SOURCE: Concannon, Kevin. “The Contemporary Space of the Border: Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands and William Gibson's Neuromancer.” Textual Practice 12, no. 3 (winter 1998): 429-42.

[In the following essay, Concannon discusses the thematic motif of the border and how it relates to self-identity in Neuromancer and Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera.]

I

When Charles Edwards and a female passenger stopped at a Barstow gas station on a late September day in 1992, little did they know that two hours later they would be just north of Burbank, almost 122 miles from Barstow, and far from alone. In fact, as they sped along the California freeways, they were being followed by at least seven police cars and four helicopters, numerous television and radio trucks, countless spectators, and an even larger television and radio audience, who watched and listened as the spectacle unfolded.

According to news reports, Edwards had kidnapped his female passenger in Barstow, where he picked up the police escort. As the pursuit continued, criss-crossing city and county boundaries at speeds upwards of seventy to eighty miles an hour, the chase pack grew as spectators lined overpasses and civilians followed behind. Television and radio stations interrupted their normal broadcasting to follow the image of police cars, television trucks and interested bystanders heedlessly speeding up and down the LA freeways.

The disorganized and seemingly chaotic chase group proved a perfect match for Edwards' chaotic driving, as he would unexpectedly drive on to the freeway shoulder and into emergency lanes, or would haphazardly jump from freeway to freeway in a futile attempt to escape. Trying to anticipate his helter-skelter movements and to prevent injury, the police blocked on-ramps and diverted traffic, carving an inviting path of open space for Edwards within the larger commuter gridlock of the late afternoon rush-hour.

Even though this corridor proved as much a prison as an escape route, as news and police helicopters followed overhead and officers and reporters tailed close behind on the ground, Edwards continued through this spaciousness as fast as his car would carry him. The plan was to give Edwards just enough freedom, just enough ‘open’ space, so that he would run out of gas before killing himself or someone else. Edwards wished never to do so, of course, not wanting to relinquish his celebrity status or these perks of unrestricted movement. Celebrity, however, was truly fleeting in this case, even on the Hollywood freeway, and almost as soon as his path was blocked by a plumber's truck, Edwards surrendered peacefully. What was seemingly already a foregone conclusion to every spectator had finally come to pass: Edwards' car was surrounded and he was taken into custody.

The spectacle ended with his capture, diminishing popular interest quickly, and little was heard of Charles Edwards ever again, save for a few incoherent comments from the back of a police car on the evening news. The rapid shift by the news stations from this foiled escape to an analysis of how fast the freeway could return to normal only quickened Edwards' disappearance from popular consciousness. The chase pack of police cars, concerned citizens and news vans evaporated in less than twenty minutes, themselves in an Edwards-like rush to broadcast the pictures of his flight along the circuitous path of the airwaves.

Though not chased by the police, the narrator, in Italo Calvino's aptly titled story, ‘The Chase’, is also attempting to escape.¹ The narrator is pursued by a single gunman who is trying to kill him, and as he considers his options for escape in the slowdown of rush-hour gridlock, he grows to realize the sympathetic bond between himself and his pursuer. He recognizes that his movements are tied to those of the gunman; that in fact his movements are themselves held by the movements and actions of his pursuer. The narrator's safety, it would seem, is found only by recognizing his own involvement in the chase, that he himself is both the pursued and the pursuer. For the narrator, even after turning down a cross street and leaving the gunman behind, to escape means also to recognize that ‘nothing has changed: the line moves in little, irregular shifts of position, [and] I am still prisoner of the general system of moving cars, where neither pursuers nor pursued can be distinguished’.²

The freedom the narrator achieves in terms of containment compares favourably with that experienced by Edwards. The difference is that Edwards' flight and capture points to a less totalizing image of control, presenting instead a more fluid structure, one that actually allows him the physical freedom to move to the left or the right, but still not allowing him the freedom to escape. It seems that no matter how fast Edwards drives, there is no space beyond for him to go where the police cannot; he is forced to try to escape within the police perimeter rather than trying to find a space beyond. Instead of making a ‘run for the border’ like the narrator in Calvino's story, then cutting a logical and unidirectional path away he has to rely upon the illogical and the multidirectional, to traverse the space of the known in an unexpected way, jumping from freeway to freeway, turning around abruptly, speeding up and slowing down, and even putting innocent lives at risk, so as to disappear without ever really leaving. The space of sanctuary is not beyond a boundary here, not found by driving as far or as fast as possible, even if Edwards still seems to search for it; it is within the space of capture itself. To borrow from Lech Witkowski, a ‘sanctuary of ambivalence’³ has replaced a vision of the separateness of a space beyond, where Edwards' freedom is only to be found in terms of control.

This double meaning of escape, as the search by Edwards to access a space beyond the border, and the escape as containment that Edwards experiences within the police boundary, draws on the complex etymology of the term ‘border’. As John T. Juricek has noted, the border, at once, can mark the limit of space (as a borderline) and the crossing or merging across this limit (as a border territory).⁴ The border, therefore, is the line of separation as it is the space of merging; it is the line of escape as it is the spaciousness of involvement. This ambivalence, as marked by Witkowski, complicates our perception of the spaciousness ‘beyond’ the border, rendering nationalist and subject identities (we vs. other) uncertain and distorted.⁵ The border as zone complicates difference even as it promotes separation, creating the ‘space’ for oppositional strategies even as it renders uncertain the separation these strategies seek to create.

D. Emily Hicks, in her book Border Writing, speaks of the attempt of border writers to develop this ambiguity, to ‘undermine the distinction between the original and alien culture … [giving] the reader the opportunity to practice multidimensional perception and nonsynchronous memory’.⁶ To Hicks, the border and border writing speaks to a disruption of meaning, of a referential crossing that joins the compatible with the incompatible. The result can be a nonsynchronous textuality, as exemplified by Hicks in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's A Hundred Years of Solitude. The uncertain distinction between the past and the future in the novel causes objects to ‘take on additional meaning’ and frees characters ‘from a single ordering or sequencing of reality’ (p. 4). Border texts write the supplement, creating a plurality of meaning that expresses the hybrid experiences of those who exist in terms of the merging in-between.

Drawing on the experiences of the pollo as an example, Hicks argues that border writing prevents one from referring to ‘a clearly defined “subjective” or “objective” meaning. Rather, there is a refusal of the metonymic reduction in which a white, male, Western “subject” dominates an “object”’ (p. xxv). There is no way to distinguish, creating a pollo writing that problematizes those oppositions which frame gender and colonial issues. Ultimately a literature of resistance that refuses to resist in oppositional terms, then, border writing looks instead to create a hybrid spaciousness that questions how difference is determined.

The hope this writing provides, both in its attention to those who are displaced and in its recalibrating our more abstract conceptions of identity and place, however, must be balanced with the concern which Edwards' car chase raises over the border space as boundary. By this I mean the potential that Hicks sees in border writing to heal the global body or to calm ‘the storm of progress blowing from Paradise’ (p. xxxi) glosses over the possibility of the border as a spaciousness of control, the spaciousness of merging rethinking and re-creating difference. Border writing is presented only as critical of authority, as ‘refusing’ or ‘subverting’ what is limited to Western thought. Hicks never considers how merging the border figures could itself have another ‘side’, that the freedom of crossing could also be seen in terms of the containment of the boundary line.

Part of the problem results from Hicks' introduction of the border in terms of the crossing of two referential codes (p. xxiii). The space of crossing becomes perceived in crucible-like terms, where two different codes are mixed and a different combinative code emerges. The danger with this description is that little attention is paid to the more complex structure of the border, of the many levels that can be involved in its construction and the ways in which this different, combinative code could already be anticipated. The ‘new form of knowledge’ (p. xxxi) that Hicks claims border writing offers presents this writing as separate from the codes that produce it, as both emerging from their joining and at the same time unaffected by them. This production allows her to speak of border writing as able to represent ‘another side where capital has not yet reduced the object to a commodity’ (p. xxxi), even as, at the same time, it leaves one to wonder if a border can have only one side.

Even if Hicks overemphasizes the potential of border writing, she rightly emphasizes, I believe, the influence which geographic, economic and gender crossings have on the production of Latin American literature. The question that one must ask, though, is whether her focus on these types of crossings tends to essentialize the definition of the border. The border seems always there, only to be talked about in terms of being crossed or inhabited, rarely as to be constructed or in the process of becoming. This more fluid definition is supported by the ever-changing direction of Edwards' flight and forces one to confront the ‘in-betweenness’ of borders themselves, of their appearance and disappearance, of their complexity as real world and imaginary points of passage and control, and of their production and reproduction.

Gloria Anzaldúa's novel, Borderlands/La Frontera, examines the fragile status of borders and highlights the political strategies involved in their construction.⁷ She speaks, for instance, of the formation of ethnic, sexual, linguistic and religious borders against which she struggles as attempts by those in power to separate and divide, the border produced as boundary in the name of the status quo. Her work should be seen as more than an attempt to expose the political nature of borders, though, for Anzaldúa draws on their constructedness as a means to speak of her own constructions, of the formation of a border consciousness for those who resist division. She speaks of ‘an “alien” consciousness [that] is presently in the making—a new mestiza consciousness’ that favours the making of a ‘mixture’ and of a ‘hybrid’ identity (p. 77). This ‘cross-pollinization’ defines difference in terms of involvement; the borderland that develops, or is developing, is a product of the separation that resists crossing and the merging that resists difference. To Anzaldúa, one's border consciousness is to be understood as forming in terms of this ambivalence.

Similar concerns over strategizing borders, over their appearance and disappearance and the impact they have in defining identity and community, have been raised in contemporary writings about cyberspace. A comparison to William Gibson's Neuromancer adds an extra level of complexity to the cultural and religious ‘betweenness’ Anzaldúa describes, as Gibson speaks of the impact which burgeoning technology and capital have on our capacity to understand, navigate and control space.⁸ Anzaldúa's struggle is presented against an even harsher background as a result of the comparison, as the cyberspace world of Gibson is one of hidden conspiracies, of the secreting and exchange of information and capital, and ultimately of the fragmentation and loss of the individual. The result is an increasing indeterminacy over the agency responsible for the creation of what Anzaldúa describes as the ‘rigidly defined roles’ (p. 17) that limit the formation of a mestiza culture. The broad categories that Anzaldúa uses (‘Western culture’, ‘males’, or ‘America’) to identify those opposed to a border consciousness are complicated by Gibson's cyberworld, where advances in technology and science make any attempt to identify agency, even in such broad terms, seemingly impossible.

This uncertainty is indicative of the larger difficulty of constructing difference in cyberspace. With the Panther Moderns' ability to blend into the background like chameleons in the future world of Neuromancer and with the relatively common occurrence of cyberspace cowboys ‘flatlining’, boundaries separating man and nature or life and death are not easy to determine. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that Gibson's cyberspace is only to be understood in terms of movement and access. Gibson's narrative, for instance, is focused around the success and failure of a ‘cowboy’ and ‘rustler’ protagonist named Case, who, like a number of other male ‘console jockeys’, makes clear that this new space is also the ‘old’ space of a male-dominated Western frontier. And though women do hold positions of power, as Marie-France helps lay the groundwork for the eventual union of the two artificial intellegences and Molly provides the ‘muscle’, both characters ultimately rely upon Case and his capacity to navigate the life and death experiences of cyberspace.

The division along gender lines that is created means that Gibson's science fiction future world folds back upon Anzaldúa's past and present, Neuromancer participating in the same rigid codifying that forces Anzaldúa and others into exile. This separation, combined with the prevalence of barriers or ‘ice’ in cyberspace, underscores the borders of Gibson's cyberworld, structuring the novel as much in terms of cyberspace's seeming infinity as in terms of its limits. Gibson's theorizing of the edges that make up infinity means, ultimately, that his focus is on the interplay of separation and connection that constructs space, about how one is to navigate and exist in terms of the limits of the future, drawing one again to Anzaldúa's Borderlands. Through the comparison, it becomes clear that Gibson is also concerned about the construction and defence of borders and the impact they have on the formation of one's identity. More specifically, the characters in Neuromancer reflect Anzaldúa's thinking about both the potential and dangers that face the hybrid; they are aware of the access available, and possibly even dream about using it, but, at the same time, they are also aware of the larger sense of structure and control within which they must exist.

II

In looking at this book that I'm almost finished writing, I see a mosaic pattern (Aztec-like) emerging, a weaving pattern, thin here, thick there. … I see a hybridization of metaphor, different species of ideas popping up here, popping up there, full of variations and seeming contradictions, though I believe in an ordered, structured universe where all phenomena are interrelated and imbued with spirit. This almost finished product seems an assemblage, a montage, a beaded work with several leitmotifs and with a central core, now appearing, now disappearing in a crazy dance. The whole thing has had a mind of its own, escaping me and insisting on putting together the pieces of its own puzzle with minimal direction from my will.

(Borderlands, p. 66)

The act of writing for Anzaldúa is the act of driving for Edwards; his sudden turns or shifts of speed become, for her, ideas ‘popping up here, popping up there’, all organized by a ‘central core, now appearing, now disappearing’. The freedom Edwards finds in his contained flight is translated by Anzaldúa into the freedom that stylistic and linguistic uncertainty provides within the containment of her ‘story’; the disorder that ‘variations and seeming contradictions’ give point to the presence of a structure, even as the text struggles to maintain this frame. This ordered—disordered writing of Borderlands becomes writing life on the border, border writing born not solely out of the mixing of ideas or the crossing of difference, but out of a sense of structure as well.

The repetition of terms like ‘pattern’, ‘ordered’ and ‘structure’ in the above passage, which speaks ultimately of the author's loss of control and the willfulness of the work itself, makes clear this polarity between structure and chaos that is played out in the text. Even within this context, though, any reference to the need of structure seems surprising given that border writing or the border writer is precisely what is left out of political and cultural ‘structures’. Not surprisingly, then, Anzaldúa is always quick to qualify her use of the terms. She refers to patterns in terms of a ‘mosaic’ or a ‘weaving’, and her definition of structure emphasizes not the difference or separation between ideas but how ‘all phenomena are interrelated’.

Though a mosaic is still a ‘pattern’ as much as weaving is, by using the terms, Anzaldúa emphasizes the inclusiveness and combination found in patterns rather than their exclusiveness. To Anzaldúa, it is the variety in combination that defines her text, the ways in which structure or patterns can show the connection between different objects or ideas. The pattern of her border voice is found in the weaving of this difference and one can see this weaving throughout her work. The opening chapter, entitled ‘The Homeland, Aztlan’, presents the history of Chicano ancestry in America, Anzaldúa beginning with the discovery of Indian bones in Texas from as far back as 35000 BC and then moving forward to the present day (pp. 4-13). Though presented in chronological order, Anzaldúa intersperses the narrative with poetry, songs and personal stories in an attempt to show the impact of migration, exploitation and imprisonment on the lives of Indians, Chicanos and Mexicans. The result is a history of migration and movement written in migratory terms, the narrative voice shifting back and forth from the public to the personal, from discussing race hatred against Chicanos in the early twentieth century to stories of how Anzaldúa's family coped during years of consecutive droughts.

As Inderpal Grewal argues, within this plural voice of inclusiveness, Anzaldúa represents the formation of a mestiza consciousness in active, changing terms.⁹ In Anzaldúa's text, the border self is never settled, coming into view only to disappear ‘in a crazy dance’, the mestiza self developing in terms of an Edwards-like flight. To Grewal, a fixed border subjectivity is as elusive for Anzaldúa as escape is for Edwards; the loss of a central core and the writing of this ‘beaded work’ is a sign that identity is defined for Anzaldúa in terms of flux and transition. The writing of Borderlands as a montage, then, reflects, at both the level of style and content, the border existence of those who live in between, giving voice to the uncertainty of life along or within the border.

By doing so, the text reveals both the ‘pain and strength of living in the borderlands’.¹⁰ To Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, this combination reflects a contradictory movement in the text, one which makes difference difficult to determine. Borderlands is seen as unwilling to construct clear divisions, challenging a Western philosophy founded upon binary opposition.¹¹ The text refuses to oppose history to fiction, prose to poetry, even if the cost is a loss of the work's ‘deep structure’ or a fear that the work is ‘escaping’ Anzaldúa and becoming a ‘rebellious, willful entity’ (p. 66).

This loss of control reflects a larger concern of Anzaldúa over the ways in which institutions exploit the uncertainty of border writing to silence those who live in between. Anzaldúa points, for example, to the Catholic Church's exploitation of the complicated history of la Virgen de Guadalupe. To the ‘mestizo true to his or her Indian values’, Guadalupe is a guide, drawing worshippers back to the Indian past, to the Aztec god Tonnantsi. The god joins the old and new to become a border image, and through this hybrid past represents tolerance for ‘people of mixed race[s]’, acting as a mediator between different cultures (p. 30). To the Church, however, drawing upon this ambiguous history, she becomes a means to ‘mete out institutionalized oppression: to placate the Indians and mexicanos and Chicanos’ (p. 31). From the Church's perspective, the uncertainty of the border image is a means to render certain the obedience of its flock, the border crossers always in danger of being crossed out.

This push and pull of the border experience is emphasized by the mestizo language in which the text is written, Anzaldúa drawing on English, Castillian Spanish, Chicano and Tex-Mex to highlight the cross-cultural nature of border life, even as the multiple tongues speak of the difficulty of translating or understanding the experience. At one level, the different languages break down the concept of regional dialects, replacing it with a futuristic, Western esperanto. As a consequence, the narrator seems to exist within a nomadic plurality, moving back and forth in an Edwards-like disorder within different languages. At another level, this hybrid language underscores the Chicano struggle for political and social presence. The multiple languages speak of the complexity of the struggle and the numbers involved, just as the number of languages used and the occasional translation reveals Anzaldúa's recognition of others' unwillingness to cross over, to understand. In this way, the mixing of languages represents the plurality of the border experience even as it speaks of an alienation, of a loss of voice, and the realization that many will never understand.

Anzaldúa's experience is caught within this silence that is part of her plural voice, her difference on the border resulting not from her being an ‘outsider’ but from her being in between: between experiences, between languages, exiled within. She is a part of ‘all countries’, yet has ‘no country’; she is part of ‘all races’, yet a member of none, separated by her own involvement (p. 80). She is present as absent within this ‘ambivalent sanctuary’, engaging oppositions that underscore the strategies of power and control that define life on the border. The resulting irony is that Chicanos/as are caught by their crossing of boundaries, caught within a spaciousness that connects them to everyone and to no one.

III

Because, in some weird and very approximate way, it was like a run in the matrix. Get just wasted enough, find yourself in some desperate but strangely arbitrary kind of trouble, and it was possible to see Ninsei as a field of data, the way the matrix had once reminded him of proteins linking to distinguish cell specialties. Then you could throw yourself into a highspeed drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh in the mazes of the black market.

(Neuromancer, p. 16)

The sense of flux which Anzaldúa describes in Borderlands results in part from the lack of recognition of the border subject. In this way her text can be seen as an attempt to make the absent present, a calling forth that finds its contrast in Case and others' seeming desire to disappear in Gibson's Neuromancer. The Panther Moderns, for example, wear clothing that allows them to merge into the background and in the city of Ninsei surgically created flesh is an important commodity. In the above quote, moreover, Case is introduced on the run, trying to lose a ‘tail’ sent by the powerful Tessier-Ashpool corporation. He experiences this chase in ways that carry him back to the matrix, an analogy that speaks of reduction and anonymity in terms of the expanse of information; he sees Ninsei as ‘a field of data’, or the matrix in terms of proteins. Rather than hoping to escape from his ‘tail’, as Edwards attempts to do from the police, though, Case is invigorated by the prospect of the flight itself, of losing himself in the larger flow of information, participating in the ‘dance of biz’. Case hopes to disappear in the interface of capture and escape, and to exist in between, a border experience that speaks of the interplay of the corporate and the individual, of Case finding himself only in flight.

At the same time, it is the special talent that Case possesses to access cyberspace that creates an interest in him, and results in his being followed. His desire to disappear, whether it be from some person or into the ‘bodiless exultation’ of the matrix, is countered by the significance of his presence, of his ability to access this space, ‘to be totally engaged but set apart from it all’. Case's ability to be both here and beyond makes him a valuable commodity; it raises the potential to access data ‘anonymously’, to gain information or capital without anyone or any corporation knowing of it. This capacity to counter the walls of ‘ice’ that protect corporate secrets and capital in cyberspace speaks to the power of anonymity in this future world as it does to the significance and construction of borders within the matrix.

The corporate investment by Tessier-Ashpool to recreate Case as a cowboy—their sponsoring of the operations that will allow him to access cyberspace again—defines the borders of this future world in terms of a corporate—techno interface. Case is remade as a cyberspace mestiza, his border self a corporate dream and his anonymity a corporate strength. His border experience is emphasized by his role as a cowboy; his job is to gain access beyond the ‘borders’ of cyberspace, to break down the ‘ice’ that protects corporate information. These borders are to be seen as positions of power, both in their ability to repel attackers, as well as in their capacity to store massive amounts of data, information and capital. The ever-expanding cyberspace, as it is represented by scientists today, is tempered within Gibson's texts by a more traditional grid-like spaciousness as a result; the data border becomes the locus of control, the battleground where corporations strive to retain their individual hegemony. In fact, the emphasis, in Gibson's work, is as much concerned with the expansive possibilities of this space, and its unifying drive, as it is in searching and exploring the finitude of this space, either metaphorically in the border encounters, or through Gentry's attempt, in Mona Lisa Overdrive, to discover the shape of the matrix—to see its ‘overall total form’.¹²

As a consequence, I would argue that Gibson's trilogy, of which Neuromancer is a part, must be read as a sequence of border texts rather than only as texts of openness and accessibility. They are texts that examine the contemporary border problematic of accessibility as control, applying Anzaldúa's geographic, sexual and psychological border concerns to a cyber-geographic and economic spaciousness. As with Borderlands, the cyber border adopts the past characteristics and exclusionism of the border understood as boundary, storing information or capital beyond public access. The result is a representation of space in terms of simplistic binaries of public and private. The stability of these binaries, however, is problematized by the cowboy's capacity to access that which is beyond the border, to merge different geographic and informational spaces here and beyond. The cowboy's crossing over creates a hybridization of space which problematizes the separation that the singular definition of the border seen only as boundary represents. Instead, a cyberspace organized in contradictory terms of security and access, separation and transgression is created, a corporate and technological geography whose uncertainty is only underscored by the fluidity of being of those, like Case, who access it or are accessed by it.

This complex relationship of control and access that organizes Gibson's cyberspace is not limited to a science fictional future world beyond, but, according to Donna Haraway, can be applied to our own ‘mythic’ world of today, where ‘we are [all] cyborgs’.¹³ Haraway's edict is appropriate not only to our own present-day merging with machines, but as she argues, to the transgression of other more or less abstract binaries of real and imaginary, public and private, or male and female. According to Haraway, the ‘cyborg world’ that results can be divided into two contrasting perspectives:

a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star War apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation of women's bodies in a masculinist orgy of war. From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.¹⁴

Clearly, the second perspective is more attractive, almost utopian in its vision compared to the first, and yet Haraway's diction (‘is’ as opposed to ‘might’) makes the utopian only a possibility in terms of the final apocalyptic imposition. I would argue that Gibson's representation of the cyborg and of the cyborg world exists along this confusing border that Haraway presents, explicitly interfacing this ‘grid of control’ where women are dominated by men, with the transgression of boundaries that defines the cyborg. This transgression becomes a method of confusion in Neuromancer as much as a strategy of control, the crossing over destabilizing Western binary logic, but only by re-creating the domination of these binaries with a different, hybridized structure. Much as Edwards' freedom of movement is involved with his own capture and Anzaldúa's exile is involved with her ability to speak in many voices but not be heard, Gibson's cyborg world also interfaces accessibility with restriction. Gibson's future merges human with machine, as it separates male from female, creating a merging or crossing that allows one only a miscarried, Edwards-like sense of escape. It is this combination that creates the hesitancy on Haraway's part, the ‘might’ rather than the ‘is’, as the freedom the cyborg world allows, from the singular unity of Western phallocentrism, is necessarily balanced by the different methods of domination the cyborg world produces, ones that work as much through accessibility as resist it.

Through Haraway's definition of the cyborg in terms of the transgression across boundaries, the transgressive border self of Anzaldúa's novel, who is part of all and yet nowhere, becomes the cyborg of our present and of Gibson's future. Case, in fact, can only cross the border to the other side (from physical space to cyberspace) by means of the surgical repairs done to his body (by his becoming cyborg). While empowered by this capacity to live along the border, to cross over, Case lacks unlimited freedom. He is forced to work against the clock, since his retrofitted organs also come with toxic sacs that slowly poison his nervous system which, if left untreated, will eventually render him incapable of accessing cyberspace. Case as a cowboy is both alive and dead, representing his cyber flight in Edwards-like terms of control; Case can only ‘flee’ in terms of limits and edges, because of the presence of limits and edges, his freedom overdetermined by control.

In other words, complete accessibility carries with it its own impossibility, the corporate-dominated social being dependent upon the access these cowboys provide to steal from others, while at the same time in need of the privacy and separation that the poison sacs in Case help assure. The consequence for Case is a tenuous existence, where his freedom of movement is balanced by the recognition that he is only free to move where he is told to do so. Borders appear and disappear, therefore, as Case enters the seemingly unlimited expanse of cyberspace, only to be used by the artificial intelligences for their own gain. Accessibility is equated with control and division; the exclusion Anzaldúa experiences as a Chicana, Case experiences in technological terms. He is everywhere only when he is understood as no one, on a cyber border space where access and movement are defined in terms of control and destruction.

Just as the geographic borders Edwards traverses involve him in a more and more involved and unending spaciousness, moving him from a local criminal to a global attraction, Case's access also involves him in a ‘larger’ and more diffuse spaciousness, where limitations are clearly without limit. In this way, the space beyond becomes that which exists within, accessible, but, at the same time, always distant and limiting. Case's access to cyberspace carries with it its own impossibility, his freedom to move coming at the price of exploitation and control. His flight, as a result, creates a border space of movement as control, of freedom as capture, an existence with which Edwards and Anzaldúa are all too familiar.

IV

The recent advances in virtual reality have made the cyberspace Case experiences seem more and more a possibility, giving these literary texts their scientific counterparts, and I want to conclude by outlining the way in which the border identifying scientific and literary space is itself constructed in terms of cyberspace. Coined by Gibson to describe the space of ‘consensual hallucination’ and adopted by scientists to describe their ongoing work in the production of a computer-generated reality, the term ‘cyberspace’ itself straddles the borderline, symptomatic of the borrowing and merging that occurs across borders. At this point, however, it would seem that the scientific community is struggling at a deficit rate, since the cyberspace seen in Gibson is far from a ‘reality’. Essentially in the developmental stages, with only rudimentary virtual reality machines available (itself only a small part of cyberspace), the ‘actual’ space of cyberspace is absent, to be replaced by images presented in the many cyber punk texts and by various conferences and articles on the topic. It would seem, in fact, that the term has taken on a life of its own, its science fictionalization overcome by its real world possibility. Twisting Plato's claim that space can only be understood in terms of matter, then, it is the ‘matter’ of its representation—the articles, novels and conferences—which brings this non-existent space to light, it being seen only by those texts which attempt to see over the border and beyond into the future.

Even though advances are being made on the scientific front, it is not that science is ‘catching up’ with fiction, creating the referent after the sign (as, for example, with the [Arthur C.] Clarke belt of geosynchronous satellites that surround Earth); rather, science is creating an alternate space of possibility that at once diverges and reinforces its fictional representation. The result is that the critical border does not evaporate with each advance, as if the impossible is removed by the possible; instead, it is reconstituted. The border not only divides the two but also draws them together, making any distinction between the fiction of cyberspace and its fact impossible to determine: all seems fact and fiction. Cyberspace is the contemporary border space (of the future). As a consequence, at a conference concerning cyberspace, Nicole Stenger can argue that ‘cyberspace grafts a new nature of reality in our everyday life’, and ‘can be seen as the new bomb, a pacific blaze that will project the imprint of our disembodied selves on the walls of eternity’,¹⁵ while Michael Benedikt can state simply that cyberspace ‘does not exist.’¹⁶

The trope of cyberspace thus reflects a balancing of impossibility and possibility, an uncertainty that draws on and figures the hybrid experiences of Anzaldúa, recognized yet unknown. Less an attempt to point to cyberspace as the spaciousness of the present and future, however, as the space to ‘come’, I would argue that it is the very play of presence as absence of the cyberworld, of the joining of the possible with the impossible that represents the complex problematics of those who cross over. To emphasize these contradictions of cyberspace means to underscore the politics of the border, to show how the crossing of referential codes or the crossing of fences or oceans carries with it a control and exploitation, and often a disappearance that defines the ‘(e)merging’ existence of those in between. The attempt by Anzaldúa and Gibson to map out the possibility of a hybrid world is always understood in terms of its impossibility, a contradiction of what is and what is not that speaks of the cyberworld as it points to a border space as present and always emerging, here and beyond.

Notes

1. Italo Calvino, T-Zero, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1969).

2. Ibid., p. 127.

3. Lech Witkowski, ‘The Paradox of Borders: Ambivalence at Home’, Common Knowledge (Winter 1994), pp. 100-8.

4. John T. Juricek, ‘American Usage of the Word “Frontier” from Colonial Times to Frederick Jackson Turner’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 110 (1966), pp. 10-34.

5. Witkowski, p. 108.

6. D. Emily Hicks, Border Writing: The Multidimensional Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. xxii; hereafter cited in the text.

7. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987); hereafter cited in the text.

8. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984); hereafter cited in the text.

9. Inderpal Grewal, ‘Autobiographic Subjects and Diasporic Locations: Meatless Days and Borderlands’, in Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (eds) Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 250.

10. Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, ‘Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: Cultural Studies, “Difference,” and the Non-Unitary Subject’, Cultural Critique 28 (Fall 1994), p. 16; emphasis in original.

11. Ibid., p. 17.

12. William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), p. 75.

13. Donna Haraway, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980's’, Socialist Review 80 (1985), p. 66.

14. Ibid., p. 72.

15. Nicole Stenger, ‘The Mind Is a Leaking Rainbow’, in Michael Benedikt (ed.) Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 51.

16. Michael Benedikt, Introduction, in Cyberspace: First Steps, p. 3.