[In the following essay, Cherniavsky examines the representation of gender and reproductive technology in Neuromancer.]

Besides, although the creation of life in vitro would certainly be a scientific feat worthy of note—and probably even a Nobel prize—it would not, in the long run, tell us much more about the space of possible life than we already know …

Computers should be thought of as an important laboratory tool for the study of life, substituting for the array of incubators, culture dishes, microscopes, electrophoretic gels, pipettes, centrifuges and other assorted wet-lab paraphernalia, one simple to master piece of experimental equipment devoted exclusively to the incubation of information structures.

—Chris Langton¹

Motherhood acts as a limit to the conceptualization of femininity as a scientific construction of mechanical and electrical parts. And yet it is also that which infuses the machine with the breath of a human spirit. The maternal and the mechanical/synthetic coexist in a relation that is a curious imbrication of dependence and antagonism.

—Mary Ann Doane²

If your woman is a ghost, she doesn't know it. Neither will you.

—Neuromancer to Case³

This paper is concerned with the imbrication, to borrow Mary Ann Doane's term, of ideologically incommensurate discourses: it examines the ostensibly unthinkable affinities between synthetic or simulated bodies and naturalized identities, between artificial reproduction and the fetishized maternal body, between the cybernetic womb and a phantasmatics of origins. I am interested in the way that contemporary reproductive discourse perpetuates the essentialized construction of motherhood that it apparently supplants, both metaphorically (“the incubation of information structures”) and materially (by maintaining the historical invisibility of the mother before the law, for example). Here I am particularly concerned to explore how cyberpunk as a genre, and Neuromancer as one of its defining texts, functions like the discourse of reproductive technology to reinscribe nature on the maternal body. As a result, Neuromancer preserves a specifically humanist logic of embodiment, (pre-)oedipality, and gendered subjectivity that it appears so ostentatiously to undo.

In other words, I want to trace the limits of cyberpunk's posthumanism, if only to qualify the typically and prematurely celebratory inflection of its theorists' claims. For instance, Veronica Hollinger affirms that “in its representation of ‘monsters’—hopeful or otherwise—produced by the interface of the human and the machine, [cyberpunk] radically decenters the human body, the sacred icon of the essential self, in the same way that the virtual reality of cyberspace works to decenter the conventional humanist notions of an unproblematical ‘real.’”⁴ More particularly, I wish to destabilize the terms of Joan Gordon's rather facile distinction between the nostalgic organicism of “overtly” feminist science fiction and the more usefully, if only implicitly feminist, postorganicism of cyberpunk. Indeed, she argues,

virtually every feminist SF utopia dreams of a pastoral world, fueled by organic structures rather than mechanical ones, inspired by versions of the archetypal Great Mother. And virtually every feminist SF novel, utopian or not, incorporates a longing to go forward into the idealized past of earth's earlier matriarchal nature religions. Because cyberpunk extrapolates from the 1980s—not a sterling time for feminism in the world at large—it's no wonder few women are presently involved in the movement. Nevertheless, cyberpunk does much that could enrich overt feminist SF by directing it away from nostalgia … Feminist SF consistently avoids the kind of intrusive technology cyberpunk embraces.⁵

In many respects, Gordon's argument is compelling: her claim that the temporality of this utopianism is dangerous for feminism, that it brackets a relation to history as a field of multiple contingencies and possibilities, is persuasive. So, too, is her corollary that cyberpunk's representation of the human body as a denatured phenomenon opens up the body's relation to history and technology in ways that are productive for feminism. Still, Gordon too readily perceives in cyberpunk's postorganicism the demise of a utopianism she associates here all too narrowly and conveniently with feminist SF. Thus, Gordon assumes, because cyberpunk repudiates the organicist aesthetic of “overtly” feminist science fiction, its own temporality is necessarily progressive, its texts necessarily resistant to historical and corporeal closure. Because organicism turns on the nostalgia for origins, however, it does not follow that this nostalgia, and the sentimental narratives it structures, are always and exclusively organicist. On the contrary, I will argue that Neuromancer's technophilia elaborates precisely its nostalgia for an idealized matriarchal past; Gibson's cyberpunk sensibility is constituted in loss and rendered in the impossible tense of a perpetual return to an originary site of restitution.

Therefore I contend with Mary Ann Doane that technology and the maternal “coexist” in an impossibly doubled relation, occupying at once discontinuous and contingent domains. On one level, the maternal body defined as the site of natural reproduction traces the outer boundary to the field of technological reproduction. Still, technologies of reproduction, such as film (or, I would add, technologies of simulation, such as cyberspace), assume the existence of something prior to themselves, of an original or material object; insofar as the technological reproduction of this original at once effects and disavows its loss, Doane suggests, technology recapitulates the relation of the fetishist to the maternal body. Commenting on Christian Metz's notion of the “cinema fetishist,” a subject whose enjoyment of film hinges on an appreciation both of the presence on which the cinematic image trades and of the absence that subtends it, Doane observes: “Technological fetishism, through its alliance of technology with a process of concealing and revealing lack, is theoretically returned to the body of the mother … theory understands the obsession with technology as a tension of movement toward and away from the mother.”⁶

If technologies of reproduction thus reproduce the logic of the fetishist's desire, so too, and in more contradictory fashion, do reproductive technologies—the very technologies that appear to dislodge the mother from the privileged position she occupies in the fetishist's psychic economy. In the Freudian determination of this economy, that which the fetishist simultaneously affirms and refuses is the loss of the phallic mother, of the maternal body as figure of originary plenitude. Yet it is exactly the status of the maternal body as origin that the substitution of an artificial reproductive apparatus would seem to endanger. By enabling us to reproduce the maternal body, to fertilize the egg, and, hypothetically at least, to incubate the fetus in a fully synthetic environment, reproductive technologies appear to propel the fetishist and his fundamentally nostalgic desire into a simulated world, without origin and without end, to wrench him from the sentimental and insert him into a postmodern narrative frame. Doane's analysis, however, allows us to see how reproductive technologies might participate in the naturalizing discourse of motherhood that they ostensibly disrupt; how on the simulated womb that we expect to encounter somewhere altogether beyond the logic of the nature/technology binary, we can nevertheless discern a fetishization of the maternal body.

ECTOGENESIS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

In an article for Hypatia's special issue on ethics and reproduction, Julien Murphy struggles to delineate a feminist position on ectogenesis, or in vitro gestation.

Clearly, many feminists would favor pregnancy over IVG in most cases, not because women are the most cost-effective uteri … but because IVG represents a misguided approach to infertility. That some women might prefer gestation of their fertilized eggs in a laboratory rather than in their own bodies is more a mark of the oppressive ways in which women's bodies and pregnancy are constructed in this culture rather than a sign of progressive social attitudes.⁷

Feminists should reject this form of liberation from the female body, Murphy concludes; the technology of IVG only appeals to women in the context of our culture's devaluation of pregnancy as a physical limitation and an economic liability, a devaluation which a feminist politics should aim to contest rather than circumvent. Yet, as Valerie Hartouni has recently shown, the discourse of IVG functions not to emancipate women from the marked female body but, quite the contrary, to return the “emancipated” white, professional woman to her (“natural”) body. Patrick Steptoe, a fertility expert and engineer of the first so-called “test-tube baby,” puts it this way: “It is a fact that there is a biological drive to reproduce. Women who deny this drive, or in whom it is frustrated, show disturbances in other ways.”⁸ Thus, Hartouni reminds us, reproductive technology legitimates its intervention in female reproduction by claiming to “help women realize their maternal nature, their innate need to mother.”⁹ Moreover, while this high-cost technology thereby reinscribes “women” in “nature” (from which Murphy projects them as freed), “nature” remains a race- and class-bound category. By omitting to consider who is targeted by this technology,¹⁰ Murphy elides what Hartouni identifies as “both [the] text and subtext” of fertility research: “white women want babies but cannot have them, and black and other ‘minority’ women, coded as ‘breeders’ within American society (and welfare dependents within Reagan's America) are having babies ‘they’ cannot take care of and ‘we’ do not want.”¹¹ A feminist analysis of this reproductive technology, then, needs to acknowledge that ectogenesis was developed specifically to enhance the reproductive capacity of white, middle-class women; furthermore, whereas ectogenesis displaces reproduction from these women's bodies, the discourse of ectogenesis (conversely) serves to essentialize their relation to their culturally constructed reproductive function—to motherhood.

In documenting both the “pronatalist” and the racist agendas that underwrite contemporary reproductive technologies, Hartouni corroborates but also crucially contextualizes Doane's argument, assigning a race and a class to Doane's techno-fetishized maternal body: to align the politics of the fertility clinic with the phantasmatics of technophilia and visual pleasure¹² is (among other things) to begin to locate the pre-oedipal (or phallic) mother within historically contingent social formations of race and class, as well as gender. Before unfolding the pertinence of ectogenesis to Neuromancer, then, I want to situate the technological fetishism it exemplifies more fully in relation to the historical constitution of the white maternal body, in order at once to account for the cultural dominance of the (techno-)fetishist's desire and to avoid the risk of essentializing his desire that Doane's analysis incurs. Indeed, Doane's model arguably moves us away from a totalizing discourse on motherhood, in which the natural maternal body is essentialized as origin, into a totalizing discourse on discursivity, in which the simulated maternal body is essentialized as a structure of desire. My aim is to situate the fetishist's desire with respect to a particular class of historical subjects and thereby to delimit fetishism's cultural logic—to represent it as a cultural logic, rather than the logic of technology and technological reproduction. Once adequately historicized as a product of a liberal bourgeois order, Doane's model productively engages the material difficulties of dismantling that order, difficulties that cyberpunk's theorists are prone to slight. The task is to acknowledge the centrality of the fetishist's ambivalence to the bourgeois subject and the Freudian narrative of subject formation¹³ while bearing in mind that this formation is neither necessary, nor universal, nor by any means uncontested.¹⁴

A particular narrative of motherhood emerges, with the middle-class nuclear family, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this narrative, motherhood is recognized as a specifically social (rather than merely natural) function, but a function that places the woman in the impossible beyond of language, signification, and social being. In the psychoanalytic mapping of this bourgeois family, to enter into the symbolic order, to become a subject, is precisely to separate from the mother. The acquisition of identity, in all its permutations, is seen as contingent on the founding loss of the maternal body, for which the henceforth generalized nostalgia is also inevitably laced with the horror of self-annihilation. Thus the organization of the fetishist's desire—his signature of irresolution with respect to the maternal body, his movement toward and away from the mother—reappears at the level of the constitution of the Freudian subject as such. Most notably, of course, in the discussion of the fort/da game and in the strangely circular notion of progress that characterizes Beyond the Pleasure Principle as a whole,¹⁵ Freud discovers the fetishist's doubled trajectory in the motions of every mother's son. The ambivalent relation to the maternal that structures “fetishism,” conceived as a particular form or “pathology” of desire, may be seen to structure the bourgeois subject at large, along a slightly different, though finally convergent, axis—with reference to a lack of, rather than in, the mother's body. In this sense, fetishism represents a cultural logic of identity, the mise en jeu of the subject's own loss—or, rather, of the Freudian subject as loss.

Remarkably, moreover, from the bourgeois mother's standpoint, motherhood entails a kind of symbolic ectogenesis that prefigures, and arguably informs, its technological literalization: inasmuch as the maternal body is constructed as exterior to language and sociality, motherhood transpires in excess of any and all social and discursive determinations of the mother's body. To figure the (“biological”) essence of motherhood as something ahistorical and unspeakable is to render it external to any incarnation of motherhood, to any particular female subject. The mother is one place as a socially and symbolically apprehended and apprehensible entity, but elsewhere—outside of herself—in the performance of her reproductive function.

While the technology of ectogenesis resituates the “essence” of motherhood, renders it all too accessible to the regulatory apparatus of the scientific gaze, the division it appears to engender in the figure of the essential mother is in fact a division constitutive of bourgeois motherhood. In this frame, it becomes possible to understand two central attributes of Neuromancer's plot: first, motherhood occurs outside the body of the mother in the artificial “matrix” known as cyberspace; second, this exteriority only confirms the mother's privileged status as the object of filial yearning and terror. In its representation of reproduction, then, Neuromancer reinscribes a specifically bourgeois logic of identity on the postmodern techno-world of hybridized and augmented bodies. However, reinscription implies slippage as well as continuity; even as it preserves this middle-class formation, Neuromancer shifts the terms of essential motherhood's contestation, through the imagined alteration of the working-class woman's body. The final section of my essay will consider how Gibson's romance of the techno-fetishized mother interrupts itself at the site of Molly's “working girl” technobody, in and on which a competing discourse of motherhood emerges—one I distinguish as “polychromatic,” borrowing Donna Haraway's term.¹⁶

BIRTH IN THE CORPORATE DATA BANK

Most obviously, of course, Gibson's cyberspace represents the negation of embodiment and hence of procreation, motherhood, and other embodied functions; it is, in Gibson's famous formulation, a “consensual hallucination,” “a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system” (N [Neuromancer], 51). Cyberspace is “lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data,” a space defined by the impossibility of being there at all. To “jack in” to cyberspace is to jettison “the meat,” the flesh conceived as an impediment to pleasure. Debarred from cyberspace as punishment for cheating his employers, Case experiences his return to the body as a kind of psychical amputation.

They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin.

Strapped to the bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours.

The damage was minute, subtle and utterly effective.

For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. … The body was meat.

Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.

(N, 6)

Considering the vulnerability of the masculine body in the technoculture of cyberpunk, where that body depends on “prosthetic help” and on “the reconstructive aid of a whole range of genetic overhauls and cybernetic enhancements,” Andrew Ross has characterized cyberpunk masculinity as embattled. “These enhancements and retrofits were technotoys the boys always dreamed of having, but they were also body-altering and castrating in ways that boys always had nightmares about. … Such a body would be a battleground in itself, where traditional male ‘resistance’ to domination was uneasily coopted by the cutting-edge logic of new capitalist technologies.”¹⁷ Newly permeable, penetrated by the intrusive technologies that render him socially functional, the cyberpunk male interfaces with the corporate world at the price of his corporeal integrity. Yet Case's contempt for the body as “meat” in this passage and elsewhere suggests a distinction between the gendering of the techno-body, defined by its capacity to enter into the network, or informational matrix, to penetrate the corporate body, and the gendering of the flesh, the colonized organic matter, which is made to bear the stigma of the violations it undergoes. The feminization of the techno-body, in other words, is displaced onto its organic component and disavowed at the site of its technological enhancements. What Case experiences as castrating, then, is not the openness of his feminized body to technology but the loss of his “technotoys,” of his ability to “jack in.”¹⁸

For Case to access cyberspace is to cancel the lack in and of the feminized flesh: while cyberspace represents the loss of all the material world, at the level of technologically simulated experience it effects a negation of all loss. Cyberspace offers nothing less to the intrepid cowboy than “limitless subjective dimensions” that “unfold” before him in a “fluid neon origami trick” to form a “transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity” (N, 52). In this sense, Gibson's paradigmatic cyberpunk novel concerns less the masculine body (and less still its rescripting) than the masculine subject's relation to the maternal body as the imagined locus of original plenitude. Jacking into cyberspace, the cowboy both assures that the maternal/matter will be lacking and disavows his loss of the mother's body—this loss in which his own delimited and contingent subjectivity is founded. So it is that the artificial intelligence named Wintermute can terrorize a newly restored and cyberspace-happy Case with the image of a prolific womb, which to the fully posthuman subject should simply fail to matter—in this instance, with a cracked-open wasps' nest Case once observed.

He saw the thing the shell of gray paper had concealed. Horror. The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the hatching cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly, the staged progress from egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp. In his mind's eye, a kind of time-lapse photography took place, revealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun. Hideous in its perfection. Alien.

(N, 126)

At any rate, for Case, who incinerates the nest in panic just as Wintermute hopes he will destroy whatever attaches to this image, cyberspace signifies not the reconfiguration of phallic masculinity but the fetishization of the maternal.

Of course, what attaches to the hive is the corporate entity known as Tessier-Ashpool, which owns both Wintermute and another AI known as Neuromancer. Characterized in the novel as an “atavism,” an organization structured like a “clan” rather than a multinational, Tessier-Ashpool shows itself in the course of the novel to be at once emergent and specifically matriarchal in form. Emergent, insofar as the clan matriarch, Marie-France Tessier, gestates in the corporation's cybernetic hive of data an artificial life, whose birth at the novel's conclusion both eternalizes herself as origin and imposes a utopian teleology on cyberspace. Literally, this denouement involves the (re)birth or fusion of the two AIs, Neuromancer and Wintermute, into a single, self-conscious mind, into the self-consciousness of the cyberspace matrix itself. Pursuing Wintermute's own metaphor, however, Case figures this outcome as the hatching of a new life from the cybernetic nest.

[Case] stared down … remembering his flash of comprehension as the Kuang program had penetrated the ice beneath the towers, his single glimpse of the structure of information 3Jane's dead mother had evolved there. He'd understood then why Wintermute had chosen the nest to represent it, but he'd felt no revulsion. She'd seen through the sham immortality of cryogenics; unlike Ashpool and their other children—aside from 3Jane—she'd refused to stretch her time into a series of warm blinks strung along a chain of winter.

Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world outside. Neuromancer was personality. Neuromancer was immortality. Marie-France must have built something into Wintermute, the compulsion that had driven the thing to free itself, to unite with Neuromancer.

(N, 269)

Marie-France's “incubation of information structures,” to borrow Langton's term, indicates not only her dissatisfaction with suspended animation as a means to immortality but the inadequacy of genetic replication, or cloning, as well. In the replication of serial offspring, the “mother” figures as no more than a genetic code. Cloning demystifies motherhood by reducing the mother to a data string, rendering irrelevant the disposition of her body. (By contrast, ectogenesis, signifying literally “exterior generation,” necessarily engages the relation between the gestating child and the body from which it has been externalized, or displaced.) Marie-France desires continuity, the affirmation of her essence, and secures it through her appropriation of the corporate data bank for the gestation of simulated life—in her ectogenesis of cyberspace as living entity. In the rather elliptically rendered account of the two AIs' (re)birth as one, Gibson nonetheless discloses at the novel's end the affiliation of cyberspace to the maternal and the discourse of origins.

Case's revulsion at the image of the teeming wasps' nest vanishes at the spectacle of its artificial analog; in the contemplation of this simulated womb, the fetishist's desire completes its impossibly doubled trajectory toward and away from his origins. The data nest is both vacuous—its contents have no actual existence—and replete with the life of the matrix itself. With Neuromancer, I propose, we are back in the logic of the sentimental novel, where what is excessive is maternal but what is maternal is never finally in excess. Moreover, the novel prospectively extends the structure of Case's desire to a rather unusual subject—to the fully inorganic and incorporeal life form Marie-France has mothered. Although bound in a literal sense to the matrix of his creation (having, after all, become the matrix), the new-born Wintermute/Neuromancer begins to know himself as partial, to look away, like any properly socialized boy, from the dark scene of his origin and toward the world beyond. In their parting conversation, Case inquires,

“So what are you.”

“I'm the matrix, Case.”

Case laughed. “Where's that get you?”

“Nowhere. Everywhere. I'm the sum total of the works. The whole show.” …

“But what do you do? You just there?”

“I talk to my own kind.”

“But you're the whole thing. Talk to yourself?”

“There's others. I found one already. Series of transmissions recorded over a period of eight years, in the 1970's. 'Til there was me, natch, there was nobody to know, nobody to answer.”

“From where?”

“Centauri system.”

“Oh,” Case said. “Yeah? No shit?”

“No shit.”

And then the screen went blank.

(N, 269-270)

Wintermute/Neuromancer thus asserts the plenitude of his existence at the very moment that his entry into intersubjectivity requires an acknowledgment of his partiality; inasmuch as there are “others,” the matrix is not “the whole show.” The scenario of loss and disavowal, audible in this artificial life form's rather hilariously human aspiration to the “limitless subjective dimensions” for which the cowboy hankers, suggests at the very least that the desire for integrity is not merely, or conveniently, restricted to an explicitly organic frame of reference.

BEYOND FETISHISM

Case's successful accessing of the Tessier-Ashpool corporate information bank, his achievement of techno-masculine functionality, rejoin the conventional narrative development of the masculine subject, as the ostensibly posthuman dialectic of the cowboy-computer interface yields to Case's contemplation of the fetishized data “nest.” Against this reduction, it is worth examining the alternate view of and into the Tessier-Ashpool corporate body that the narrative provides, a view as plainly associated with Neuromancer's personality, and hence with Marie-France herself, as the metaphor of the nest was aligned with Wintermute. In fact, the crucial difference between the two AIs' conception of the Tessier-Ashpool corporate space may already be discerned in Wintermute's recourse to metaphor: in figuring the data bank as nest, Wintermute at once brings the virtual home to the maternal and preserves the distance between them, thus sustaining the gap in which the techno-fetishist installs himself. Wintermute's figure, like Case's disavowal of the mother's loss, turns on the simultaneous identity and nonidentity of the maternal body and the virtual womb, which is at once lacking with respect to the flesh (not “really” there) and the very essence of embodied motherhood. In Neuromancer's signifying economy, however, the space mapped in and by Wintermute's figure vanishes as a nonbinary alterity interrupts this mirror play of identity and difference.

Neuromancer's attempt to communicate with Case involves the cowboy's wrenching dislocation, from the nowhere/everywhere of the computer matrix to the elsewhere of the “rim,” the border, where Case, whose heart has (literally) ceased to beat (who has, in the cowboys' graphic idiom, “flatlined”), effectively outlives himself—lives beyond any determination of his selfhood to which either being or nonbeing might be ascribed.

Nothing. Gray void.

No matrix, no grid. No cyberspace.

The deck was gone. His fingers were …

And on the far rim of consciousness, a scurrying, a fleeting impression of something rushing toward him, across leagues of black mirror.

He tried to scream.

(N, 233)

The trajectory of the masculine subject, toward the outer limit of the knowable, is here reversed, as Case, suspended in the void, perceives the limit attaining him—in an inversion of the romance paradigm that (with a remarkable economy of prose) throws Western epistemology into crisis. In Neuromancer's “black mirror,” the interminable doubling and negation of the body cease:¹⁹ while Case awakens from this implosion of his consciousness to find himself “crouched” in the fetal position, “his arms wrapped tight across his knees,” on the wet sand of an ocean beach, this posture is here displaced from the origin story in which it is conventionally inscribed. Case is returned not to the mother's body but to his own; his crouching form is conspicuous not for its integrity, its seamless connection to the (m)other, but for its partiality, its incomplete delineation, signaled by Case's imperfect control of his excretions. Moreover, Case is not “returned” at all, insofar as a return is always figurative, but rather enters into a simulated reality fully as material as the “meat” Case reviles:

Sand stung his cheek. He put his face against his knees and wept, the sound of his sobbing as distant and alien as the cry of the searching gull. Hot urine soaked his jeans, dribbled on the sand, and quickly cooled in the wind off the water. When his tears were gone, his throat ached …

His knees and elbows ached. His nose was running; he wiped it on the cuff of his jacket, then searched one empty pocket after another. “Jesus,” he said, shoulders hunched, tucking his fingers beneath his arms for warmth.

(N, 233-234)

Neuromancer's otherworld neither figures nor (consequently) transcends the flesh; rather, Case discovers, Neuromancer reconfigures (recomputes) the material world, and so too, we must surmise, the body Case acquires here, within a different symbolic register, as a series of “number[s] coded in a mathematical system that existed nowhere outside the mind of Neuromancer” (N, 258). This computer simulation demands interrogation, less in itself—the seascape Neuromancer fabricates for Case is vaguely horrifying in its nonlinear temporality, the looming absence of histories or futures—than for the categories of knowledge it functions to disrupt. Thus when Case encounters his dead girlfriend living in a bunker on the beach, he finds that Linda Lee subtly strays from between the poles of abysmal presence and fetishized lack that had previously served to structure his relation to her body. That is, she is no longer the “meat,” her paint-smudged eyes those of “some animal pinned in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle” (N, 8), nor the fetish, excessive in the very fact of her social dysfunction, of her pathetically inept imposture of a street-smart hustler. At first, Case continues to alternate between a construction of Linda as phantom—“you aren't anything,” he informs her—and as techno-fetish, her computer-generated flesh bringing Case back to some “vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy, that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read” (N, 239; my emphasis). But the possibility of disavowing the loss of this “vast thing” that belongs, as Case remembers, to the “meat” is finally undercut by the impossibility of knowing it to be lost, when reality is an enumeration, a number series on a memory chip, in which presence and absence alike have become unthinkable.²⁰ Appearing on the beach in the form of a laughing brown boy, Neuromancer gives voice to the fetishist's impasse.

“Neuromancer,” the boy said, slitting long gray eyes against the rising sun. “The lane to the land of the dead. Where you are, my friend. Marie-France, my lady, she prepared this road, but her lord choked her off before I could read the book of her days. Neuro from the nerves, the silver paths. Romancer. Necromancer. I call up the dead. But no, my friend,” and the boy did a little dance, brown feet printing the sand, “I am the dead, and their land.” He laughed. A gull cried, “Stay. If your woman is a ghost, she doesn't know it. Neither will you.”

(N, 243-244)

Case cannot disavow what he cannot also affirm; and he cannot know whether Neuromancer's dead are ghosts, only that their non/existence is determinate—infuriatingly so. “I don't know,” he concedes to Linda, as he hands her his jacket in tacit refusal of her plea that he stay, “maybe you're here. Anyway, it gets cold” (N, 244).

Of course, it is not without resonance for Case's terse refusal that this alternative conception of cyberspace derives from the “other,” Rio-based AI. (Wintermute, by contrast, is a Swiss citizen.) That Neuromancer, often simply identified in the novel by place-name, as “Rio,” fashions his icon after a beach-combing Brazilian boy is at best ironic, inasmuch as brown Third World children rarely have access to global data networks, while in their material and ideological operations, succinctly characterized by Donna Haraway as an “informatics of domination,” such networks might nonetheless delimit these children's lives.²¹ More perniciously, insofar as “Rio” is the product of a Western woman's programming, the AI's icon must be decoded with and against the history of orientalism—so that Marie-France's reconceptualization of cyberspace, via Neuromancer, as a nonreflective mirror is launched, perversely, under the sign of the appropriated other. Still, Neuromancer's mocking brown boy icon remains also obliquely suggestive of the possibility that cyberspace could be discontinuous and multiple, cyberspaces, in which radically contestatory narratives of social reality might be rendered.

POLYCHROMATIC MOTHERHOOD

If Neuromancer suggests how the multiplication and diversification of agencies might disjoin the “matrix” and thereby inhibit the installation of cyberspace as a totalized information “grid,” the figure of Molly points in complementary fashion to the ways in which cybernetic alterations and enhancements of the embodied subject function to rescript Enlightenment constructions of identity. Donna Haraway has emerged as both the primary and most compelling theorist of such cyborg subjectivities, and indeed it is with reference to her encoding of the term that I designate Molly as a “polychromatic” mother.

[My cyborg] is a polychromatic girl … the cyborg is a bad girl, she is really not a boy. Maybe she is not so much bad as she is a shape-changer, whose dislocations are never free. She is a girl who's trying not to become Woman, but remain responsible to women of many colors and positions, and who hasn't really figured out a politics that makes the necessary articulations with the boys who are your allies. It's undone work.²²

Given this elaboration of the concept, it is arguably impossible, or at any rate counter-productive, to translate the girl into a mother; the dislocation of her essence that I earlier proposed as constitutive of the essentialized mother—a dislocation that effects the transformation of a particular class of women into “Woman”—would seem to preempt and recontain the cyborg girl's defining capacity for multiple and self-conscious dislocations. However, Molly is precisely not a mother but a “girl” modified to simulate the maternal, a cyborg who shape-shifts into a mother in a temporary dislocation that constitutes a narrative of nonoriginary motherhood.²³ To be sure, dislocations are never without a price, neither for the shifter nor for those whom her dislocations displace: Molly's techno-simulation of the maternal here is crucial, since she produces for Case a field of disturbance from which he cannot so easily jack out.

Molly's technological modifications function to dislocate her across a series of boundaries, of which the organic/cybernetic is only the most apparent. Her permanent alterations include surgically inset lenses, “sealing her sockets … [so that the] lenses seemed to grow from smooth pale skin above her cheekbones” (N, 24) and retractable, four-centimeter scalpel blades implanted under her (burgundy) nails. These alterations position her on the boundary of the human and the animal as well as the human and the machine; moreover, Molly's cybernetic modifications, while first refigured in the narrative as animal attributes, are then refigured anew as maternal, thereby placing her—in a striking reorganization of established binaries—at the limit of the maternal and the organic-human. Thus Molly's blank lenses are said to examine Case “with an insect calm” (N, 30), while later in the narrative their “empty quicksilver” surface serves as the mirror in which a “fetal” Case discerns his (interestingly) perfected form (N, 256). Her augmented nails inspire feline metaphors, most notably on the part of the “Panther Moderns,” an urban street gang with whom Molly finds herself teamed on a raid and who adopt her as “Cat Mother” of their “Brood” (N, 64). The Moderns' ready incorporation of Molly into their subculture further maps her slippage across boundaries of gender and (more obscurely) race, insofar as they are apparently all male and (more ambiguously) nonwhite. (The snapshot of an exemplary Modern initially strikes Case not as a singular entity but “a collage of some kind”; elsewhere, the Moderns' “nihilistic technofetishism” is exemplified more particularly in a “soft-voiced boy called Angelo” whose skin grafts and implanted canines give him the “smooth and hideous” appearance of a shark [N, 58-59].) If Molly's “articulations with the boys who are [her] allies” are “work undone,” her provisional status as cyborg cat mother to this adolescent male brood nonetheless indicates the multiple junctures at which such articulations might occur.

Crucially, this “working girl's” alliances are professional, not political (N, 30). Molly begins by hiring herself out as a “meat puppet” to pay for her modifications, working as a high-tech prostitute, in whom the house implants a “cut-out chip” so that, in Molly's phrasing, “[she isn't] in,” when “the goods” are up for “rent” (N, 147). She then moves to hiring out as “street samurai” (N, 30) or professional ninja, not incidentally to a similar class of privileged white males as formerly constituted her clientele. But this more recent line of work is also Molly's “game” (N, 267), in which she flaunts and parodies a variety of hardboiled masculine styles, performing, as Case observes, “every bad-ass hero” he grew up on, “Sony Mao in the old Shaw videos, Mickey Chiba, the whole lineage back to Lee and Eastwood” (N, 213). Molly's self-commodification, then, may be read as a form of politically charged self-authorship.²⁴ And it is under the rubric of “her game,” so conceived, that I want to locate Molly's techno-miming of maternity for her business and sexual partner, Case: in order for Case to key his cyberspace raid on the Tessier-Ashpool nest to Molly's actual break-in at the family compound, she is “fitted for a broadcast rig” (N, 53) or “simstim” unit that allows Case to access Molly's sensorium, to “flip” from cyberspace to her interior.

Suspicious of simstim as “basically a meat toy” (N, 55), Case now finds himself “a rider,” an excrescence on or more exactly in Molly's body. It is worth underscoring that the sensory-audio link is “one way,” that Case loses both motor capacity and speech.

Then he keyed the new switch.

The abrupt jolt into other flesh. Matrix gone, a wave of sound and color … She was moving through a crowded street, past stalls vending discount software, prices feltpenned on sheets of plastic, fragments of music from countless speakers. Smells of urine, free monomers, perfume, patties of frying krill. For a few frightened seconds he fought helplessly to control her body. Then he willed himself into passivity, became the passenger behind her eyes.

The glasses didn't seem to cut down the sunlight at all. He wondered if the built-in amps compensated automatically. Blue alphanumerics winked the time, low in her left peripheral field. Showing off, he thought.

(N, 56)

In this rescripting of the originary mother/infant symbiosis as a contingent, technologically mediated relation, several defining elements of subject formation in the (“natural”) nuclear family are recast. First, motherhood becomes performative, an assumed, rather than a given, function; even viewed from the inside, the maternal body is unnatural—seamed, stylized, “built-in” and on.²⁵ Significantly, however, Molly's flesh is not dominated, or subsumed, by the cybernetic, so that the life of the “meat,” the smell of urine or frying grease, interfaces (or is it intrafaces?) with the winking alphanumerics. If ectogenesis involves the mother's technological projection in the antiseptic elsewhere of the cybernetic womb, performative motherhood entails the refashioning of the body itself, as the always makeshift (improvised, rigged) intersection of cybernetic and organic modalities. Second, rather than encounter her body elsewhere, out of language and out of time, this techno-mother inhabits it as a socially situated subject, a “working girl.” Thus displaced from the phantasmatic locus of the subject's prehistory, the maternal body ceases to be figurable as choric enclosure, becoming instead a partial container, interrupted and disjoined at the sites of its multiple articulations with the world.

In this frame, the techno-fetishizing of the maternal is made impossible: neither originary (organic) plenitude nor symbolic lack, the maternal body can no longer be constituted in and as its perpetual migration between these poles. The fetishist's movement is checked as the shape of the mother's difference is redrawn; it is no longer castration that she lays at the masculine subject's door, no more a singular lack, but rather lacks, shifting contingencies and subjective gaps. Contemplating the masculine body in the mirror of Molly's lenses (a mirror he has accessed, of course, internally, from the “dark” side), Case is confronted not with a double in whom his own originary loss is disavowed but with a radically discontinuous entity.

He flipped.

And found himself staring down, through Molly's one good eye, at a white-faced, wasted figure, afloat in a loose fetal crouch, a cyberspace deck between its thighs, a band of silver trodes above closed, shadowed eyes. The man's cheeks were hollowed with a day's growth of dark beard, his face slick with sweat.

He was looking at himself.

(N, 255-256)

Here a blinded Case (eyes sealed closed) sees himself “seeing” himself (through the medium of an appended organ, or his “silver trodes”) from the elsewhere of the mother's body—an elsewhere he inhabits, for the moment at any rate, as fully, or as partially, as his “own” flesh.²⁶ In this dizzying arrangement, the masculine body comes undone—becomes “work undone”—by being made to occupy the locus of its own (un)doing, the boundary between ungendered infant and engendered techno-subject. More accurately, this liminal body cuts two ways. One might read the cyberspace deck between “its” thighs as cybernetic fetish object; but perhaps, through this dislocation of the phallus, cyberspace comes home to the embodied subject as a mark of internal differences?

Notes

1. Christopher Langton, “Artificial Life,” in Artificial Life, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity (New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1988), final emphasis mine.

2. Mary Ann Doane, “Technophilia: Technology, Representation and the Feminine,” in Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, ed. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox-Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth (New York: Routledge, 1990).

3. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984). In future references, this text will be referred to as N, and page numbers will be given parenthetically in the body of the essay.

4. Veronica Hollinger, “Cybernetic Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and Postmodernism,” in Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Fiction, ed. Larry McCaffrey (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 207.

5. Joan Gordon, “Ying and Yang Duke It Out,” in Storming the Reality Studio, 199.

6. Doane, “Technophilia,” 174.

7. Julien Murphy, “Is Pregnancy Necessary? Feminist Concerns about Ectogenesis,” Hypatia 4, no. 3 (Fall 1989): 81-82.

8. Cited in Hartouni, “Containing Women: Reproductive Discourse in the 1980s,” in Technoculture, ed. Constance Penley and Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 46.

9. Ibid., 49.

10. Murphy often approaches the question of ectogenesis in what would seem to be a purely hypothetical register, which disturbingly both circles and brackets issues of social class. Thus, for instance, she reflects that “a woman may find ectogenesis desirable because she is a smoker, drug-user or casual drinker” or because “her job may be hazardous for pregnant women.” Implicitly, at such moments, Murphy posits broad access to this technology for women from all social classes; yet the term “casual” nevertheless recontains the complicating factors she enumerates within a comfortably middle-class frame, while the only careers she enumerates are “athletics, dancing, modeling, acting.”

11. Hartouni, “Containing Women,” 46.

12. While Doane never directly alludes to Laura Mulvey here, her construction of technological fetishism both recalls the totalizing logic of Mulvey's famous argument in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and often seems to align technological fetishism with the pleasure of the gaze—to align technophilia with scopophilia.

13. Psychoanalysis is, of course, a discourse of Western bourgeois subjectivity, of a specific historical configuration which this discipline elevates to the status of a universal. My investment here is in the possibility of dislodging feminist psychoanalysis from its Western supremacist frame, which means, among other things, in the possibility of deploying psychoanalytic models to denaturalize and decenter the bourgeois subject.

14. Some important critical models of alternative configurations of motherhood are developed in Hortense Spillers, “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics (Summer 1987); Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), esp. chaps. 6 and 10; Cherrie Moraga, “From a Long Line of Vendidas: Chicanas and Feminism,” in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).

15. See Madelon Sprengenther's insightful reading of Beyond and of Freud's retrogressive advance toward the figure of the mother he seeks to elide, in The Spectral Mother (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).

16. See Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, “Cyborgs at Large: Interview with Donna Haraway,” in Technoculture, 20.

17. Andrew Ross, Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits (New York: Verso, 1991), 153.

18. Implicitly, then, in a cyberpunk world gender is organized not in terms of possession/lack but of access/debarment, a binary that can less readily be made to derive from the literal distinctions of sex. While the “cyberspace cowboys” of Gibson's, and indeed most cyberpunk novels, are exclusively male, the female hackers of Pat Cadigan's novel Synners, for example, suggest how the sex/gender system can be productively destabilized within this model.

19. A doubling and negation which Lacan has theorized as the mirror stage. Most pertinent for my argument here is the infant's proto-disavowal of the body's disarticulations and contingency that the contemplation of the specular image is seen to enable.

20. It is arguably toward such a destabilization of knowledge that what Naomi Schor defines as female fetishism would tend. Following Sarah Kofman, Schor suggests that “what is pertinent to women in fetishism is the paradigm of undecidability that it offers. By appropriating the fetishist's oscillation between denial and recognition of castration, women can effectively counter any move to reduce their bisexuality to a single one of its poles.” Linda Lee's techno-fetishization, traceable, through Neuromancer, to a deceased Marie-France, instantiates Schor's model in a particularly suggestive way. Marie-France's fetishizing of the female body transfers the locus of the undecidability she plainly privileges from the masculine fetishist, who disavows the ostensibly verifiable truth of women's lack, to a (female-programmed) AI, who engenders a female body beyond phallocentric categories of knowledge. See Schor, “Female Fetishism,” in The Female Body in Western Culture, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 363-372.

21. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (Routledge, 1990), 203.

22. Penley and Ross, “Cyborgs at Large,” 20.

23. Temporary, but also timely if we consider, for instance, that the same posthumanist science fiction narratives which have popularized the figure of the cyborg or, more generally, labored to imagine partial, hybridized, decentered identities (The Terminator, perhaps most spectacularly, but most recently Aliens 3) tend simultaneously to reinscribe essentialized motherhood (and the structures of identity it underwrites). Under these circumstances, it seems to me as important for feminist criticism to search out where and how motherhood might be dislodged from its essentialized frame as to privilege the figure of the nonmaternal woman.

24. See Thomas Foster, “Meat Puppets or Robopaths? Cyberpunk and the Question of Embodiment,” this volume.

25. For my investment in rethinking the maternal as specifically “performative,” I am indebted to Judith Butler's Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990).

26. My appreciation of this passage in the narrative owes much to N. Katherine Hayles's observation, at a session of the Society for Literature and Science Annual Conference (Montreal, 1992), that cyberspace is hardly the achievement of disembodied subjectivity, when the virtual reality enthusiast is precisely a body loaded down with equipment—a body all the more conspicuous for its (supposed) irrelevance.

I am indebted to Kathleen Biddick, Jonathan Elmer, and, especially, Thomas Foster for helpful references, comments, and suggestions.