[In the following essay, Latham reviews Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment and discusses the merging of human and machine known as cyborgs.]

Simultaneously published as a special issue of the journal Body & Society, Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment offers further evidence that cyberpunk sf has now crossed over into the terrain of mainstream critical inquiry, especially studies devoted to the relation between the human body and electronic technologies, between cybernetic theory and popular culture, and between the prospects for political resistance and the evolving socioeconomic forms of contemporary capitalism. Of the fourteen essays gathered in this volume, whose general purpose (according to the editors' introduction) is to study how “developments in technology point towards the possibilities of post-bodied and post-human forms of existence” (2), nine make fairly detailed reference to cyberpunk texts, while two others examine recent “cyborg cinema.” Thus, while not explicitly concerned with issues of genre, contemporary sf literature and film is a major focus of attention, providing not only a series of examples to support the various arguments but also, for many of these critics, a privileged discourse articulating the evolving norms of postmodern technoculture. This approach is not new, of course; it merely builds on the perspectives found in Larry McCaffery's Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction (Duke, 1991), Scott Bukatman's Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Duke, 1993), and Mark Dery's Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Duke, 1994), among others. But it does offer further proof that cyberpunk has reached a plateau of critical legitimacy very few historical forms of sf have achieved. This is not an unproblematic good, but it is a fact.

While some of the writers in Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk do fall prey to the more unfortunate aspects of this mainstream canonization, the book as a whole is generally worthwhile. While the work of William Gibson, predictably, receives the lion's share of attention, this does not totally preclude serious discussion of other talents, both major and minor (e.g. Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, Richard Kadrey) as well as of important genre precursors of the cyberpunk movement such as Philip K. Dick and J. G. Ballard. The range of texts surveyed is still comparatively small, but at least it goes beyond an endless homage to Neuromancer. Moreover, many of the writers show familiarity with both the academic and fan-based coverage of cyberpunk, citing articles in specialized venues such as Science-Fiction Studies and Interzone, though few of them seem aware of the larger discourse of sf criticism, and more than one of them has recourse to the grating solecism “sci-fi.” Worst of all, most of the essays either tacitly or overtly endorse the view that cyberpunk marks an epochal literary confrontation with technology, ignoring its roots in previous genre movements (save for the work of occasional geniuses like Dick or Ballard). This naive critical avant-gardism will doubtless be profoundly irritating to anyone who knows the field in depth.

Of course, the book's main concern is not to trace how cyberpunk builds upon or refines recurrent themes in sf literature, but rather to map its contiguity with the contemporary situation of “technological embodiment” as expressed in a range of discourses and cultural formations, from information theory to trends in medical research to popular attitudes towards the “computer revolution.” This interdisciplinary focus is the main strength of the volume, which gathers the work not only of scholars of literature but also of communications, sociology, philosophy, film and media, history, public policy, and cultural geography. While a series of central issues clearly emerge as one reads through the collection, it must be said that the various perspectives mobilized do not entirely cohere, and the editors' introduction provides little in the way of a synoptic overview. But as a mosaic of fragments on the theme of cyberculture, the book is generally absorbing.

The introduction does attempt to sketch the basic assumptions of the book's tripartite title. Briefly, cyberspace, especially in its Gibsonian version, is important because, as an imaginative fusion of the internet and virtual reality (VR), it offers a locus for extrapolating the emergence and evolution of various kinds of cyberbodies, from personality constructs to Artificial Intelligences. Cyberpunk thus becomes a kind of “social theory” providing, in displaced fictional form, “viable characterizations of our contemporary world” of proliferating computer-based visions and lifestyles (9). The editors stress, however, that their attention to cyberbodies extends beyond siliconic representations to encompass “the aesthetic manipulation of the body's surface through cosmetic surgery, muscle grafts and animal or human transplants” as well as “alternatives to … organic functions, such as biochip implants, upgraded senses and prosthetic additions” (11). For the editors, and for most of the essayists, the figure of the cyborg, in its popular as well as its specialized guises, comes to crystallize this range of “posthuman” possibility.

Appropriately enough, then, the first essay, David Thomas's “Feedback and Cybernetics: Reimaging the Body in the Age of the Cyborg,” provides a compelling genealogy of modern human-machine hybrids by outlining Norbert Wiener's theories of cybernetic automation and their cultural legacy. A meticulous and wide-ranging discussion, it is also the best piece in the volume. It is followed by Sadie Plant's “The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics,” which introduces the book's central focus on gender issues in an interesting, though theoretically half-baked, defense of “cybernetic feminism.” The essay is on solid ground when discussing the biography of Ada Lovelace, the first “computer” programmer, whose career working with Victorian inventor Charles Babbage figured prominently in Gibson and Sterling's “steampunk” novel The Difference Engine (which Plant treats). For Plant, Ada was a protofeminist whose alliance with technology was enabling in her structured patriarchal context. While this seems to me a suggestive line of argument, Plant unfortunately abandons its historical specificity, launching into a speculative metaphysics of cyberspace as “the virtual materiality of the feminine” (60) that I found muddled and unconvincing. Those with greater sympathy towards poststructuralist feminism would perhaps view her discussion more favorably.

The volume then moves into a series of debates about the cultural significance of information technologies. Michael Heim's essay on “The Design of Virtual Reality” defends the projection VR system developed by the Electronic Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois-Chicago, which induces an effect of “apperceptive immersion” (73), over conventional head-mounted displays, which tend to promote a less interactive environment. Heim offers much useful information, but his discussion is deformed by an earnest, California-speak evangelism in favor of Tai Chi and biorhythms. Mark Poster's “Postmodern Virtualities” likewise gives evidence of special pleading, this time for postmodernist theory as the only adequate model for apprehending the immense cultural shift portended by information technologies; his argument is clear and efficient, but adds little to existing treatments of the topic, including the author's own The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context (Polity, 1990). Deborah Lupton's “The Embodied Computer User” canvasses the effects of the integration of computers into everyday life, focusing on the anthropomorphic metaphors that emerge to describe the technology, and on the symbiotic relationship that evolves between it and its users. Her discussion is rooted in common-sense perspectives, perhaps of necessity; however, I cannot help but feel that her conclusions are as a result ultimately rather banal.

Nigel Clark's “Rear-View Mirrorshades: The Recursive Generation of the Cyberbody,” which follows, is at once more ambitious and more confusing. Basically, it involves an extended riff on Marshall McLuhan's famous observation that the content (as opposed to the form) of a new technology is previous technology; hence, Clark's emphasis on the “recursive” logic that purportedly structures how cyberbodies are envisioned, each advance in representational possibility inaugurated by technology leading to “the resurrection of the referential form of the body from the previous generation” (116). Thus, for example, the “futuristic” landscape of cyberpunk, ostensibly based on an extrapolation of computer technology, actually reflects the aesthetic styles and social modalities of older visual media such as television: “a hyperactive sampling of broadcast bits … the material fallout of mediated trends, fashions and product lines” (122). The cyberbodies evoked are mutable, gestural, “receptive surfaces for the images projected by the media” (123), encoding the “burden of a corporeality brought up to the speed of the fashion industry” (127). At the same time, however, Clark wants to argue for the emergence, in dialectical counterpoint to these retro revivals, of the genuinely novel in culture, “some movement into unfamiliar or undemarcated terrain” (116) that indicates the radical character of technological innovation. Unfortunately, the general drift of his argument is so firmly to stress a recursive logic that he never really convinced me true change and development were occurring. Apparently, this essay is a fragment of an unpublished booklength manuscript on the growth of “visual culture in the 20th century” (133), and perhaps Clark's argument would be more congenially encountered in unabridged form. I would certainly look forward to reading it.

The next essay, Kevin Robins's “Cyberspace and the World We Live In,” is a neo-Luddite rant, and in the context of the volume's otherwise generally celebratory tone, it's rather bracing. I agree completely with Robins that prophesies of cyberspatial utopia need to be more attentive to “their discursive status and significance in the world we presently inhabit” (136), attending more responsibly to the emplacement of information technologies like VR in a social regime based on differential relations of power. Even so, I think Robins's treatment of the subject is more narrowly dogmatic than it need be, and I'm surprised he doesn't offer more specific evidence of cyber-culpability, such as the prevalence of sweatshop production in the microelectronics industry, instead of the vague and fairly schoolmarmish attacks he trots out. For readers interested in a more comprehensive and detailed recent indictment, I would direct them to James Brook's and Iain A. Boal's anthology Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information (City Lights, 1995).

The two essays that follow focus on film. Samantha Holland's “Descartes Goes to Hollywood” considers the gender implications of the mind-body dualism at work in “contemporary cyborg cinema,” and Alison Landsberg's “Prosthetic Memory” investigates how synthetic or simulated memories impact upon characters' perceptions of self-identity in Total Recall (1990) and Blade Runner (1982). Both essays are very engaging, and Holland's is exceptionally impressive in its range of reference, focusing on Eve of Destruction (1990) and the Terminator (1984, 1991) and Robocop (1987, 1990, 1991) films, but making mention as well of more marginal titles such as RoboC.H.I.C. (1989) and Cherry 2000 (1988). Holland's synthetic reading of the gender dynamics of these films—especially how they evoke a “transcendental masculinity” that surpasses biological gender, thus shoring up a patriarchal regime threatened by technological encroachment—is heavily dependent upon Claudia Springer's coverage of similar terrain (in material that eventually found its way into her Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age [Texas, 1996]). Moreover, I am not convinced that the epistemological apparatus of Cartesianism is absolutely essential to the structure of Holland's argument. Still, she writes forcefully and well, and she knows these movies initimately. Hers is perhaps the most effective feminist arraignment of contemporary cyberculture in the book. Landsberg's essay, by contrast, is too schematic, and in my view too fundamentally hopeful about the implications of implanted memories; I cannot agree, for example, with her assertion that “whether … actions are made possible by prosthetic memories or memories based on lived experience makes little difference” (183). Obviously, it makes a great difference if those memories were implanted, as they are in both movies she discusses, by invidious forces for nefarious reasons.

The volume reaches is nadir with Nick Land's “Meat (or How to Kill Oedipus in Cyberspace).” Clearly, the editors felt compelled to include a sample of that genre of cyberdrool that conflates poststructuralist theory and prose poetry, a form pioneered by Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, and Arthur Kroker. It is unfortunate they didn't solicit a contribution from one of that triumvirate, who are at least entertainingly pompous, instead of this third-rate knockoff, with its risible imitations of William Burroughs: “Arriving reprocessed from inexistence at phase-transition into Hell or the future, you slide an interlock-pin into its sub-cortical socket, shifting to the other side of the screen (coma-zoned infotech undeath). Pandemonium scrolls out in silence. Decayed pixel-dust drifts into grey dunes” (194). Etcetera ad nauseum.

Land's essay does at least prefigure an emotional response towards the effects of cyborgization—nervous ecstasy mingled with revulsion—that inflects two of the remaining four essays in the book. Vivian Sobchack's “Beating the Meat/Surviving the Text, or How to Get Out of This Century Alive” and Robert Rawdon Wilson's “Cyber(body)parts: Prosthetic Consciousness” are very different in their ways, but both include fascinatingly strange meditations on their authors' real or imagined prosthetic enhancements. Sobchack's discussion, which explicitly takes up where her November 1991 SFS response to Baudrillard's reading of J.G. Ballard's Crash (1973) left off, details her own experiences with a prosthetic leg. The result is a brilliant mix of phenomenological theory, moral polemic, erotic reverie, and self-lacerating irony that I could not do justice to if I tried—though I must remark the (likely unintentional) echoes of K.W. Jeter's scathing novel Dr. Adder (1984), with its vision of sexy cyborg amputees. Wilson's essay is equally idiosyncratic, though it apparently emerges from his ongoing study of the cultural significance of the emotion of disgust. His conclusion that the prospects of cyborgization disturb us because the process threatens the mythic integrity of our bodies is finally more conventional than his detailed speculation, along the way, about the potential benefits of penile implants and augmentations: “my penis will have been lengthened (by cutting the suspensory ligaments that join it to the pubic bone) and thickened (by the liposuction of fat from my buttocks or abdomen) and I will seem, to my own mind at least, irresistibly bionic” (240). Wilson is a Shakespeare scholar who can cite Dr. Who and Star Trek—The Next Generation chapter and verse; altogether a very peculiar person.

Anne Balsamo's “Forms of Technological Embodiment: Reading the Body in Cyborg Culture” is essentially a distillation of her Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women (Duke, 1996). A careful and intelligent (if overly diagrammatic) study of the social “system of differentiation [that] determines the status and position of material bodies” (234), through the mediation of technology and especially in relation to the categories of gender and race, it is hardly worth reading if one has already perused her book, but if not it provides a thoughtful precis. By contrast, Kevin McCarron's “Corpses, Animals, Machines and Mannequins: The Body and Cyberpunk” is a conceptually thin coda, again invoking Cartesian themes in a comparative discussion of the work of William Gibson and Marge Piercy. The essay adds little to the critical literature on cyberpunk (and seems cognizant only of the essays gathered in George Slusser's and Tom Shippey's Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative [Georgia UP, 1992]), but scholars interested in approaches to Piercy's utopian novel He, She, and It (1991; a.k.a. Body of Glass) might find something useful here.

In sum, Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk is an entertaining but uneven study of its subject. Certainly it excels another more narrowly conceived SAGE anthology, Steven G. Jones's Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community (1995), but it falls short of covering the range of cultural phenomena canvassed in Dery's Flame Wars and Andrew Ross and Constance Penley's Technoculture (Minnesota UP, 1991). And it isn't a patch on McCaffery's Storming the Reality Studio which, despite its essentially literary bias, remains still the best study of contemporary cyber(punk)culture.