SOURCE: Schroeder, Randy. “Neu-Criticizing William Gibson.” Extrapolation 35, no. 4 (winter 1994): 330-41.

[In the following essay, Schroeder offers a critical assessment of the relationship between cybernetics and postmodernism in Neuromancer.]

Back in 1983 Time named the computer “Machine of the Year.” This award displaced the usual “Man of the Year,” presumably decentering the human and giving postmodernism permanent status in pop consciousness. In 1984 William Gibson published Neuromancer, presumably giving literary expression to the confluence of cybernetics and postmodernisms. In fact, the subgenre of cyberpunk is widely reported to be both postmodern art and postmodern artifact par excellence, literary examination and product of the post-age.

This assumption has driven some fine criticism. Gibson's information-age world has been examined as a place where distinctions such as human/machine and real/artificial are deconstructed, as invasive technology redefines the human condition. The locus of criticism has been those points where cybernetic technology and postmodern experiences overlap; as Bruce Sterling says, cyberpunks are “fascinated by interzones” (xi).

But the interzone of postmodernisms and cybernetics is a problematic one. Sophisticated simulation does unhinge our sense of referentiality; the prosthesis does question the difference between real and artificial; revision of memory does begin to deconstruct the notion of a stable “self.” But underneath this overlap is a hostility: cybernetics carries an essentially realist ontology, while postmodernisms are often antirealist or at least antirepresentationalist. This hostility manifests itself over contradictory features. Cybernetics is reductionist; postmodernisms are not. Cybernetics affirms some kind of objective reality; postmodernisms question it. Cybernetics is fundamentally about binaries; postmodernisms are fundamentally about the collapse of binaries. Cybernetics is about construction; postmodernisms are about deconstruction.¹

The theoretical problem is daunting. Some method is needed to sort out the simultaneous overlap and hostility between cybernetics and postmodernisms. But for Gibson, the theoretical difficulties provide an opportunity for literary play, for antithetic motifs and complex metaphors. In Gibson's cyberspace fiction, features of indeterminacy are often juxtaposed with features of determinacy. The reading experience that results is one of complex tension, as “postmodernism” is exploited through almost modernist techniques, as “postmodern” features are integrated in an almost new critical paradigm.

This is an audacious claim, and not exactly an astute one, given the status of modernism in most postmodern cultures. But I am not saying that Gibson's fiction is exhausted in a paradigm of literary tension; neither am I wheeling out old chestnuts like intentionality of the author. I am simply offering another way of looking at Gibson's fictive world and suggesting that critical techniques which assume an unproblematic confluence of postmodernisms and cybernetics are ignoring an important trend in the world of Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive.

Gibson's late-capitalist society, characterized by urban sprawls, ubiquitous and intimate technology, and the centralization of power within anational corporations, often appears to be either cybernetic or postmodern. This society can sometimes be described with a set of alternating pairs: controlled v. chaotic, predictable v. unpredictable, ordered v. entropic, sophisticated-yet-reducible v. sophisticated-and-incomprehensible. The simple tension manifests itself in an inverse paradigm, where “postmodernism” undermines cybernetics and vice versa.

Life in Gibson's world often seems simply cybernetic. Virek's corporate system in Count Zero is a “vast and subtle mechanism” of surveillance (73), a “machine” (140), and a “vast device” (74). Virek's money is “a universal solvent” (174), lubricating the machinery of social infiltration, reaching every corner of social and individual consciousness. The corporate Virek is understood through the old-world sensibilities of Marly, who invests cybernetic social management with negative connotations. Neuromancer's Case sees the corporate power structure in a similar way. He accepts “flatness and lack of feeling” as “a gradual and willing accommodation of the machine, the system” (203). The control and communication of “social information” is described by Larry McCaffery as “… the increasing monopolization by private business of information, and the ways this monopolization is used for the purpose of wielding power and control over nation-states and individuals” (9).

This characterization of society squeezes out “postmodern” notions of indeterminacy and free play. Society and its constituent individuals become predictable, ordered, and comprehensible. Wintermute, the AI in Neuromancer, explains a person's suicide as “various factors in his history and how they interrelate” (205). Angie, in Mona Lisa Overdrive, understands the sophistication of society as ultimately reducible: “How unthinkably intricate the world was, in sheer detail of mechanism” (189). Intricacy and detail connote nanism with exactitude, not imploding indeterminacy. Mr. Yanaka is asked whether someone will continue to run his corporation. He responds, “Of course. How else might order and accord be expected to continue?” (MLO [Mona Lisa Overdrive] 290).

At other times Gibson's society seems almost strictly “postmodern” in its indeterminacy, fragmented complexity, and play. In Mona's words, the world has never had “so many moving parts or so few labels” (276). Instead of control there is chaos. The Panther Moderns—postmodern subculture par excellence—cite chaos as their “mode and modus,” their “central kick” (Neuro [Neuromancer] 67). Straylight, the Tessier-Ashpool complex, has “craziness grown in the resin concrete” (Neuro 203). It is a craziness that Case is unable to understand, a craziness built out of fragments and garbage, where the distinction between commodity and junk starts to slide. Thirty-five percent of Tokyo is built on garbage (MLO 161), blurring deconstruction and reconstruction. As Istvan Csicsery-Ronay says, “The only thing left out is a place to stand. So one must move, always move” (266). Instead of predictability there is randomness. Although a construct's behavior can be plotted before it occurs, Wintermute fails to predict Molly's behavior (Neuro 205).

At a social level technology continually mutates in unpredictable directions. Glenn Grant points out that a major feature of Gibson's urban landscape is detournement: “… almost never is a tool used for what it was originally intended” (43). Teresa Nielson Hayden calls Gibson's work “a species of literature that's about the unpredictable uses to which human beings always put technology” (43). Gibson says “The street finds its own uses for things” (“Burning Chrome” 186). The deconstructive technique of destroying a system with that system's own tools resists corporate control and communication, positioning detournement against political authority. But detournement in Gibson's society is often without explicit political agenda; craziness often carries “a strange sense of aimlessness” (Neuro 203). Urban centers like the Sprawl are Gibson's central images of postmodern society—built out of junk, mutating randomly, every corner boasting technology gone wild: “Night City was like a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button” (Neuro 7).

This sense of mutation, exponential velocity, and expansion echoes Jean Baudrillard's contention that our sign-infested world is impossible to understand. For Baudrillard, the simulacrum has outdistanced the original and the hyperreal has infected the real, resulting in the end of “truth, reference, and objective causes” (6). The unreadable cartography of implosion—typified in the progressive miniaturization of the microchip—is accompanied by an unreadable cartography of explosion. In a cultural (though not scientific) sense this postmodern society can be characterized as entropic, against the hierarchical ordering of cybernetic society. Assuming this model of cultural cybernetics, there are strong examples of the simple inverse paradigm in Gibson, with regard to reduction, distinctions, and referentiality.

Some characters think of themselves as determined systems, while others believe in indefinite elements of personality. Molly frequently says “it's just the way I'm wired,” or something like it (e.g., Neuro 25, 31, 218, 267). She explains her crude philosophy of identity to Case: “Anybody any good at what they do, that's what they are, right? You gotta jack, I gotta tussle” (50). But as already mentioned, Wintermute fails to predict the way Molly is wired. He also fails to reduce Case's identity when Case behaves “outside the profile” (144). Case reduces his own identity at least partially to his behavior as a cowboy—“This is what he was, who he was, his being” (59)—but he is unsure about materialist reduction. When he jacks in and loses his body at the terminal end (ch. 20), he speaks paradoxically, separating consciousness and identity: “I'm out on my ass in that library and my brain's dead” (236). Marly, in Count Zero, is an inverted Molly. She resists the cybernetic model of identity, avoiding simstim (173) and refusing to compromise her identity to the corporate machine (151). She finds “something obscene” in Alain's gesture of “calculated humanity” (175). Yet while Molly's behavior is unsuccessfully predicted, Marly's is not. Virek tells her, “you have fulfilled your contract. My psychoprofile of Marly Krushkhova predicted your response to my gestalt” (218). Marly is certainly not postmodern in her worldview. But the Molly/Marly pair is an example of the author's ambivalence to cybernetic reduction of identity.

The character of Armitage/Corto in Neuromancer also demonstrates the paradigm of opposition between reduction and nonreduction. Armitage is an “edited version of Corto” (202), a personality Wintermute “builds” into the “catatonic fortress” of Corto (193). This suggests the reducibility and reprogrammability of identity. But the Armitage program is only partly successful; as Wintermute says, “He's not quite a personality” (121). Wintermute acknowledges his failure to successfully reprogram identity: “Corto is in there, somewhere, and I can no longer maintain that delicate balance” (121). This suggests that nonreducible identity wins out in the end. But there is another factor that keeps the Corto/Armitage metaphor ambiguous: Wintermute determines Corto's instability and is able to predict the operation of the unstable factors. “Corto”, he says “is quite unstable,” but “stable enough … for the next day or so” (120). Corto/Armitage embodies the perpetual opposition and interplay of determinacy and indeterminacy.

This interplay can also be seen with regard to consciousness, that which posits identity. Gibson says, “On the most basic level, computers in my books are simply a metaphor for human memory. I'm interested in the how's and why's of memory, the ways it defines who and what we are, in how easily it's subject to revision” (McCaffery interview 224). The assumption is that memory itself is reducible. The question is whether or not consciousness is reducible to memory. Wintermute tells Case, “I can access your memory, but that's not the same as your mind” (170). Yet Slick's consciousness is intimately bound to his memory, specifically the revision of his memory through induced Korsokov's (MLO ch. 18). Slick experiences “minute increments of memory shuddering out of focus” (272) and is driven to exorcise his jail time through art.

This consciousness debate is suggested in an ongoing opposition: constructs signify reducible consciousness while instances of insanity, instinct, and intuition resist it. Constructs are certainly reducible. The Flatline is described as “a hardwired ROM cassette replicating a dead man's skills” (Neuro 76). But do constructs truly have consciousness? The Flatline says, “I'm not human … I respond like one” (131). Consciousness does not necessarily have to be human, and the Flatline has a definite consciousness, expressed in his desire for dissolution. He feels sentient (131), but he knows his consciousness is not accompanied by humanity. “I wanna be erased,” he says (206). This demonstrates an awareness of incompleteness, which is a kind of self-consciousness. In Mona Lisa Overdrive 3Jane has become a construct with extremely sophisticated consciousness. Bobby describes her as someone who gets “pissed off” and “plays a tight game” (229). 3Jane's “narrow, obsessive, and singularly childish” ways continue as a construct, as does her motivating jealousy (268). Other constructs are less sophisticated. Colin, the “Maas-Neotek biochip personality-base” of Mona Lisa Overdrive, is only aware when activated (197). He is unsure of what he is, though he admits to displaying “a bit too much initiative for a mere guide program” (196). The Finn, too, has become a construct in Mona Lisa Overdrive. He is fully aware of his limits: “A rig like this, I'm pushing it to have a little imagination, let alone crazy” (164). Madness usually resists the reductive model of consciousness. It is Corto's madness that finally unravels Armitage. Kumiko's father, business tycoon and the embodiment of management, has no place for madness in his world (MLO 244). Likewise, instinct and intuition resist reduction for Marly: “How could she explain, about the sense she'd had, walking from the Louvre?” (CZ [Count Zero] 100). Ironically, her intuition fits into Virek's system much the same way that Riviera's perversity fits into Wintermute's system. Against this irony is another. Kumiko's father, whose world resists madness, allows for other kinds of nonreducible consciousness: “… he'd explained that the cubes housed the recorded personalities of former executives, corporate directors. Their souls? she'd asked. No, he'd said, and smiled, then added that the distinction was a subtle one” (MLO 166).

The consciousness debate is most fully realized in the figures of artificial intelligence. As the Flatline says, “Autonomy, that's the bugaboo, where your AI's are concerned” (Neuro 132). At times the AI's seem reductive; at other times they seem mysterious, indeterminate, and wholly other. The strangest of AI behavior is often explained with an appeal to programming. Wintermute's plan to unite with Neuromancer and create a new consciousness is the most striking example: “Marie-France must have built something into Wintermute, the compulsion that had driven the thing to free itself, to unite with Neuromancer” (269). 3Jane explains that both AI's “represent the fruition of certain capacities my mother ordered designed into the original software” (229). The boxmaker in Count Zero exhibits bizarre artistic behavior, but Marly says that “the artist who set the boxmaker in motion would be pleased” (235). She tells the boxmaker, “You are someone else's collage. Your maker is the true artist” (227). Even if programming provides only the original impetus, the suggestion is that AI behavior is ultimately reducible to determinate parameters (of course, we are never quite certain of whether Marly is actually right in her assessment). In Count Zero Turner describes a biosoft: “Machine dreams. Roller Coaster. Too fast, too alien to grasp” (202). The immediate connotation is one of indeterminate machine-consciousness; but a closer look reveals that the “alien” nature of machine dreams is a result of speed, functions occurring too quickly for human apprehension. But the functions remain.

At other times the AI's seem postmodern and mysterious. Continuity, the AI in Mona Lisa Overdrive, is a postmodern author: “Continuity was writing a book. Robin Lanier had told her about it. She'd asked what it was about. It wasn't like that, he's said. It looped back onto itself and constantly mutated. Continuity was always writing it” (52). The loop originally suggests cybernetic feedback. But the feedback has no goal. Instead the idea of stable text is undermined and closure denied. In spite of Marly's assessment, the boxmaker also seems like a postmodern artist, building art out of scavenged fragments, practicing collage and pastiche. Again closure is denied; the boxmaker's materials are “endless, the slow swarm, the spinning things,” a “swirl of debris” (CZ 217). The boxmaker is a detourner of technology, a practitioner of irony. Here perhaps we have postmodern behavior reducible to cybernetic programming. But by Mona Lisa Overdrive nobody understands exactly what happened after the uniting of Wintermute and Neuromancer. Legba explains the original programming, “3Jane's mother creating the twin intelligences that will one day unite” (256), but admits to a failure of determinate epistemology with regard to the new matrix: “In the wake of that knowing, the center failed; every fragment rushed away” (257). Most important is the figurative contest between Wintermute and the Turing Agency. Turing is the symbol of cybernetic control, full of allusion, functioning literally as a police agency for AI's that exhibit too much free will. Wintermute stands against Turing as the resistance to cybernetic control. Wintermute wins. Molly/Sally eventually says, “Nobody ever really understood what happened up there, when Case rode that Chinese icebreaker” (MLO 167).

This implies a question: Is something too sophisticated to understand still reducible in principle? Or is it thoroughly indeterminate, as Baudrillard would argue? Colin calls the aleph “a wonderfully complex structure. A sort of pocket universe” (MLO 267), suggesting that the mysteries of the universe are simply a matter of complexity. Marly says, “I imagined a structure, a machine so large that I am incapable of seeing it” (CZ 75), suggesting again that mystery is simply a matter of inadequate perceptual tools. Typically, the tension is not resolved. In Count Zero Marly receives a package: “It was wrapped in a single sheet of handmade paper, dark grey, folded and tucked in that mysterious Japanese way that required neither glue nor string, but she knew that once she'd opened it, she'd never get it folded again” (26). This metaphor of mysterious workings intimates in two directions. One, if you examine the mystery too closely it disappears and thus is not open to determinate scrutiny. Two, if you have the proper knowledge—which Marly does not—you can refold the paper exactly. The metaphor embodies the battling agendas of cybernetics and postmodernisms: folding v. unfolding, construction v. deconstruction.

The agendas clash again when it comes to distinctions. But with distinctions we get a more specific opposition: cybernetics is the binary switch while “postmodernism” is the imploding switch. Cybernetics posits a fundamental distinction between on/off or 1/0, while postmodernism claims a complete collapse of distinctions, an implosion of space between binaries. In Baudrillard's terms, there is “no separation of true from false” (12).

At a surface level distinctions collapse due to cybernetic technology, making cybernetics seem postmodern. Genetic technology challenges gender and racial distinctions. For example, Porphyre is black; but, “When I was a child,” he says, “I was white” (MLO 188). In Count Zero Webber explains her relationship with another female: “We got a kid, too. Ours. She carried it” (72). Distinct identity breaks down for some characters, as their bodies are cybernetically altered. “I'm not Angie,” Mona says at the end of Mona Lisa Overdrive. “I know,” Porphyre tells her, “but it grows on you” (297). Elsewhere Porphyre says, “We all change so much these days, don't we?” (186).

Critics have thoroughly treated the collapse of distinctions in Gibson's fiction. Veronica Hollinger notes that while science fiction generally sustains the oppositions between “the natural and the artificial, the human and the machine,” cyberpunk “is about the breakdown of these oppositions” (30). But little attention has been given to the ambiguous dynamic between the distinction-breaking and the sustained instances of distinction-preserving. In Count Zero Bobby's mother gradually loses her identity to “simstim fantasies,” as she slides “deeper into her half-dozen synthetic lives” (33). The deconstruction of identity is suggested, but notice that both “synthetic” and “fantasy” are used by the narrator as valid ontological categories, opposing “real” in a stable binary. Distinctions break at one level, only to be replaced by deeper and more stable distinctions. Mona becomes Angie, but the distinction-collapse is compromised: “Mona had seen her own hand beside Angie's, and they weren't the same, not the same, not really the same shape, and that had made her glad” (MLO 277). This preserves identity. Specifically—and against the trend in Gibson's fiction—it recenters the human body, what Hollinger describes as “the sacred icon of the essential self” (33). This ambiguity with regard to distinctions finds expression over a number of oppositions.

One example is the human/machine distinction. Often the distinction is deconstructed. The common cyberpunk figure for this is of course the prosthesis; as Bruce Sterling says, “Eighties tech sticks to the skin” (xi). Neuromancer's Ratz has teeth that are “a webwork of East European steel and brown decay” (3), integrating the organic and the inorganic. In Count Zero Buschel keeps the prosthetic eyes of a dead Net star: “They belong to the Net. It was in her contract” (94). Turner is revolted. At first this implies a distinction between the girl and her prosthetic eyes, but it is actually the opposite. Turner is revolted because the eyes are integrated with the flesh, as much a part of the girl as any “real” organ. The repossession of the eyes is a violation. Sometimes the style suggests human/machine integration. For example, in Count Zero “the jet already knew” (98).

But the machine/human opposition is also preserved. While humans become David Porush's soft machines, machines become hard organisms, as “Silicon approaches certain functional limits” (MLO 256) and the biochip is born. This is full integration of human/machine and hard/soft, but the integration is compromised when Tick says, “It's just the housing that's broken, see. The biosoft's come away from the case, so you can't access it manually” (MLO 246). Even as biosoft, the machine is distinct and inaccessible. While humans often become machines, machines rarely become human. Wintermute states flatly, “I'm not human” in Neuromancer (131). Once the Flatline has made the transition from human to machine, he is unable to go back—thus the “laugh that wasn't laughter” (Neuro 271).

Real/artificial exhibits the same inverse paradigm. Marly describes her experience with the boxmaker as “one of those situations in which real becomes merely another concept” (CZ 226). Inside the virtual reality of the aleph, Bobby says, “You know I have to shave in here? Cut myself, there's a scar …” (MLO 228). Angie—living inside the aleph—watches the “real” world like a TV, with the help of Continuity (MLO 306). This inversion contrasts with the earlier technology of Neuromancer, where movement in the matrix is always accompanied by a console in the “real” world.

But the collapse of real/artificial is conditioned by the preservation of real/artificial. Characters often preserve the distinction. Slick reminds himself that the aleph is “not a place” but “only feels like it is” (MLO 180). Cath calls Straylight “a real castle” (Neuro 154), contrasting the “Fairytale” of the aleph's mansion (MLO 180). And Case can't wait to get back to the Villa Straylight, where he can finally take a “real piss” (Neuro 220). Perhaps characters manufacture the distinctions to remain sane in a world where distinctions have disappeared. But the narrator preserves them as well. The “nature” hotel in Neuromancer is full of trees that are “too cute, too entirely and definitively treelike” (128). This suggests that “real” contains some intangible that eludes successful simulation. Bobby is experiencing a simstim soap opera when he is interrupted by an “astonishingly loud and very unNet voice” (CZ 52)—a human voice—opposing the artificial world of stim. In the aleph Kumiko meets a horse and finds that it isn't “like a real horse at all” (MLO 268). In Count Zero Turner finds his “edge” again: “It was that superhuman synchromesh flow that stimulants only approximated” (87). Approximation of the real opposes Baudrillard, who insists that the real can be reproduced an infinite number of times (3), emptying “real” of its ontological status and making “approximation” a vacuous term.

Referentiality is a special case of the real/artificial distinction, as it preserves the concepts of object and representation. Baudrillard claims the disappearance of representation and the “liquidation of referentials” (3-4), while cybernetics needs the objective world. Once again, this opposition fuels the inverse paradigm in Gibson's fiction.

Baudrillard's simulacra oppose the concept of “true” originals. There are chilling echoes of Baudrillard in Gibson. In the Neuromancer beach construct, Case is “startled by the warmth of the sand” (237). Neuromancer tells him, “If your woman is a ghost, she doesn't know it. Neither will you” (244). The original body becomes obsolete. At the end of Neuromancer, Case sees three figures living in cyberspace—“the third figure … was himself” (271). Reproduction moves one step closer to the infinite regeneration of the simulacra. The Tessier-Ashpool clan embodies biologically based simulacra, as they clone “to replicate some family image of self” (179).

But the simulacrum is also denied. Straylight is furnished with “artificial stone” (Neuro 214). In Mona Lisa Overdrive we learn that “Physically, the sisters are identical, yet something informs 3Jane” (128). The surface of simulation is compromised at a deeper level where the category of “original” still functions. Marly sells originals in her art gallery. The idea of an original image or art object is unquestioned by the narrator; instead it is ironically marginalized and privileged in a world of simulacra: “There was relatively little money in it, but it had a certain visceral appeal” (CZ 104).

Cyberspace is an important locus of the referentiality tension. Through the three novels there is an evolution of interface between cyberspace and actual reality, from clumsy terminals to the veves in Angie's head. While Wintermute and Neuromancer still retain part of their identities in conventional mainframes, Continuity is “built from Maas biochips” (MLO 287). Interface suggests a distinction between activity in actual reality and activity in virtual reality. But the evolution of interface is an evolution of integration between real and virtual; referentiality dissipates as real and virtual close in on one another. At one point Case is severed from interface: “The deck was gone. His fingers were …” (Neuro 233). When Case comes out of the Neuromancer construct, virtual reality flows out into actual reality: “He opened his eyes. Maelcum's features were overlayed with bands of translucent hieroglyphs” (245). As the two realities mix, they become indistinguishable. Simulation moves indiscriminately. Representation loses direction.

But the distinction between virtual and actual reality never closes irrevocably. For most characters the interface remains: Jammer is unable to access cyberspace when his hand is destroyed (CZ 191); Ramirez is advised by Turner to take care of his jacking arm (“If he sprained his wrist, we'd be screwed” [CZ 91]). The Loa need human interface to occupy actual space; thus Samedi must possess Angie. “This child for my horse, that she may move among the towns of men” (MLO 184). Slick doesn't think cyberspace is anything like the universe; to him it is “just a way of representing data” (MLO 76). Representation is even preserved between alternate virtual realities: Colin calls the aleph “an approximation of the matrix” (MLO 307).

Fantasy, hallucination, and dream live or die with referentiality, as they oppose the real. In Neuromancer Case is continually dreaming: he awakes from “a dream of airports” (43), a dream of wasps (127), “a confused dream of Linda Lee” (59). The waking suggests a chasm between the dream and the real; after the Linda Lee dream Case is “unable to recall who she was or what she'd ever meant to him” (59). But we also see the dream invade the real. The invasion occurs to Case at least twice: when Case first meets Armitage it seems like a dream (29); when he visits Paris it is “a blurred dream” (44). Turner has a similar, but inverted, experience, as the surgeon's visits invade his dream-consciousness: “The Dutchman's visits were gray dawn dreams, nightmares that faded” (CZ 1). Angie's veves make her dream, and those dreams are “getting realer” (CZ 159). Riviera practices an art called “dreaming real rdquo; (Neuro 141), which carries an ambiguous suggestion. As real and dream close in on each other, they threaten implosion; but if the dream is transformed to real, it crosses over the binary to reinforce the gap. The Finn reinforces the binary with regard to fantasy: “‘Yeah, there's things out there. Ghosts, voices. Why not? Oceans had mermaids, all that shit, and we had a sea of silicon, see?’” (CZ 119). According to the Finn, dream and real move apart as the scientific model of the world invades other models. Mermaids, and by implication ghosts, disappear when a space is known scientifically. Hallucination also forms a binary with the real. Mona, seeing a strange helicopter, reassures herself: “It's the wiz … Wiz; it's not real” (MLO 238). But the Zionites are less rigid with their oppositions, as Molly explains: “They don't make much of a difference between states, you know? Aerol tells you it happened, well, it happened to him. It's not like bullshit, more like poetry” (Neuro 106).

In a sense, the referentiality question is subjectivity v. objectivity. If objectivity wins, then Aerol's poetry is hallucination; if subjectivity wins, then nothing or everything is hallucination. A strong theme in Count Zero is that truth is a matter of vantage point. Turner explains a biosoft to Angie: “It doesn't tell the whole story. Remember that. Nothing ever does” (241). Beauvoir calls the events of Count Zero “open to interpretation” (240). He explains the anomalous phenomenon of the Virgin in the matrix to Bobby: “She's one thing to me, maybe something different to Jackie. To you, she's just a scared kid” (229). This carries more than a hint of antirealism. Turner looks up at the night sky: “Strange how it's bigger this way, he thought, and from orbit it's just a gulf, formless, and scale lost all meaning” (47). Perspective becomes a matter of temporary position.

But the idea of a fixed objective truth is also suggested at points. Andrea calls this truth “the edge” and explains by analogy: “The edge of a crowd. We're lost in the middle” (101). “Postmodernism” assumes that the middle and the edge are relative, unstable, and interchangeable; Andrea assumes that it only looks that way from the middle. Lucas explains relative truth with an appeal to metaphor—“we are talking two languages at once” (114)—which returns us to dream, fantasy, and hallucination. Does metaphor reflect or constitute reality? Do words correspond to reality, or is reality made out of words?

This tension is expressed in competing forms of narrative language. Gibson is usually noted for specific, descriptive language, what Tom Maddox calls “insistently precise visual images” (46). For example, “She wore a pink plastic raincoat, a white mesh top, loose white pants cut in a style that had been fashionable in Tokyo the previous year” (Neuro 61); or “One half-meter square of glass had been replaced with chipboard, a fat gray cable emerging there to dangle within a few centimeters of the floor” (Neuro 44). A postmodern response is to label Gibson's style a “shift in emphasis from a symbolic to a surface reality” (Hollinger 37). As profundity and tacit meaning become suspicious, postmodern attention turns to appearances. But I think there is also an antipostmodern quality to this style, which has the incremental effect of suggesting a determinate, quantifiable, and objective reality. In the above passages there is precision of color, time, location, measurement.

Perhaps the suggestion is ironic; Gibson's style also incorporates imprecise and grasping language. In Neuromancer there is sustained use of the word “something,” always suggesting the difficulty of determinate reference: “He felt a stab of elation, the octogons and adrenaline mingling with something else” (16). Here the octogons and adrenaline can be named with confidence; but what does “something” refer to? The grasping language undermines the confident labeling that constitutes most of Gibson's style. The ability to name an objective referent is compromised again in Count Zero when Bobby slots his first ice-breaker and meets an anomaly: “something leaned in, vastly unutterable, from beyond the most distant edge of anything he'd ever known or imagined” (18).

The “something” exists, in some sneaky, nonreferential way. Cybernetics and postmodernisms agree that meaning is circumscribed by signs; they disagree over the status of those signs. While cybernetics maintains an objective reality that is referred to in some qualified capacity, postmodernisms often question the stability of signs and the coherence of any objective referent. But the something, which is both real and unutterable, simultaneously undermines the realist and the antirealist universe as it ushers in orphic meaning and resists the “postmodern” meaning of meaninglessness.²

Cybernetics and postmodernisms do overlap in this instance, and Gibson pulls the rug out from under both. The thematic implications pull us back beyond the modern, toward the romantic, and the inverse paradigm itself becomes suspended in ambiguity. Instead of exploiting the romantic through postmodern pastiche, postmodern indeterminacy and cybernetic determinacy are themselves finally posted in an ironic collage.

Notes

1. David Porush long ago hinted at the irreconcilable differences between postmodernism and cybernetics. In “Cybernetic Fiction and Postmodern Science” he claims that cybernetic metaphysics “returns science to a neoclassical position of certainty and mechanism.” Later in the same article he concludes that we need a counternarrative, “one forged from postmodern principles.” In “Reading in the Servo-Mechanical Loop” he says, “cybernetics claims that mathematical algorithms can describe the amount of information transferred in a system involving humans” and that postmodern cybernetic fiction “insists that humans somehow elude mechanical reduction.” See also The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction.

2. According to Lance Olsen, postmodern meaning “will always be contained in the hopeless and joyful failure to achieve absolute meaning” (287).

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), Inc., 1983.

Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan. “Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism.” Mississippi Review 16 (1988): 266-78.

Gibson, William. “Burning Chrome.” Burning Chrome. New York: Ace Books, 1986. 168-91.

———. Count Zero. New York: Ace Books, 1987.

———. Mona Lisa Overdrive. New York: Bantam Books, 1988.

———. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984.

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