[In the following essay, Schmitt discusses William Gibson's mythologizing of technology in his fiction.]

With only three published novels and a collection of short stories, William Gibson has quickly risen to the top of his field, winning the Nebula, Hugo, and Philip Dick awards for Neuromancer. Even more important is the fact that Gibson is considered one of the principal, formative forces in a movement within science fiction known as “cyberpunk.” I see “cyberpunk” as an appropriate label for Gibson's heroes since they share two important similarities with the punk rock movement—one which is more obvious and another which is probably less recognized.

First, the cyberspace “cowboys” in Gibson's novels, like punk rockers, use the technology that is supposed to be a means of ordering and mechanizing the world to attack powerful institutions and individuals associated with the established order of authority. They employ what Norbert Wiener, in Cybernetics and Society: The Human Use of Human Beings, calls “forensic discourse.” Here the differentiation is made between “normal communicative discourse,” which is subject to the confusion caused by the normal entropic tendencies of the physical world but which seeks to convey information accurately, and forensic discourse, “whose conscious aim is to qualify and even destroy its meaning” (93).

Such an interest in selectively obscuring meaning is carried to an extreme in the punk rock movement. All the communicative qualities normally associated with musical entertainment are inverted and distorted. Rather than using amplifiers to clarify sound, extreme electronic feedback and distortion are used as musical effects. Lyrics are mumbled and undiscernible above the extremely loud amplification. The relationship between audience and performer is also distorted. The crowd and musicians curse, spit on, and even batter each other. “Slam dancing” involves violently crashing into others until they fall down. If the audience doesn't succeed in destroying the equipment by the end of the evening with fists and thrown beer bottles, the musicians will often ritualistically destroy their expensive instruments in a final, climactic fury. In short, the punk rocker seeks to subvert all the values that he or she associates with the established conventions of a corrupt society and looks to reenergize a musical genre once potent but now castrated through commercialization and hypocrisy.

Similarly, Gibson's cyberpunks obscure meaning, attack authoritarian values, and celebrate vandalistic and anarchistic values using computer and other technologies rather than music. Yet, while simple, criminal vandalism and nihilistic violence could achieve the downfall of authority, both the punks of our society and the cyberpunks of Gibson's choose to ritualize their defiance. The main focus of this analysis will be the second similarity between Gibson's novels and punk rock: the ways in which primitive mythology is used in ritualizing and symbolizing this rebellion against authority.¹

One of the most significant patterns in punk rock iconography, I hope to show, is the blending of modern technology with practices and symbols meant to suggest primitivism and savagery. One of Gibson's essential thematic and imagistic motifs is the blending of primitive myth and symbols with speculative high technology. For the punk rocker, this identification with the primitive is overt, extreme, and related, for the most part, to barbarism and savagery. For Gibson, this identification is more intellectual, subtle, and related to the mythic belief patterns of primitive man. In both instances, however, a “mythologized” technology is used as an important component in an attempt to subvert those authority figures who represent the decadence, pomposity, and misuse of power and wealth in a technological society.

Perhaps the principal means by which this break with authority is ritualized and symbolized for the punk rocker is through fashion. The notion of rock fashion as mythic is probably best developed in Mablen Jones's analysis of rock fashion, Getting It On:

The raw power of rock stars lies not merely in the release of repressed desire, but also in the evocation of primordial images from the wellsprings of archetype. … When the bad boys in leather, from Gene Vincent and Link Wray through Jim Morrison of The Doors, Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, Rob Halford of Judas Priest, and Billy Idol, flaunt their lizardlike armor trimmed with metal symbols of their inescapable badness, they become the invincible Trickster of myth. The adventures of this collective “hero with a thousand faces” (as mythologist Joseph Campbell calls the archetype) serve to release the flow of life energy into the world. … The self ravaging punk anti-hero cathartically and messianically vents collective rage with-in a tradition of ecstatic martyrdom as he is pelted on-stage with assorted objects hurled by fans. (7-9)

The specific mythological icons that permeate the ritualized anarchy of punk rock fashion are those of the fierce, primitive warrior, in contrast to the peaceful, peasant garb of the preceding generation of hippies. The most easily recognizable of these icons, now a cliché, is the Mohawk haircut. But so many of the fashion items and practices associated with punk rock can be seen as modern variations of primitive warriors' attempts to present a fearsome and stoic visage.

Whereas the hippies endorsed a natural, earthy look with long, flowing hair, the punks' elaborate spiky hairdos and thick applications of brightly-colored make-up resemble the Native American braves' feathered headdresses and warpaint. Slam dancing is the ultimate “primitivization” of dance. What began in the 1960s as mimicry of actual tribal, totemic dances (the Watusi, the Monkey, the Pony) has reached its logical extreme in slam dancing, which resembles the frenzied state of tribal dance at its climax, before exhaustion and collapse.

But what is particularly interesting about punk rockers' choice of imagery in the cyberpunk context of this analysis is the use of technological paraphernalia in the development of this mythological trickster-warrior persona. The use of corporate-made electronic equipment and recordings to carry forth the punk movement's anti-establishment message is certainly as ironic as the hippies' use of these same means to encourage the discarding of technology and a return to an imagined pastoral utopia. The punks' bizarre and creative use of other forms of modern technology to suggest savagery is an indication of the extent to which these warriors will go to prove that they are unafraid of technology's dehumanizing, mechanizing effects.

The piercing of various body parts (cheek, nose, ear, lip) with safety pins has its equivalent in the fanatical stoicism of tribal practices such as distending lip bowls, earweights, and neckrings—but with an important technological dimension added. Common products of modern technology, like razorblades, safety pins, chains, hypodermic needles, etc., are worn as jewelry. Again, just as the primitive warrior would wear the bones, teeth, and scalps of enemies to prove his heroic mastery over them, the punks' use of technological items as jewelry can be seen as having a similarly defiant function. Razor-slashed T-shirts crudely sewn up or left hanging are a removable version of the permanent scarification of primitive warriors' bodies. In fact, Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols was often pictured bare-chested, proudly displaying the matrix of scars and needle tracks that marked his chest and arms. “Homemade” tattoos, done with safety pins, and the coloring of their tribal haircuts with fluorescent dyes complete the picture of this bizarre combination of primitivism and modern technology.

Thus, it is clear that the punk rocker's identificaton with those symbols of the primitive warrior is not an effort, as the hippie movement was, to return to an imagined utopia of primitivism, but, rather, is linked with a desire to disrupt and subvert an already decaying authoritarian system. The unconventional blending of modern technology and primitive mythology to achieve this end is an important link between the social phenomenon of punk rock and the fiction of William Gibson. Gibson's heroes are truly cyberpunks that use technology and mythology to wreak havoc on a technologically based, corporated world.

Just as Gibson's world is cluttered with a diverse assortment of futuristic technology and jargon employed by young punk vandals to “rock” the corporate world, it is also cluttered with a diverse assortment of primitive mythological entities like ghosts, demons, and gods. Science fiction authors and critics like Hillegas (273), Delany (143-44), Sontag (124), and Clarke (Porush 113) have analyzed some of the clear conceptual connections between science and mysticism. They all have pointed to the fact that, especially for the nonscientist, the “wonders” of science are often perceived of in mystical, pseudo-magical terms.

Gibson's use of these primitive mythic concepts in conjunction with technology can also be seen as a clever “literalization” of Arthur Koestler's Ghost in the Machine, another strongly influental work, like Wiener's Cybernetics, which sought to reconcile human concens with the influences of mechanization. The central image of a “ghost in the machine,” actually a phrase drawn from Gilbert Ryle in his 1949 book The Concept of Mind (Koestler 202), is a fascinating and powerfully antideterministic/mechanistic concept. The notion of forces associated with irrational superstitions invading the rigid determinism of the machine and haunting, perhaps disrupting, its function is an aggressively humanistic image that would certainly be attractive to the punk rocker. It is not surprising that rock composer Sting of The Police, a group strongly influenced by punk rock conventions, would name one of his albums Ghost in the Machine and entitle a song on that album “[We Are] Spirits in the Material World.”

So while the extremely rapid development of extraordinary and fearsome technologies inspires in many only a passive fear and awe, it also generates a “collective rage” in others—an emphatic denial of the mechanization of humans in the wake of the mechanization of the world. The hippie and punk movements clearly involve themselves with just such a denial. But the punk rocker deviates from the hippie (and Gibson deviates from dystopian SF) in the understanding that it is not technology itself which must be discarded, but, rather, those dehumanized human forces behind the machines. Thus it is the “gradual and willing accommodation to the Machine” (Neuromancer 203) not the machine itself which is the enemy. In Gibson's world the solution to the dehumanized human (the corporate bigwig) is to kill him/her, finally establishing his/her humanity. The solution to the dehumanizing machine, which cannot be killed, is to humanize it by “mythologizing” it.

When one enters Gibson's cyberspace, it hardly resembles the cold, non-living accumulation of digital constructs one would expect in a computer, and both the human and non-human consciousnesses that inhabit it at any given time are anything but mechanized. The entities the cowboys confront when jacked into cyberspace are often referred to directly as ghosts, demons, and gods. These “ghosts in the corporate cores” (Neuromancer 229) play a variety of roles: Helpful allies to the heroes; angry, independent forces on a similar disruptive mission; and terrifying, nearly omnipotent powers which often take control of the human characters.

The “flatlines” in cyberspace are quite literally ghosts, and they readily admit to being dead. When a cyberspace cowboy confronts “black ICE” (intrusion countermeasure electronics) in his attempt to “penetrate the bright walls of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data,” he can be “flatlined,” referring to a flat EEG (Neuromancer 50). If a cowboy's consciousness is never rescued and returned to his body after being flatlined, then his fate could be like that of the legendary cowboy McCoy Pauley, called the “Dixie Flatline” and the “Lazarus of Cyberspace,” a “hard-wired ROM cassette replicating a dead man's skills, obsessions, knee-jerk responses” (76-78). This computerized version of a man's “spirit” assists Case throughout his epic journey into the Tessier-Ashpool computer core. Both 3Jane and the Finn, who appear as humans in Neuromancer, are preserved as more sophisticated personality constructs in Mona Lisa Overdrive. But whereas McCoy Pauley is discontented with his state as a flatline and finally has his wished to be “erased” granted at the end of Neuromancer, the Finn in Mona Lisa Overdrive is happy to do his “oracle gig,” letting local kids set their alms of vodka, cigarettes, and cocaine before the “rounded figure” in which his construct is housed (135-36).

One step further removed from the humanity (or former humanity) of the flatlines are the fearsome and bizzare loa, also called the Divine Horsemen and the hoodoo (voodoo), with names like Samedi, Danbala, Legba, and Ougou Feray—“the god of war” (Count Zero 166). These computer programs, in keeping with their referential identities as savage warriors, are troublesome and often uncontrollable versions of icebreakers that “invade” not only cyberspace but the mind of Angie Mitchell in Count Zero. The incidents of Angie Mitchell being “ridden” (184) by these hoodoo warriors resemble nothing as much as demonic possession. As Michele in Neuromancer says, “For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons, only now are such things possible” (163).

The loa's identification with the primitive warrior, as well as their ability to obscure understanding for both other characters and the reader with their metaphorical jargon, make them another of Gibson's clear symbolic links with the iconography of punk rock. They are the same disturbing, disruptive voices in cyberspace that punk rock fashion and music hope to be within our society. They are the demons that continue to trouble even the most seemingly rational, ordered system; they are entropy.

If the flatlines and the loa are the ghosts and demons of cyberspace, then the AIs are its gods. Wintermute refers to itself as a “burning bush” but then says to Case, “I am that which knoweth not the word” (Neuromancer 173). Wintermute is also referred to as “lord of hell” by Ashpool, and Neuromancer refers to itself as “the lane to the land of the dead” and says “I am the dead and their land” (Neuromancer 185, 243-44). Because of their extraordinary power and intelligence, and since “nobody trusts those fuckers … every AI ever built has an electromagnetic shotgun wired to its forehead” (Neuromancer 132). Despite this, the AIs break free from the Tessier-Ashpools when Case cracks their coporate ICE, and the new integration of Wintermute (“hive mind, decision maker”) and Neuromancer (“personality … immortality”) enters the matrix where it says it is “the sum total of the works, the whole show” (Neuromancer 268-69). Definitely more than just a super smart computer, this new AI produces the art works which are Virek's obsession in Count Zero. As the Dixie Flatline tells Case, “I ain't likely to write you no poem, if you follow me. Your AI, it just might” (Neuromancer 131).

Thus, we have a complex mythological variation on the standard SF theme of the self-determined machine. The “consensual hallucination” (Neuromancer 5) of cyberspace has allowed Gibson a high-tech version of hell, purgatory, and heaven combined. It is also a model of the technological society itself, never able to attain in its human population the uniformity, passivity, and mechanical predictability and order it can expect from its machines. Indeed, if our “intelligent” machines are endowed with any element of the human spirit, as Gibson's are, they will necessariy represent the irrational, chaotic tendencies in man, as well as the rational ones: we will have ghosts in our machines.

One of Gibson's most significant and complex uses of primitive mythological concepts in conjunction with a futuristic society comes in his characterization of Angie Mitchell. At the beginning of Mona Lisa Overdrive, when Angie is an adult she is able to admit to herself for the first time what the reader already knows after hearing the story of her earlier life in Count Zero: “Her father was dead, seven years dead, and the record he'd kept of his life had told her little enough. That he'd served someone or something, that his reward had been knowledge, and that she had been his sacrifice” (17). So emerging from Gibson's world of stoic heroes, lunatic corporate kings, and cybernetic demons is the story of a young, fragile girl whose own father offered her for sacrifice upon the altar of technology.

From the very start the mysterious young girl who Turner befriends and protects in Count Zero acts very strangely. She gets nose bleeds, has bad dreams, hears voices, and speaks in “Tongues.” Often unseen forces take over her body completely, ranting and threatening, using African names and mythic jargon:

“What do you want?”

“This child for my horse, that she may move among the towns of men. It is well that you drive east. Carry her to your city. I shall ride her again. And Samedi rides with you, gunman. He is the wind you hold in your hands, but he is fickle, the Lord of Graveyards, no matter that you have served him well …” He turned in time to see her slump sideways in the harness, her head lolling, moth slack. (184)

When Turner takes Angie to be checked out physically it is discovered that she has long chains of biosoft chips grafted into her brain (133).

This technology, developed by her father, is perhaps Gibson's ultimate creative blurring of the distinction between the organic and the mechanical: “minute biochemical factories endlessly reproducing the engineered molecules that were linked and built up into biochips” (88). The medical implant of biochips into Angie's brain, performed by her father, allows Angie to access cyberspace directly, without a deck, thus making her, for all intents and purposes, a human computer. Being perpetually jacked into cyberspace makes Angie susceptible to the loa mentioned in the preceding section. There is no escape for her from these demonic entities that occupy cyberspace, for they simultaneously occupy her mind, haunting and bewitching her. So just as a cyberspace deck is a human's conduit to the “land of the dead,” Angie's brain becomes the conduit for the computerized loa to the human world. But here again, through Gibson's mingling of primitive myth and technology, there is an inversion of the mechanical state one would expect in such computer-human intermingling. Angie's sacrifice to the machine does not mean that she is a robot in the traditional unfeeling sense: she has been offered up to the land of the dead and returned a bewitched goddess herself.

Needless to say, such a state makes Angie not only the “Virgin of Miracles” (Count Zero 58, 213), but the virgin of sorrows as well. She becomes a drug addict in Mona Lisa Overdrive in an attempt to stave off the voices that haunt her sleep. But more important to a mythic context is the fact that her affliction becomes a reason not for societal persecution but for exaltation. The bewitched princess in this case is glorified in her adult life as an ideal, romantic queen—a world-famous media star in Mona Lisa Overdrive.

As with any sacrifice, Angie's designation as an offering to the “gods” of cyberspace is both a curse and a blessing. She is the chosen icon of a society, its most precious gift to appease the gods. As such she is society's conduit between the supernatural and “real” worlds. Her “death” marks the culture's continued life (Campbell, Masks 177). Glory for the sacrificed means the dissolution of personal identity into that of the cultural symbol.

Clearly another analogy with our own pop culture mythologizing of the rock musician is suggested by the notion of the sacrifice and Angie's stardom. Rock stars are society's sacrificial lambs; they extinguish their own personal identities to function as fantasy personas for the rest of society. Even if their fame and glory is actively pursued, often the taxing experience of being a cultural icon can turn what was initially a blessing into a curse. This can be seen in the many instances of drug addiction, suicide, and mental breakdown among famous rock stars. The rock stars' fans expect a predictable persona, and they can turn hostile if the stars attempt to change their looks, music, or politics. They are trapped within their roles as the mythic icons of our culture. If punk rocker Sid Vicious had not killed himself and his girlfriend, they would have lived to see eight-year-olds sporting punk rock haircuts and clothing and walking contentedly beside their hippy-garbed parents in the shopping malls of America.

Angie's status as “simstim” star puts her in this awkward position of cultural icon—the ultimate symbol of a society hungry for ever greater “simulated stimulation” from the electronic media. Her father's Frankenstein-like surgery has, instead of bringing the dead to life, brought the living to the land of the dead. Such an existence as cultural conduit to the machine is finally too much for Angie to take. She joins her lover, Bobby Newmark, who has given up his physical body to fully become one with the machine. Her role as simstim star is taken over by Mona Lisa, surgically altered to look like Angie. Another “virgin” is found for the sacrifice.

In Gibson's futuristic mythology there is even a shaman. Peter Riviera is referred to specifically as a “certified psychopath” (Neuromancer 51), an interestingly clinical appraisal considering the gloating insanity of the Tessier-Ashpools. The difference between the madness of Ashpool and Riviera is Riviera's creative use of holography in bringing to life for all to see the passionate sublimity of the psychotic mind.

Riviera's talents in using holography are presumably the reason he is brought into the team which Armitage assembles to topple the Tessier-Ashpool corporate structure. The team members discover that Riviera has an “implant” which allows him to project his own “subliminals” in disconcertingly realistic holographic displays. As the Finn says, “What he imagines, you see” (90-91). Riviera also uses holography to “enhance” the experience of injecting the drugs to which he is addicted, creating snakes instead of tourniquets and scorpions instead of needles (106-07). In these and other subtle and not-so-subtle ways, Riviera continuously uses his expertise and disturbed imagination in the medium of holography to disturb and dazzle those around him.

Gibson shows that holography has its more predictable applications in his future society for arcade games (as in the short story “Dogfight”), imaging in communications (as with Virek in Count Zero), and pornography (Count Zero 28). But by introducing the potential such a medium would have in expressing the dark, subliminal world of the psychotic mind, he has tapped into a very ancient and potent mythic fascination we have with the “controlled” madness of the shaman.

In every primitive tribe … we find the medicine man in the center of society and it is easy to show that the medicine man is either a neurotic or psychotic or at least that his art is based on the same mechanisms as a neurosis or a psychosis. (Roheim in Campbell, Hero 100)

Riviera's characterization is particularly interesting when one considers that if “high-rez” holography is a technology available for barroom games then it would certainly be available to Case, one of the finest cyberspace cowboys in the Sprawl. So why, then, is Riviera able to so dazzle and overwhelm those around him with his holographic displays while the others seem unable to reciprocate? The answer is that Riviera, because he is a psychotic, can bring forth the subconscious terrors of the mind as no normal man could. “The medicine men, therefore, are simply making both physical and public the symbols of symbolic fantasy that are present in the psyche of every adult member of their society.” (Campbell, Hero 101). This technology allows Gibson to engage in incredibly surreal flights of fantasy and break down the barriers between imagination and physical reality. The widespread use of holography is a technological “magic” that is realizable within our lifetimes, making Gibson's speculative uses of it all the more potent.

I am again forced to think of our own pop culture and our hunger for fantasies of “madness” in the media. The escalation of bizarre violence and sexuality in the stage shows and videos of rock musicians parallels a general, cultural desensitization toward such images on television and in the movies. Our own consensual hallucination, the media matrix, clearly has its own shamans bringing us to the brink of a cultural psychosis. One can only imagine what would happen if MTV were to become holographic.

In Gibson's futuristic world there are two extrapolated technologies which allow his characters to attain heretofore unattainable states of physical and mental transformation. These technologies, I feel, are his most distinctive and fascinating means of connecting primitive myth with modern science. They also suggest the potential such technological wonders might create for allowing man not to become a robot, but to realize some of his deepest primordial fantasies of transformation.

The first of these has already been mentioned in regard to Angie Mitchell, but it is a technology that figures prominently in all of Gibson's novels and is employed by most of his characters. It is called simstim—simulated stimulation—another of Gibson's clever literalisms of terminology which carries to a logical extreme the tendencies of our current computer systems and electronic media toward more and more sophisticated simulations of “reality.” Because “the cyberspace matrix is actually a drastic simplification of the human sensorium,” one is not only able to project one's consciousness into it using “trodes,” but is also able to receive sensations through what Gibson calls a “little plastic tiara” (Neuromancer 55).

Gibson exploits simstim as a means of realizing one of the most primitive fantasies of man: transfiguration. The desire to magically transfer one's consciousness into another physical state, to be something or someone else for a time, is, of course, the basis of so much of children's play as well as adult's entertainment. Yet, while the mind can imagine itself in any number of forms, we all ultimately remain trapped in our corporeal body. Simstim and cyberspace allow the barrier of the single corporeal body to be breached, allowing for the dissolution of individual perspective into a frantic electronic pantheism in which minds, bodies, and senses blend, merge, and spin in a consensual hallucination of sensory overload—hardly what we imagine robot existence to be like.

The employment of simstim for pornography and the soap-opera-type fantasies in which Angie Mitchell stars in Mona Lisa Overdrive is a predictable and logical extension of our current society's dependence on vicarious sensual experience through the electronic media. But Gibson mentions two forms of simstim that are unusual and suggest fascinating mythic possibilities.

The first is a passing mention of a simstim tape that allows the viewer to experience the sensations of arboreal animals (Count Zero 36-37). It is a great disappointment for me that Gibson never really attempts to describe the sensations involved in a simstim with an animal, for this could open up, not only new imagistic vistas for him to explore with his baroque, visually intense style, but could also expand his mythological framework to include the concept of totemic identification. However, he fully exploits another mythological/psychological concept through his use of the second type of simstim.

Throughout Case's epic journey into the corporate computer core of Tessier-Ashpool, he has a direct, neurological simstim link with Molly and is able to simultaneously “feel” what she feels, as well as see, hear, smell, and taste what she does (Neuromancer 56). The notion of man and woman in one body is a literal realization of the androgynous state of our psyches as described by Jung through the concept of the anima and animus (186-207). It is interesting that Case and Molly rely on a combination of their skills to achieve their heroic ends, Case involving himself with the temporality of cyberspace consciousness while Molly involves herself with the physicality of the battle itself: cybernetic man and Amazon warrior in one body.

Again, parallels with punk rock can be made. Punk fashion is essentially androgynous in nature, with no distinctions made between what is appropriate for men or women to wear. Many punk rock stars, as well as those in traditional rock and heavy metal, create fantastic androgynous personas, blending and distorting conventional masculine and feminine concepts in fashion (leather and chains blend with eye makeup and hair coloring). Rock stars like Annie Lenox and Boy George carry on the tradition of rock star androgyny begun by Little Richard and David Bowie.

The mythic implications of androgeny are clear. The integration of traits usually seen as exclusively male or female gives one the power of a god (Campbell, Hero 153-56). To transcend the cycle of birth, procreation, and death and “bear the emblems of both my parents” (153) is also to transcend one's heritage and the societal limitations of sex roles. It is the ultimate assertion of individuation and thus a logical mythology with which rebellious youth can identify.

Simstim is also clearly an assertion of man's continued interest in sensual stimulation (albeit simulated stimulation) in the face of mechanization. This extrapolated technology actually expands rather than limits human's sensual experience. Gibson has again neatly inverted the notion that mechanization must bring about the robot image of man. Through the futuristic technologies of simstim and cyberspace, man regains his primordial links with magic and mythic power. He also retains and even expands the potential for sensuality that distinguishes man from machine.

The final mythic component of Gibson's world I will analyze is his most obvious link with the modern phenomenon of punk rock and its blend of technology and savagery: the disfiguration of the body. As discussed in my introduction, an important pattern in punk rock fashion iconography is its interest in creating parallels with the primitive warrior and the aesthetic of ugliness intended to frighten enemies and prove stoicism. In Gibson's world, advancements in medical technology have allowed this primitive pattern to be carried to new and wilder extremes.

There is Molly, whose “mirrored lenses were surgical inlays, the silver rising smoothly from her high cheekbones, sealing her eyes in their sockets” (Burning Chrome 6) with an alphanumeric time readout “chipped” into her optic nerve so it is displayed “low in her left peripheral field” (Neuromancer 56). Also, since she is a mercenary: “She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly spread, and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four-centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails” (Neuromancer 25).

But, of course, the clearest examples of disfiguration occur in Gibson's descriptions of the youth gangs in his future world: Moderns, Kasuals, Gothicks, Dracs. His general description of the Moderns could also apply to punk rockers; “it was the style that mattered and the style was the same. The Moderns were mercenaries, practical jokers, nihilistic technofetishists” (Neuromancer 59). Yet this fetish for technology is blended with a fetish for the savage as well:

His face was a simple graft grown on collagen and shark-cartilage polysaccharides, smooth and hideous. It was one of the nastiest pieces of elective surgery Case had ever seen. When Angelo smiled, revealing the razor-sharp canines of some large animal, Case was actually relieved. Toothbud transplants. He'd seen that before. (Neuromancer 59)

So here again, the advanced technology of Gibson's world, instead of making people into robots, has intensified and expanded the potential for the realization of our most primitive mythic desires. Instead of desensitization and uniformity we have transfiguration and disfiguration.

If any pattern emerges from Gibson's mythologizing of technology and humans' relationships with technology it is the emphatic denial of the mechanistic image of humans in a technological culture. The use of primitive mythic entities and practices like ghosts, demons, sacrifice, the shaman, etc. is clearly a means by which Gibson can humanize those unhuman, cold, and impersonal technological forces that increasingly challenge the boundaries between the corporeal and the mechanical.

The mirrors with which we view ourselves have never been so crowded with things—things which most of us reluctantly admit we could not imagine life without, things which were barely dreamed of 100 years ago. Twentieth-century technology, whether one perceives it as an essentially positive, constructive tendency or an essentially negative, destructive, tendency, arose from ideologies as potent as those of any of the great religions of the world, and like these religions, they reshape our conception of “human being” at its foundations.

For Gibson and the punk rocker, this redefinition of humanity must include the irrational and sensual components of the human spirit. As previously mentioned, it is not the machine itself but “the gradual and willing accommodation to the machine” that is the enemy of humanity. So Gibson's fiction and the punk rock movement, while not seeking to stem the flow of our technological advancement and return to a non-technological state, do reach back for images and ideas from our primitive past to compensate for the helter-skelter rush of twentieth-century man into a future of increasing mechanization.

By superimposing a world of primitive myth upon the machine, Gibson in a sense creates a myth within a myth. The notion that we, godlike, can imbue the objects that we create with a sense of our own living spirit—to animate the inanimate and create a new form of “life” based on our own characteristics—is the myth of our own time. The robot, the cyborg and the AI are at once mirrors of our own encroaching mechanization and lights from our Promethean fires. They are ourselves and our children. Gibson, by imbuing his technological world with characteristics of the “primitive,” ensures that his children will still know how to dance in the moonlight. Koestler says in The Ghost in the Machine, “Machines cannot become like men but men can become like machines” (217). Gibson might agree that men can become like machines (in the mechanistic sense), but in a world where the machine can be an extension or perhaps even an enhancement of the human spirit, endowed with mythic qualities, is it so bad to become a machine? Becoming a computer in Gibson's world does not imprison or dehumanize a person. It brings him or her into often frighteningly intimate contact with a mythic world of beings and experiences which have no equivalent in the “real” world.

What all of this suggests to me is that Gibson's technology is ultimately humanizing, not in any idealized, utopian way but in a very human way, with all its contradictions and problems as well as its wonders. “Jacking-in” to cyberspace can allow the ultimate in out-of-body experiences, both demonic and enlightening. Simstim can allow the ultimate in sensory experiences, whether sublime, pornographic, or hideous. Holography can be used to entertain or to manipulate and confuse. Medical technology can be used to miraculously restore life, perpetuate it in a wretched state, or compliment human vanity to the point of the grotesque.

In a word, technology is whatever we make of it—a truism that is nonetheless ignored by those SF writers who wish to believe in technological utopias or dystopias. There will always be marvelous and hideous uses for whatever we make. The myths that we construct to make sense of our technological world tell us a lot about ourselves and very little about technology. The artistic AI in Count Zero, which is the integration of practicality and immortality, says it best: “My songs are of time and distance. The sadness is in you. Watch my arms. There is only the dance. These things you treasure are shells” (227).

Notes

1. By “primitive,” I refer to those cultures, ancient and contemporary, that lack written histories and literature and whose characteristics are therefore known only through the relatively modern sciences of archeology and anthropology. Thus, included with prehistoric cultures are those examples of aboriginal and indigenous cultures that have survived into this century, such as the Native American and the Australian Aborigine. The influence which these primitive mythic patterns have exerted on subsequent myths and religions, including Classical Greece and Christianity, make any clear cut-off point impossible in a discussion of mythic motifs. Indeed, it is one of the central theses of writers like Campbell and Jung that basic mythic patterns are so universally distributed across cultures that their images and concepts must in some way be linked with fundamental human psychology and not soley determined by culture. Still, in terms of Gibson's works, it is possible to differentiate between mythic pattern and specific religious allusion; and while there are both in his works, his emphasis and mine remains on overall patterns and concepts generally defined as “primitive.”

Works Cited

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———. Count Zero. New York: Ace, 1986.

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