I' must be redefined and pinned down, before proceeding. Where the self, the identity, the greater set of me and it, us and them, is to be defined, is an almost... inevitable aspect of our daily interactions. Thus 'I' is already fluid in purely linguistic terms, before stepping it up to the distribution/multiplicity of self. So when defining the multiple 'I's of a distributed self, unifying under a single 'I' of the hybridized self, what is being defined against? What is excluded?
Neuromancer was awesome! Definitely 'terrifying and compelling' earlier described. Although I still can’t say I understood half of the technology on first read, there was definitely a real moment of reward when all the foreign vocabulary finally fell into place (for me, this was not till ¾ of the way through). It was also full of themes we’ve been discussing in class—tensions which technology brings between slavery and liberation, alienation and new intimacies. Technology like Molly’s mirror-shaded eyes created distance, while the ‘simstim’ (simulated stimulation) device allows more intimacy than I’m personally comfortable with. I was continuously struck by how eerily close to our world it seemed.
In recounting the logic in which human have become ‘bodiless information,’ Hayles recalls Haraway’s ‘control strategies:’ “This separation allows the construction of a hierarchy in which information is given the dominant position and materiality runs a distant second.” (12) This statement rings especially true while reading these materials in a University setting in the wake of midterms and scholarship deadlines. Generally speaking (and with a few notable exceptions), we’re as students, expected to conform to ideals of efficiency. In most cases, our products (timely assignments, readings and test scores) are held high above the actualities of embodied experience (when fatigue sets in and our brains refuse to cooperate!)
What I love about Hayles and Haraway, is that we are given hope. Hayles traces what has been taken apart/erased, in order to reassemble later. She writes, “This book is a ‘rememory’ in the sense of Toni Morrison’s beloved: putting back together parts that have lost touch with one another...” It seems this might have been Gibson’s intent as well. Hayles move to rebuild interestingly mirrors Case’s path to reembodiment by the end of the novel (he gets his body back—well, at least a new liver). Gibson’s use of the symphony’s CODA in his conclusion in a reinforces this dynamic of rebuilding. At the same time as Hayles notes, Gibsons novel, being highly influential to 3-D computing, also helped perpetuate the same dynamics many of us are trying to escape.
Yet like Haraway, Hayles promptly makes us aware that our situation is more complex. We cannot simply shift our perceptions to be regain our lost embodiment. How we engage with the posthuman world is not only determined with how we think of ourselves, but also by our relations of collective sum of how others view themselves. But, by recognizing our position within greater power networks, we seem to be able to regain some agency by conceiving of ourselves as cyborgs. Since we were never quite ‘whole’ to begin with, we rebuild using what we can (usually fragments and recycled, reappropriated parts).
A clearer version of what I said in class:
The two interesting things that I thought about after reading Neuromancer were:
1. Thinking about the book as relating to the concept of reflexivity, which Hayles claims is "the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates." (8) If Gibson published his work at a time that preceded Cyborgian theory and the concept of the hybrid, then can it be considered the "system within a system" of Haraway/Latour-ian thought? If so, to what extent?
2. Assuming that the context of when Neuromancer was written was irrelevant (this is clearly a dangerous move), the fact that the text has such a unique lexicon is fitting to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on language and culture, which claims that language shapes the way that people within a culture perceive and apprehend the world. Gibson succeeds in creating a language in Neuromancer which reflects a culture and society that is outside of our own; either that or his text provides the platform for a society which may already exist but only seems out of reach because of our skewed "cultural perspective".
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