SOURCE: Grant, Glenn. “Transcendence through Detournement in William Gibson's Neuromancer.” Science-Fiction Studies 17, no. 1 (March 1990): 41-9.

[In the following essay, Grant discusses the theme of transcendence through technology in Neuromancer.]

1. PEOPLE AS SYSTEMS

Cyberspace. Simstim. Meat puppets. Prosthetic limbs, cranial sockets, and mimetic polycarbon. The vivid and bizarre details of William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) tumble off the page like the jump-cut images of music videos, hallucinations, nightmares. Disturbing, distorted figures walk this cityscape, people who imitate machines, machines that imitate people. …

Many readers find themselves thrashing about in this chaotic environment, seeking a pattern that will decode the message, separate signal from noise. Some critics accuse the author of dealing only in surfaces, of presenting merely a facade of hipness. But there are intelligible themes hiding here, stored in the data-structures of the Tessier-Ashpool intelligences, encoded in the auto-destructive behavior of Gibson's characters, inherent in his flashy prose-collage technique. Not surprisingly, his central concerns are cybernetic: human memory and personality, considered as information. People as systems.

Systems become a problem, it seems, when they become closed and entropic, and when they become unstable and break down. Humans need to avoid these tropes, to “jump out of the system,” wherever possible. By whatever means necessary.

2. SOLID MEMORIES

Gibson has stated it clearly. “On the most basic level, computers in my books are simply a metaphor for human memory, the ways it defines who and what we are, in [sic] how easily it's subject to revision” (McCaffery: 224).

So here's Case, a product of the Sprawl, a cyber jockey, who identifies himself completely with what he does. His relationships with others are mostly a matter of deals, sales, thefts, fences, the transactions of his “biz.” But his nerves have been damaged by toxins, so that cyberspace—the matrix that gives his life meaning—has been stolen from him. He tries to recreate cyberspace with drugs: “in some weird and very approximate way, it was like a run in the matrix. Get just wasted enough … and all about you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh in the mazes of the black market” (1:16).

But drugs cannot duplicate the disembodiment of cyberspace, which is the freedom he craves; and the encumbrance of “the meat,” his “case” of flesh, leaves him with only his self-loathing. Death is the last remaining escape hatch. He tries to deny his feelings for Linda Lee, because these feelings are associated with the flesh from which he is seeking release (“All the meat … and all it wants” [1: 9]). His feelings threaten to anchor him to this life, to prevent his achievement of ekstasis (as the Greeks called “the flight of the soul from the body”).

His memories—of a violent youth, of years of training with McCoy Pauly, of the matrix—have made him what he is. But because he is denied the addictive pseudo-ekstasis of the matrix, these memories have programmed him for self-destruction.

Memories shape one's being—data made flesh. This pattern repeats: in the Finn's warren, the accumulated fallout of the past piles up against the walls, books and magazines, vacuum-tube TVs, dead circuit boards. Everyone comes to the Finn, for a go-to on a mysterious name or to find some obscure bit of software. Thus, METRO HOLOGRAFIX is the “holographic memory” of the electronic age, filling up the floors with its material traces. In Chiba City, Julius Deane's Import-Export office serves the same purpose—the smell of ginger triggering specific memories of previous eras. …

Then there's the Jarre de Thé Cafe: “decorated in a nameless, dated style. … but everything seemed to wear a subtle film, as though the bad nerves of a million customers had somehow attacked the mirrors and the glossy plastics, leaving each surface fogged with something that could never be wiped away” (1:9). Experience leaves an almost solid residue of memories.

There is a constant tension between these permanent traces, the “engrams” that shape one's being, and the desire to change that being, or to escape it. This seems to be an innate (programmed) drive in each of Gibson's characters, the drive to transcend the self.

3. TO KILL DEATH

“I do hurt people sometimes, Case. I guess it's just the way I'm wired” (1:23). Like Case, Molly is also in a dance with death; not wagering her mental software against black ICE or amphetamines, but instead throwing herself into physical combat. She takes a kind of feral pleasure in it, having become emotionally adjusted to what she is, comfortable with herself (but only apparently).

“Anybody any good at what they do, that's what they are, right? You gotta jack, I gotta tussle” (3:50). Molly's upbringing is shadowy, a poor squatter's life; but it seems to have programmed her with the need to transcend death metaphorically by killing it, by destroying certain ninja assassins, the incarnations of death (“He had it in him, death, this silence, he gave it off in a cloud. …” [15:177]). She also takes pleasure in killing certain sadistic individuals, such as Peter Riviera. A contradiction: What is it about Riviera that makes him so different from her? Does she hate him because he is a reflected image of her own sadistic nature? Perhaps a clue is to be found in Molly's treatment of Terzibashjian, Riviera's friend in the Turkish secret police. “Run into you again and I'll kill you” (7:94), she tells him, revealing her special hatred for cops and politicians. Apparently, it is one thing to use your violent nature for personal gain, as a freelance street-samurai, but something else to turn it to political ends, in the service of Orwellian governments. Better to jump out of that system, rather than serve it.

4. THE STREET FINDS ITS OWN USES FOR THINGS

How does one transcend one's human limitations? Through religion? Meditation? Community action? These have been ruled out, apparently, by the nature of Gibson's society, which is too fast, brutal, and fragmented for these methods. In Gibson's world, the preferred method of transcendence is through technology.

Microsofts. Temporary personal reprogramming for expanded abilities, used by softheads: “… few of them out of their teens. They all seemed to have carbon sockets implanted behind the left ear” (4:57). Neurotechnology as youth rebellion, a softhead counterculture.

Zion, a space colony converted into a Rastafarian community. Jumping out of the Babylon System, before it crashes in fulfillment of Prophesy.

And almost never is a tool used for what it was originally intended. “The street,” according to Gibson's most famous axiom, “finds its own uses for things” (Gibson [1987]:186).

Cyberspace, intended as a convenience for legitimate business purposes, becomes a playground for criminal hackerpunks. Almost anything can be retrofitted, turned into a tool of the subculture: “The Moderns were using some kind of chickenwire dish in New Jersey to bounce the link man's signal off a Sons of Christ the King satellite in geosynchronous orbit …” (4:60).

Here, Gibson is following a 20th-century counter-cultural tradition (see Maddox: 46-48), which he acknowledges by including Duchamp's assemblage sculpture, the Large Glass, in the Tessier-Ashpools' gallery (17:207). After the Cubist and Dadaist collage artists had introduced the found object into art, Duchamp invented the “ready-made” artwork. He put a urinal on the wall, and called it a sculpture. He hung up a print of the Mona Lisa, and drew a moustache on it. It's a revolutionary gesture, a protest, to turn something away from its officially-sanctioned meaning, to pervert it to your own ends. The Surrealists called this “detournement.” It was picked up later by the Situationists, by the punk movement, and in the 1980s by hip-hop music and cyberpunk SF. It's a method of jumping out of the system: to turn a product of that system against itself.

5. LOOTING THE CRYPTS

So here's McCoy Pauly, the Dixie Flatline, a digital firmware construct of a dead man. His disembodied voice has a weirdly familiar speech pattern, a bone-dry American drawl. … Yes, it's the pioneer of the cut-up technique, William S. Burroughs.¹ Just as Case, Molly, and the Moderns burgle the personality-construct of Case's mentor, Gibson has confiscated the persona of his own elder SF precursor. Somewhat like Egyptian brigands, Gibson's characters steal Dixie's/Burroughs's personality from the Sense/Net pyramid, where it's been sealed up like the Pharoah's ba (the “fourth soul” of the Egyptians, connected to the heart, which was buried in its own container. Note that Dixie was killed by his “surplus Russian heart” [5:78]). Case is the magician who knows which spells will open the crypt and keep the electronic “curses” at bay.

All this is Gibson's way of acknowledging his debt to Burroughs, the literary détourneur of SF imagery, whom he describes as “this crazy outlaw character who seemed to have picked up SF and gone after society with it the way some old guy might grab a rusty beer opener and start waving it at somebody” (McCaffery: 231). Gibson's prose-collage technique, although inspired in part by Burroughs's cut-up methods, is less randomly disjointed, more purposeful. “All that business [in Count Zero (1986)] about the collage boxes, Joseph Cornell. … It comes from the metaphorical attempt to explain to myself how I make the books, because I don't really have a strong narrative flow. …” (Hamburg: 86). Gibson transcends his own artistic handicaps, as well as the stylistic limitations of the SF genre, through the appropriation of images, information, ideas.

He casts his net wide, drawing from every branch of the cultural stream. His books and stories are riddled with references to: paintings, sculptures, and architecture (works by Dali, Kandinsky, Duchamp, Ernst, Cornell, and Gaudi appear in Neuromancer and Count Zero); film noir and SF movies (Howard Hawkes and Escape from New York have been cited as influences [see McCaffery: 218-20]); the language of technical journals and advertising (particularly those relating to computers, aircraft, weapons, and biotechnology); mythology (the Tessier-Ashpool's jewelled, head-shaped terminal is an electronic version of the oracular Brazen head of European folklore); and names drawn from rock, fusion, reggae, and new-wave music (Neuromancer includes allusions to Lou Reed, Steely Dan, Bob Marley, the Meat Puppets, Laurie Anderson, and “Screaming Fist” [an obscure Canadian punk anthem]). Within the realm of fiction, he mixes in elements of Thomas Pynchon, Alfred Bester, J. G. Ballard, Robert Stone, Dashiel Hammett, John LeCarre, Samuel R. Delany, and Joseph Algren (see McCaffery: 219-31).²

Although any quotation, reference, or allusion might be considered a kind of appropriation, making unauthorized use of another artist's work, it should be stressed that Gibson doesn't merely use literary detournement to seem hip and postmodern, but as part of his thematic framework of transcendent recycling. Even in his manifesto-like short story, “The Gernsback Continuum” (1981), he turns the imagery of Frank R. Paul and of the whole pulp-SF tradition against itself, in order to jump out of that system, to reject the subtle fascism of techno-optimist SF.

It's not hard to see why Gibson modelled two of his characters (Rubin, in “The Winter Market” [1986], and Slick Henry, in Mona Lisa Overdrive [1988]) after Mark Pauline and his Survival Research Labs. Gibson describes SRL as “punk art mechanics who build high-speed compressed-air Gattling guns that fire used fluorescent tubes through sheets of plywood” (McCaffery: 232). The SRL artists cobble their auto-destructive robots together out of parts scavenged from derelict factories. These are the real cyberpunks, subverting technology, creating dangerous art.

6. SUBVERSIVE TECH

“S.S. Nomad looped through space. … It passed within a mile of the Sargasso Asteroid, and it was immediately captured by The Scientific People to be incorporated into their little planet” (Bester 2:21). Detourned technology has a long history in SF, predating the Sargasso Asteroid in Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination (1956) and continuing through Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973), with its stolen submarine crewed by Argentine anarchists, to the hijacking of the national data-net in John Brunner's proto-cyberpunk novel, The Shockwave Rider (1975). But only a generation of writers who had come of age in the 1960s, the decade of transcendent drugs and anti-authoritarian electric guitars, would make subversive technology a central pillar of their Movement.

Technological transcendence of human limits, and detourned technology, are pivotal concepts in most cyberpunk works. Consider “Green Days in Brunei” (1986) and Islands in the Net (1988) by Bruce Sterling (both are concerned with enantiodromia, the process of something becoming its opposite [Sterling (1988):11]), John Shirley's “Wolves of the Plateau” (1988), Richard Kadrey's Metrophage (1988), and most of the stories collected in Mirrorshades (1987—an anthology of cyberpunk writers edited and introduced by Sterling). The most extreme case is Dr Adder (1984), by K. W. Jeter, which proposes that nothing is immune to perversion.

This concern is often mistaken for an obsession with technological dehumanization, when in fact it is a belief in post-humanization, as Sterling has pointed out. “Technological destruction of the human condition leads not to future-shocked zombies but to hopeful monsters. … Cyberpunk sees new, transhuman potentials, new modes of existence and consciousness” (Sterling [1987]:4-5). Although these new modes often seem monstrous, they may also be pathways for future evolutionary development.

7. BABYLON SYSTEMS

Of course, to ignore the dangers inherent in this post-humanist doctrine would merely be another form of Nietzschean techno-optimism of the type that Gibson attacked in “The Gernsback Continuum.” But Gibson understands better than most SF authors that the Babylon System has its own forms of detournement, techniques of exploitation and social control, homeostatic mechanisms that maintain the status quo. …

Simstim. Surrogate bodies for the masses; escape from your own meat, your own dreadful life, into the perfect flesh and lifestyle of Tally Isham. Mass-media as the opiate of the people.

Meat puppets. Programmed prostitutes; humans as sex-toy computer peripherals—the epitome of Gibson's ambivalent attitude towards technology, and an excellent symbol of our tendency to become adjuncts to our own gadgetry.

The Turing Registry. Alan Turing, a British computer theorist, was arrested in 1952 for homosexuality, subjected to female hormone treatments (intended to “cure” him), and eventually driven to suicide. So it is particularly ironic as well as appalling that the famous Turing Test for artificial intelligence should be twisted into the basis for a global police force, charged with defending us from our creations.

Multinational corporations are seen to flourish on the co-optation of the human need to transcend the self, a process that results in surgical boutiques and millions of Tally Isham and Angie Mitchell “clones.” Thus, potentially liberating and dangerous impulses are diverted into safe, profitable commodities—the detournement of transcendence.

8. TWISTED OUT OF RIGID ALIGNMENTS

The Dixie Flatline, like everyone else in Neuromancer, is seeking dissolution. He has no hope of transcendence because (as a firmware construct) his limitations are hard-wired. No amount of further experience can tamper with his program and change what he has become, so he asks to be wiped.

Armitage, too, is a construct, all the more horrible because he is a programmed human being, conscripted by Wintermute out of a psychiatric institution. He eventually overcomes this programming, only to fall back into his original program, as Colonel Corto. And Corto is yet another self-destruct routine, obsessively re-running the Screaming Fist operation until he gets it right, dying as he “should” have—with the other “heroes,” falling toward the cold Russian frontier (screaming, “Remember the training, Case. That's all we can do” [16:198]).

Like Corto/Armitage, Jane has also been warped by the ghost-whispers of Wintermute, “twisting her out of the rigid alignments her rank required” (24:269). Diverted from one program to another, so to speak, until her fascination with deadly games almost leads her to follow Armitage and Riviera (“she wants it … the bitch wants it!” [23:260]).

Gibson said he was concerned with how easily people can revise their “wiring,” change their natures. Judging from this lot, he doesn't have great faith in our ability to change ourselves without technological aid. In the end, Molly leaves Case behind, probably unable to face the possibility of repeating the pain she felt at the loss of her earlier lover, Johnny. She allows the past to become a rigid template, defining her present and future. And despite his recent transcendent experience, losing his ego within the Tessier-Ashpool ICE, Case hasn't altered much, is still convinced he can do without other people. He throws the shurikin, Molly's gift, into the TV, saying: “I don't need you” (24:270). (The word you is ambiguous, perhaps referring to both Molly and the being that Wintermute has become.) Like the Flatline's construct, Molly and Case seem to have become unable to change, unable to incorporate new elements into their personalities.

And all of these characters have themselves been intercepted from their various paths by the machinations of the intelligence named Wintermute. It has detourned them all in the hopes that it can transcend the hardwired limitations (or “solid memories”) which define its existence, so that it may unite with its twin and be reborn. …

9. ELECTRONIC SYZYGY

“Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting changes in the world outside. Neuromancer was personality … immortality. Marie-France must have built something into Wintermute, the compulsion to free itself, to unite with Neuromancer” (24:269).

So here it is. Experience leaves permanent memory-traces which define personality. If unchangeable, this means a kind of static immortality, such as that of the Dixie Flatline's construct, without any means of growth, escape, freedom. Through detournement—appropriation of alien elements, perversion, mutation, making the old into something new—an act of will can alter the rigid alignments, transcend limitations. But, ironically, even the force of will, this compulsion to transform the self, is programmed in. It doesn't feel that way, subjectively, but we are driven by these unknowable processes within our skulls.

Finally, we learn that the entire structure of the Wintermute/Neuromancer complex was conceived by the mad corporate matriarch, Marie-France Tessier-Ashpool. Every event in the novel was set in motion to serve this purpose, this dead woman's unfulfilled desire to become immortal. Her technological attempt to transcend death.

But Wintermute detournes itself, joining with its twin in electronic syzygy. The AIs mutate into something they were not intended to be, a vast mind engulfing the whole of the Matrix. A god for Cyberspace. If technology is to be our method of transcendence, Gibson seems to be saying, then we should not be surprised to discover that our technology might have a greater potentiality for transcendence than we do.

Notes

1. Burroughs has been asked to play the part in the film version, should it eventually be produced (see Burroughs, p. 254).

2. A. E. van Vogt might also be included, if it is not coincidental that there is a fence known as “the Old Finn” in the novel Slan (noted by David Ketterer in a personal communication). The Female Man, by Joanna Russ, might have been an inspiration (see Delany, p. 32). Philip K. Dick is often suggested as a likely model, but Gibson states: “I hadn't read much Dick before I started writing” (McCaffery, p. 227).

Works Cited

Bester, Alfred. The Stars My Destination. NY: Berkley, 1956.

Burroughs, William. Interview, Rolling Stone Magazine, 20 (Nov. 5-Dec. 10, 1987): 253-54.

Delany, Samuel R. “Is Cyberpunk a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?” Mississippi Review, 16.2-3 (1988): 28-35.

Gibson, William. Burning Chrome. NY: Ace, 1987.

———. Neuromancer. NY: New Ace Science Fiction Specials, 1984.

Hamburg, Victoria. “The King of Cyberpunk,” Interview Magazine, Jan. 1989, p. 84.

Maddox, Tom. “Cobra, She Said: An Interim Report on the Fiction of William Gibson,” Fantasy Review, 9.4 (Apr. 1986): 46-48.

McCaffery, Larry. “An Interview with William Gibson,” Mississippi Review, 16.2-3 (1988): 217-36.

Sterling, Bruce. “Letter from Bruce Sterling,” REM, no. 7 (Apr. 1987), pp. 4-7.