SOURCE: Fabijancic, Tony. “Space and Power: 19th-Century Urban Practice and Gibson's Cyberworld.” Mosaic 32, no. 1 (March 1999): 105-30.

[In the following essay, Fabijancic discusses the motifs of space and vision in Gibson's fiction within the context of modern multinational capitalist society.]

Modernity may be broadly defined as a mindset which privileges the new and fashionable over the old and traditional, and in this sense it becomes one of the central ideologies according to which life is understood in multinational capitalist society and culture. Insofar as an investigation of the dynamics of capitalism requires attention to the “material” base of this ideology, a problem with many depictions of modernity therefore lies in the overemphasis on “time” and too little attention to “space.” This emphasis on the temporal can be seen, for example, in those accounts which view modernity as beginning with the Renaissance's revolutionary “conviction that history had a specific direction,” continuing with the Enlightenment's project of change, and culminating perhaps most forcefully in the 19th century when modernity as an ethos appeared to be generated from the linear (developmental) progression of history (Calinescu 22). Such accounts, however, fail to address the “structure” of modernity, just as they tend to overlook the way that capitalism registers its exploitation in physical forms. Capitalism channels the “movements” of its subjects as much as their ways of seeing and thinking, and it is in this interaction between capitalist spaces and the subjects who occupy them that modernity is most clearly comprehensible and its continuance today can best be seen.

An important capitalist process which pervades the spatial organisation of cities in modernity is reification—an umbrella term that Georg Lukacs introduced in his History and Class Consciousness to describe the kind of problematic experience, at all social levels, which results from conditions generated by commodity production. On the objective side, reification has to do with capitalism's “second nature” of appearances in the form of a system founded largely on commodity production, one that seems inescapable and permanent; on the subjective side, reification involves the fragmentation or abstraction of individuals—the limited development or maturation resulting from specialized labor under capitalism, the mechanization of workers in order to motor the capitalist machine, the separation of individuals from each other, and a failed sense of vision, an inability to see this state of affairs for what it is. Another characteristic of reification, and a contributor to subjects' experience of modern urban space, especially through vision, is the subject/object opposition in which a gap forms between subject and objective world (as well as between subject and the products of subjective labor), increasingly bridged only through vision, as in the consumption activity of the promenade or in television and film viewing or the playing of video games. Reification thus also “invades” the spatial structures of aesthetics, both in terms of content and form. The concrete transformations of space and vision begun particularly in the 19th century (the arcade; Baron Haussmann's reconstructions of Paris) are homologous with the stylistic abstractions (in the Marxist sense of “fragmentation” and “atomization”) of modernist and postmodernist literature and visual arts. This restructuring is equivalent to the conditions of reified fictional subjects whose lived space and sense of vision is bound up with or reflective of the processes of modernization, and also approximated for readers or viewers of the works themselves through various experimentations with form.

Among contemporary literary experimenters, few are more concerned with issues of reification and capitalism and its future directions than William Gibson, whose cyberpunk trilogy—Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988)—literally enacts the shift from temporally-oriented depth modes to spatial, surface ones that Fredric Jameson associates with third-stage or multinational capitalism. In each of these works, Gibson presents us with a hyper-urban, technology-ridden, and utterly simulational world. His cyberpunk novels usually involve some heist carried through by a small collective of characters born on the margins of a high-tech world, but who have had their bodies “wired” either by choice in order to exploit the “biz” nature of that world or because they have been coerced by Artificial Intelligences which have broken free from their corporate creators, and who need the services of these individuals.

In this essay, however, I wish to focus less upon the futuristic aspects of Gibson's fiction and more upon the way that it continues to represent the reification of space and vision that is characteristic of the capitalist impetus in modernity. More specifically, I want to explore the way that in Gibson's differentiation between the essentially lower-class and criminal zones of the urban sprawls, on the one hand, and the high-tech virtual space of the matrix, on the other, one finds the same ideology that informs the politics of 19th-century urban space. Thus I will begin by briefly outlining the general dynamics of the space-vision reification process and its 19th-century characteristics before turning specifically to Gibson's fiction, where I will focus first on the new imperatives of business, and then on how they result in new reifying technologies which alter the composition of “natural” bodies, in new categories or levels of space, in new ways of seeing that issue from these strange virtual dimensions (as registered narratively in the juxtapositional spatial form that originates with the radical experimentations in modernism). In an attempt to show that such modernity has not disappeared, but has become entrenched in new ways, I will center my analysis on two areas which manifest the reified space-vision construct: a) the subject/object relation, and b) the relation between public and private space. I will also show that these points are registered in the spatial form of Gibson's narrative style, both reflecting and repudiating the reified space/vision conjunction.

Reification unfolds in and contributes to the restructuring of urban space, although this abstracting, fragmenting, alienating process is also, at the same time, generated by space. Space is not simply a physical context for the evolutions of capital, as Marx himself essentially saw it, but also an active agent which structures the capacities of capitalism (although it may also be destroyed by this expansion). That is, space conditions the direction of capitalist expansion in both a material and ideological sense, since it contributes to organizing urban subjects' imagined relations to their spatial conditions of existence. As soon as reified urban space is inscribed in the consciousnesses of individuals, their entire armature of being and thinking tends toward being marshalled accordingly. Every city's spatial configuration interpolates subjectivity (in Althusser's sense of “hailing”) through its organizational capacity, determining the movements, gestures, attitudes and general modern style of its subjects. The specifics of such style—for example, the transient fashions of clothing, hair, physique—are liable to change, to delayed recycling in different form, or obsolescence. Yet the overall interpellative function of reified space remains viable and essentially bound up with such constituent factors. Space does not determine what styles people adopt but contributes fundamentally to a wider modern rhetoric of being and thinking.

The role of reified space in constituting modernity originates perhaps most forcefully in the 19th-century metropolis, for which Paris might be considered paradigmatic. The experience of modernity in the 19th century—and indeed the 20th as well—is founded in large part on the fragmentation of social space into public and private, center and periphery. Modernity involves the public domain of chaotic crowded streets, those urban festivals of consumption which produced the prototypical modern figures of the dandy and the flaneur (the latter being the solitary urban voyagers who lose themselves in the multitudes, bourgeois non-working observers observing events they are separate from). It is, however, not the effects of such public space on fashion or fashion-consciousness that I want to emphasize but, more importantly, the conflictual undercurrents in the production of massive rationalized public space. As Walter Benjamin and others have suggested, Baron Haussmann's reconstructions of Paris, which involved cutting long corridors through workers' districts, also served a very different, power-oriented purpose; the breadth of the streets “was to make the erection of barricades impossible, and new streets were to provide the shortest route between the barracks and working-class areas” (Benjamin 89).

The way that Paris's spatial entrenchment of the old uneven distribution of power was concealed behind the facade of the new, does not, of course, hold true to the same extent in late capitalism's hyper-urban configurations. This complex and abstract city space is characterized by a “vast network of banks, business centres and major productive entities, as also of motorways, airports and information lattices” through which the city as simply a vast agglomeration of people ceases to exist (Lefebvre 53). Similarly, the desire of the 19th-century bourgeois to see and be seen on boulevards and arcades is not evident in the arterial freeway structures of major 20th-century cities. But neither has this space-subjectivity modality completely disappeared, since the promenade or stroll as a component of commodity consumption is still with us. More importantly, multinational capitalist urban space intensifies the division between “haves” and “have-nots,” symbolized earlier by the center-periphery opposition—even if this opposition in multinational capitalism no longer fully holds true (the “inner city” now constituting a site of deprivation not affluence) or has been inscribed into more complex multifaceted spaces whose affluence is increasingly determined by fluctuating real estate prices. In terms of the reification of space, therefore, it would be wrong to imply that in our contemporary world modernity is no longer an issue, for one is essentially speaking about a greater degree of abstraction today, not a complete disappearance of the phenomenon.

The private component of reified social space—the 19th-century middle-class home with all its petty luxuries and ornaments—exemplifies the continuing widespread atomization and compartmentalization inherent in capitalism as a whole. This compartmentalization reinforces the apparently irrevocable reality of separateness in its most negative sense of isolation and alienation, both of which are an inevitability of modern existence. The separation of private from public space as an inherent element of modernity is part and parcel of the reifying process which also involves the specialization of shops, the specialization of rooms, and the separation of the individual from the group (Sack 45). Such separateness under the sign of private property, reinforced in spatial and psychological terms, marks out capital's power in a particularly effective way since it naturalizes laissez-faire and (less potent) individual struggle, as opposed to the collective kind. At the same time, private space and separateness in general may be considered more positively as a gap or chink within a vast system like capitalism or a more limited one like the matrix, a corporation or corporate clan, from which some individual might attempt a coup.

Vision is significant in the constitution of modernity because it is the privileged connector between subjects and reified urban space. Sight is the most powerful sensual mediator because it has the capacity of entrenching a naturalized objective world, transforming it into an apparently unchangeable reality that may be verified optically, and providing the kind of superficial reading of surfaces needed to maintain or entrench it. Vision allows for the naturalization (and mystification) of capitalism, not only through the obvious optical regime of advertising, but also by an appeal through vision for the necessity of mass-produced commodities, and the inevitability and irrevocability of the system in general. Vision in capitalism has always meant more than the sensual mediation between subjects and reality, individuals and physical space; it also becomes synonymous with “being.” To be in the 19th-century capitalist world was above all to see and be seen, which implies a polarity or gap between the viewing subject and the surrounding objective world, as if the two could be related only through a passive gaze.

Another point of connection between reified space and vision is the loss of a sense of totality (i.e., life experienced as a totality) that comes with living under capitalism. The fragmentation or abstraction characteristic of modern experience is articulated spatially in the oppositions of urban/rural and work/home, in addition to the division of cities into districts. The homology in visual terms is the separation of the senses in capitalism whereby sight “becomes a separate activity in its own right” (Jameson, The Political Unconscious 63). In a simultaneous process, reification penetrates lived urban space and subjective vision to the extent that the reification of one immediately implies the reification of the other.

In addition, the privileging of sight appears to result from the separation of capitalist spaces of production on the one hand and consumption on the other, a separation that produces a disjunction between labor and leisure, between working the land and simply viewing it (Williams 121). Pleasure occurs primarily through vision, and this vision is abstract, finding its 19th-century expression in the facades of bourgeois apartments, in the flat images on posters and ads originating with Lautrec. Nor has the connection between bourgeois luxury and passive vision disappeared from third-stage capitalism, where it takes the form of lower middle-class seduction by soap programs. This superficial imperative is from another perspective (that of the poor) a desire for the beautification of the visible, of the daily and mundane, a need to compensate for the grayness of life.

Gibson's contribution to our understanding of the subjectivity-reification-capitalism complex lies mainly in his concern with the connection between the physical body and consciousness, whereby his fiction leads to questions like the following: what might happen to the human body and consciousness in multinational capitalism? how will science driven by the impetus of market forces inscribe itself on the human subject? how will reification further transform space and the experience of space? and what new ways of seeing will result? Certain theorists of postmodernism have long announced the demise through reification of the natural body as a result of the expanding simulational world, describing it as a compression into “a fantastic simulacra of body rhetorics” generated by industries like fashion and advertising (Kroker iii). Others, following Michel Foucault, perceive the body both in terms of surface and invaded interior—a “communicative tissue upon which social power is inscribed, at first externally (the socio text) and now perhaps on the body's very insides” (O'Neil 71). One of Gibson's achievement is his exploration of the finer ramifications of various possible directions that science and technology might take in terms of their effects on the human body.

In Neuromancer, for example, he describes a loyalty guarantee used by multinationals: the injection of employees with classified chemicals that cause withdrawal should the individuals transfer without permission. Gibson's protagonist, Case, is “hired” by the AI Wintermute through the bribe of a regenerated nervous system that will allow him access to cyberspace again, but he is blackmailed into loyalty by a new medical condition—fifteen toxin sacs “bonded to the lining of various main arteries” requiring an enzyme injection that will “dissolve the bond without opening the sacs”—which will return him to his initial condition (46). After an attempt on his life, Turner, the mercenary in Count Zero, is rebuilt by doctors working for the Hosaka corporation so that he will be capable of overseeing the transfer of a prominent scientist working for a bio-tech corporation called Maas: “They cloned a square meter of skin for him, grew it on slabs of collagen and shark-cartilage polysacharides. They bought eyes and genitals on the open market” (1). Yet he is sickened by the retrieval of the Zeuss-Ikon eyes of a dead soap-opera star. Indeed, he appears to desire a more traditional or “natural” physical existence, and only partially finds a home within his own body, as Istvan Csicsery-Ronay suggests (68). In Mona Lisa Overdrive, there is the case of a sixteen-year-old street kid and prostitute called Mona, who is surgically altered to resemble Angela Mitchell, internationally famous interactive (simstim) screen star and daughter of a Maas scientist. In a shady, highly complex operation born from the madness of one of the cloned daughters of an enormously wealthy corporate clan called Tessier-Ashpool, whose two AIs have joined together and directed Dr. Mitchell in his research, Mona becomes the pawn in a corporate intrigue in which the competitors fight for control of the secret biochip codes that Mitchell planted in his daughter's brain.

Perhaps the most disturbing of Gibson's reified bodies is that of the tycoon Josef Virek in Count Zero. Virek has decayed into a kind of chemical morass in a support vat on the outskirts of Stockholm. He is able to run parts of his business through simstim and recently through the more detailed and realistic virtual reality generated by Maas biochips. In other words, his visually reified existence radically replaces his original self, a self which has already been scattered around the world in file footage and old magazine photos. Virek is no longer a physical being in even the reconstructed sense of Case or Turner. No longer centered on his physical presence, his wealth has become “autonomous by degrees,” aspects of which war with each other in what he calls “rebellion in the fiscal extremities” (37). Virek's ultimate goal is to use biochip technology and transplant his chemical remnants into one or more “virtual” bodies like a parasite invading a host. Turner's comment about some people's need to make a “jump” from their static, stagnant lives takes on troubling connotations here.

Like Josef Virek, Gibson's AIs usually communicate visually with humans through either holograms or virtual realities, the most pervasive means by which thought and information appears to be represented at this stage of economic and social history. The images that feel real confuse reality and “virtuality” to the point that only a residual valorization of the human body (or “meat” in cyber parlance) remains a way of choosing one or the other, as it turns out with Case. Indeed, the visual exhilaration of cyberspace is for some a high compared to the lapsarian life in the meat world—the “Fall.” And although various other virtual constructs distinct from the cubist datascape of the matrix are woven through with non-visual sensual details—damp sand of Neuromancer's electronic beach, the smell of rain and wet earth in Virek's Guell Park—there is eventually the sense on the part of the characters that these scenes are visually-dominant and therefore inauthentic, that they are holographic to the core and that the sensual totality of virtual experience is often added on only after the fact as a kind of consent to the human agents operating therein or as a method of manipulating them. One can detect here an awakened consciousness (if not specifically of the class kind) to the illusory nature of some apparently unchangeable reality.

The tendency to equate or synonomize “seeing” and “being” is evident in the console cowboys' willing seduction by the visually intense formations of the matrix. One imagines them suffering from Jameson's postmodernist version of schizophrenia, characters who experience “euphoria, a high, an intoxicatory or hallucinogenic intensity,” awash as they are in “a sea of technological change, information overload and random—but extraordinarily vivid—sensory stimulation” (Postmodernism 28; McCaffery, “Introduction” 10). In Count Zero, Bobby Newmark recognizes the nature of his mother's simstim addiction, although he ultimately abandons his own body to slow death on life support while his consciousness is jacked inside the aleph.

[Bobby] knew her, yeah, how she'd come through the door with a wrapped bottle under her arm, not even take her coat off, just go straight over and jack into the Hitachi, soap her brains out good for six solid hours. Her eyes would unfocus, and sometimes, if it was a really good episode, she'd drool a little. About every twenty minutes she'd manage to remember to take a ladylike nipp out of the bottle.

She'd always been that way, as long as he could remember, gradually sliding deeper into her half dozen synthetic lives, sequential simstim fantasies Bobby had had to hear about all his life. … Maybe, he thought now, it had been true, in a way; she'd jacked that shit straight through the pregnancy, because she'd told him she had, so he, fetus Newmark, curled up in there, had reverberated to about a thousand hours of People of Importance and Atlanta.

(33-34)

The paradox of Marsha Newmark's simstim addiction is that she simultaneously experiences the illusion of control but is unconsciously and in reality being controlled. Simstim's perverse genius is its ability to conflate the two poles of this power axis into one experience of jouissance, whereby watching the latest star is also to be watched, to feel for the duration of any given episode what it is like inside the skin of someone very rich and very glamorous. Simstim is like a techno version of the panopticon in which viewers are objects of their own gaze, except here they do not feel that they are monitoring themselves. Although Gibson provides instances of surveillance on the part of “official” agencies like the Turing police, or of various crime organizations, clans, or AIs, in this world the “guards” seem increasingly to be the anonymous, sourceless directives of multinational capitalism itself, whose visually-based apparatuses like simstim are most effective in seducing subjects. Most of Gibson's characters are forced to transform themselves mentally and physically according to the exigencies of the perpetual dance of biz, which takes some of them from urban criminal-infested sprawls to the other side of the computer screen.

One of Gibson's main interests under the rubric of reified consciousness is the role of memory in the shaping of identity. Gibson's near-future society sees the past (in this case, personal past) in visual terms. The connection between vision and memory implies some of the same panoptic overtones in multinational capitalism's infiltration of consciousness as the connection does in terms of the control of the body. While many characters in Gibson's work show little nostalgia for the past (history and tradition are considered memories seemingly designed for obsolescence in a culture whose data capacities, ironically, are perpetually growing), Gibson often seems to privilege historical consciousness and the concept of an essential universal humanity, which indicates his ambivalence toward the technoscape in which his stories are situated. In Neuromancer, Wintermute's ability to access Case's memories and cull forth images of exporter-importer Julius Deane and the hustler called the Finn, for example, might be understood as a way of representing the corporate adeptness at seeing and reifying our desires visually in the images or auras surrounding commodities. As consciousness becomes reified optically, it loses its quality of imperviousness to the gaze from outside. Moreover, capitalism's power even extends to recording and altering memory and identity, although the comments by Wintermute (through the Finn) suggest that memory differs from mind because the latter appears more inviolable and cannot be plotted or controlled to the same degree.

In Count Zero, the way that a character can be subjected to memory reconstruction is presented in the case of Turner, who after being blown apart in New Delhi is shipped to Singapore and rebuilt by a Dutch physician.

He spent most of those three months in a ROM-generated simstim construct of an idealized New England boyhood of the previous century. The Dutchman's visits were gray dawn dreams, nightmares that faded as the sky lightened beyond his second-floor bedroom window. … The Dutchman opened a door in his back brain and came strolling in to ask questions, but in the morning his mother called him down to Wheaties, eggs and bacon, coffee with milk and sugar.

(1-2)

While not all Turner's memories are artificial, the ones that are have been inserted by the Hosaka corporation merely in order to insure the reliability of their investment. Hosaka has effectively done away with the concept of a personal past as an authentic register of experiences, reducing it to a simstim show that may or may not approximate the real thing. Memory therefore falls victim to the same simulational workings as the body, perhaps an even greater transgression because of the residual trans-cultural sense of divinity attributed to human consciousness. As a kind of antidote to this state of affairs, Gibson's final chapter in Count Zero returns some lost human dimensions to the novel, a utopian foil to the simulational overload of the 21st century: Turner's squirrel wood.

Another of Gibson's characters subjected to mental reconstruction is Armitage in Neuromancer. An important difference between Armitage and Turner, however, is the former's ultimate breakdown, which puts a noticeably dystopian slant to the entire process. Armitage was once Colonel Willis Corto, an American military agent who, with his team, dropped through Russian defenses in gliders to install a virus program, but were thwarted when Russian pulse guns caused them to crash. After being “[r]epaired, refurnished, and extensively rehearsed” he gave false testimony provided by a Congressional cabal to a Congressional investigation of the Screaming Fist mission. His testimony was “instrumental in saving the careers of three officers directly responsible for the suppression of reports on the building of the emp installations at Kirensk” (83). Corto's history after the hearing was a trail of murders and criminal activity declining into a state of schizophrenia. His incarceration in a French asylum and subsequent cybernetic cure at the direction of Wintermute transforms him into a construct named Armitage. As Wintermute says to Case, however, “He's not quite a personality. … But Corto is in there, somewhere, and I can no longer maintain that delicate balance. He's going to come apart on you, Case” (121). So not only do Corto's long suppressed memories of Screaming Fist finally resurface as the Armitage construct wears out like a battery, but the partially-revised personality or identity also begins to dissolve. Case wonders, “where had Corto been, those years?” (194).

Although not the first time this question has been asked, it may be the first time within this context of technological mastery over memory by an artificial intelligence born from a capitalist system where even the most personal, inaccessible, and non-material things acquire some form of exchange value. Control of this kind is conceivable only because of capitalism's long process of abstraction and objectification of individuality. Marx referred to this process as the decline of “species being,” a term now dismissed for its essentialist connotations. Yet it appears appropriate in the context of Gibson's somewhat romantic, nostalgic presentation of some of his characters. Ultimately, Corto/Armitage serves as a point of entry into a discussion of the schizophrenic relation between memory and identity—the way time and history have broken down and separated from personality, the way they have separated personality into various components created for market production and consumption so that personality becomes a sort of superfluousness necessary to the proper functioning of a computerized world-system. Evidence of the way that Gibson's world profoundly abstracts and devalues identity is its privileging of the simulational form of simstim stars like Tally Isham, Angela Mitchell, and finally Mona, who is appropriately, doubly artificial—a fake of Angela's screen persona.

The cyberpunk landscape “tends to be choked with the debris of both language and objects; as a sign system it is overdetermined by a proliferation of surface detail” (Hollinger 212). The high-speed proliferation of (usually) high-tech commodities results in a proliferation of obsolete junk. This material finds its way into alleys, empty warehouses and trash cans in urban ghettos scavenged by street kids. In Neuromancer, for example, as Case and Molly are on their way to see the Finn, they find themselves standing in a cluttered space.

The junk looked like something that had grown there, a fungus of twisted metal and plastic. He could pick out individual objects, but then they seemed to blur back into the mass: the guts of a television so old it was studded with the glass stumps of vacuum tubes, a crumpled dish antenna, a brown fiber canister stuffed with corroded lengths of alloy tubing. An enormous pile of old magazines had cascaded into the open area. …

(48)

Similarly, in Count Zero, Bobby Newmark comes across a loading bay blocked by a dumpster in a ramshackle collection of projects called Barrytown.

The dumpster was overflowing with a varied hash of industrial scrap. Barrytown had its share of gray-legal manufacturers, part of the “shadow economy” the news faces liked to talk about, but Bobby never paid much attention to news faces. Biz. It was all just biz. …

Bobby watched blankly as three kids, maybe ten at the oldest, scaled the blue wall of the dumpster with a length of dirty white nylon line and a makeshift grapple that might once have been part of a coatrack. … Small white hands tipped a dented alloy canister up and over the edge, lowering it on the nylon line. Good score, Bobby thought; you could take the thing to a metal dealer and get a little for it. They lowered the thing to the pavement, about a meter from the soles of Bobby's boots; as it touched down, it happened to twist around, showing him the six horned symbol that stood for biohazard. “Hey, fuck,” he said, drawing his feet up reflexively. …

(34-35)

For Bobby, the canister is not worth the risk of contamination, but for the scavengers it appears worth its weight in gold. In any case, the object holds no meaning beyond its exchange value or its use value, the latter likely to be involved in some sort of exchange later.

In contrast to this kind of junk, Gibson also features another type which consists of dereified objects that are usually those bound to the history of individuals or families, and connected with the slowly evolving totality of human experience. They are dereified in the sense of their retention of a historical trace and in their general lack of exchange value. As such they are rare in a world where the human element is increasingly peripheral. Examples may be found in Neuromancer in Case's run through the Tessier-Ashpool corridors where objects belonging to the family are encased in shelves, or in Molly's encounter with Ashpool which offers a view of his cluttered room. One scene which privileges dereification of this kind is that of the boxmaker near the end of Count Zero. The episode takes place in the remains of the Tessier-Ashpool cores which hold the mainframes for their corporate memories. The woman hired by Josef Virek to find the maker of various delicately made boxes, Marly Krushkhova, ends her hunt in a half-atmosphere space which houses a multi-armed robot.

[S]he caught herself on the thing's folded, jointed arms, pivoted and clung there, watching the swirl of debris. There were dozens of the arms, manipulators, tipped with pliers, hexdrivers, knives, a subminiature circular saw, a dentist's drill. … They bristled from the alloy thorax of what must once have been a construction remote, the sort of unmanned, semi-autonomous device she knew from childhood videos of the high frontier. But this one was welded to the apex of the dome, its sides fused with the fabric of the Place, and hundreds of cables and optic lines snaked across the geodiscs to enter it. Two of the arms, tipped with delicate force-feedback devices, were extended; the soft pads cradled an unfinished box.

Eyes wide, Marly watched the uncounted things swing past.

A yellowing kid glove, the faceted crystal stopper from some vial of vanished perfume, an armless doll with a face of French porcelain, a fat, gold-fitted black fountain pen, rectangular segment of perf board, the crumpled red and green snake of a silk cravat … Endless, the slow swarm, the spinning things. …

“I understand,” she said, sometime later. … “You are someone else's collage. Your maker is the true artist. Was it the mad daughter? It doesn't matter. Someone brought the machine here, welded it to the dome, and wired it to the traces of memory. And spilled, somehow, all the worn sad evidence of a family's humanity, and left it all to be stirred, to be sorted by a poet. To be sealed away in boxes. I know of no more extraordinary work than this. No more complex gesture. …”

(217-27)

For the scene to achieve its full impact the boxmaker's work must be set against Virek's selfish calculating hunger to discover the secret behind the Maas biochips technology, which he thinks will free him from his original physical self, and which he believes to be held by the robot. Virek perceives the boxes as merely means to an end, a trace toward a very different destination. The boxes, however, are signs not only of the history of the subjects they represent, but also of the labor that went into making them—labor in general, both aesthetic and otherwise. Ironically, the “hands” performing this labor belong to a machine not a human, though “someone” created the AI that speaks as the boxmaker. In Gibson's world, the remainder of that imprecise universal quality connoted by the word “human” is located within the concrete forms of dereified objects.

The subject/object relation in Gibson's trilogy—of which the object pole can be viewed as the multinational system rather than, more specifically, the object as “commodity”—is rendered through cyberspace. This parallel world is a uniquely multinational capitalist space which acts as a point of conflation between reified subject and object, and is not (as Jameson argues) solely the object pole of late capitalism or a representation of the almost unrepresentable configurations of a high-tech hyperurban world, although both approximate it. Cyberspace is a point of conflation in the sense that it is thought to represent all the data produced in the “human system”; to enter it is, ideally, to become part of a world of information that is part of us and knowable by us since it is our creation. This conflation, however, is a limited one because just as the reified object world confronts its subjects like an alien force, cyberspace itself functions in a similarly alienating way. Its operators cannot know it in its totality because many of its sectors are the privileged private domains of multinationals or corporate clans like the Tessier-Ashpools.

In addition, the relation between reified subjects and reified space in modernity—of which the promenade guided by subjects' abstract “flat” sight is an earlier type—is now refigured in that static hooked-in relation between console cowboy, cyberdeck, and screen. To understand this refiguring, one should note how the 19th-century space of the arcade involves a similar set of relations as the contemporary games room arcade. Here, as with the console cowboy's relation to the matrix, the player is located within the same spatial-visual nexus that characterizes both the old and new arcade experience. There is the same emphasis on passive vision and fragmented space, since the players, like consumers, are separated from each other while they are assembled, and interfaced with a screen that is centered on their vision, with the rest of their bodies mere supports for their eyes. Whereas the arcade as commodity festival reduces social relations to relations between commodities, video arcades reduce social relations to those between individuals and the game screens (although there is a necessary exchange of money that begins the game). Furthermore, the privileging of sight in the arcade, which appears causally related to the differentiation between capitalist spaces of production and consumption, is here a sign of the shift to non-material information production as a central factor in the economy, a way of showing the extent of abstraction in third-stage capitalism.

Cyberspace, or what in Neuromancer Gibson calls the matrix, is a “graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system” arranged in “clusters and constellations” like “city lights receding” (51). A three-dimensional non-space centered upon the eye, the matrix addicts users. In privileging sight over the other senses, the “human now exists as pure gaze while the fragmented ‘nonplace urban realm’ is translated into visual terms” (Bukatman 151). Consider here Gibson's depiction of Case's entry into cyberspace:

He closed his eyes.

Found the ridged face of the power stud.

And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.

Please, he prayed, now—

A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.

Now.

Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding—

And flowed, flowered for him. … the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.

(52)

A principle question arising from the phenomenon of cyberspace is the degree to which it is undermined by its subjects' awareness of its artifice. For example, at a critical moment when Wintermute's plan hangs in the balance, Case chooses to fulfill it by leaving his former girlfriend in Neuromancer's simulation of a beach and returning instead to the corporeal world, thereby abandoning a place that was no more than “a coded model of some stranger's memory” combined with his own memories of his relationship with Linda Lee (240).

Although the irony is that by recalling the integrity of his physical self he permits the most calculating, mercenary, and “cybernetic” AI to succeed, the positive side is that by no longer privileging abstract over material existence, Case penetrates his own reified consciousness and begins to see, both figuratively and literally. The beach construct created by Wintermute, into which Case has been projected, begins to wear down at this moment of awakened consciousness.

His vision crawled with ghost hieroglyphs, translucent lines of symbols arranging themselves against the neutral backdrop of the bunker wall. He looked at the backs of his hands, saw faint neon molecules crawling beneath the skin, ordered by the unknowable code. He raised his right hand and moved it experimentally. It left a faint, fading trail of strobed afterimages. …

“Hey,” he said, “it's breaking down. Bet you know, too. What is it? Kuang? Chinese icebreaker eating a hole in your heart?”

(241-43)

In contrast to Case's decision to abandon cyberspace, Bobby Newmark in Mona Lisa Overdrive abandons his body while jacked into an enormous microsoft called an aleph in the shape of a small rectangular slab, “a sort of model of cyberspace” (307). From Bobby's perspective it constitutes an ideal Platonic realm twice removed from the corrupted or imperfect material world, “an appreciation of everything” (154). But this “approximation of everything” within a package of “dead storage” shows that things have become even more distorted and reified than they were in Neuromancer's beach construct.

Gibson's accent on visuals and his use of heightened language becomes something like pure exhilaration as the corporeal world is escaped. The descriptions of a Chinese military ice-breaker cutting through the Tessier-Ashpool forms in cyberpsace typifies this ecstatic experience.

Kuang Grade Mark Eleven was filling the grid between itself and the T-A ice with hypnotically intricate traceries of rainbow, lattices fine as snow crystal on a winter window. …

The Chinese program was face to face with the target ice, rainbow tints gradually dominated by the green of the rectangle representing the T-A cores. Arches of emeralds across the colorless void. …

Headlong motion through walls of emerald green, milky jade, the sensation of speed beyond anything he'd known before in cyberspace. … The Tessier-Ashpool ice shattered, peeling away from the Chinese program's thrust, a worrying impression of solid fluidity, as though the shards of a broken mirror bent and elongated as they fell.

“Christ,” Case said, awestruck, as Kuang twisted and banked above the horizonless fields of the Tessier-Ashpool cores, an endless neon cityscape, complexity that cut the eye, jewel-bright, sharp as razors.

(201-56)

In a system which has done away with traditional unified subjectivity and its clear relation with its labor and product, which has shifted from a production-based economy to an information-based one, the relation between language and the material productive world no longer exists. Unlike the complex labor-intensive language of William Faulkner, for instance, seemingly consonant with the hard labor of poor tenant farmers, Gibson's style in Neuromancer fittingly reflects the very different socio-economic conditions of the present. His high-speed language is suited to the high speed of “biz,” the high of cyber-travel, the depthless rhetoric of multinational capitalism. Although this organicism could be considered a weak point in Gibson's own aesthetic response to this world, he might actually speak to the problem by avoiding direct intrusive commentary that would blunt readers' abilities to experience such rarification by themselves, albeit vicariously through the text.

With BAMA (Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis) and the mega-city of Ninsei, Gibson resituates the ideological imperatives of a ruling elite within a spatial configuration that is based on the differentiation between, on the one hand, lower-class suburbs and disintegrating urban criminal wastelands which serve as a refuse pile for old technologies and an experimental playground for new ones and, on the other, the virtual level of cyberspace and orbiting colonies, accessible to those with the money, good fortune, or thieving qualities necessary to acquire the means or the technology for entrance. As a result, the separation between public and private space and consciousness, which formerly served to distinguish the world of work from that of leisure, the crowded boulevards of fashion-conscious flaneurs from apartment spaces belonging to private property-owners, is subverted. Gibson depicts the disintegration of the authoritarian Haussmann-type urban fabric and the invasion of both private space and consciousness by high technology.

On the public side, zones like Night City in Japan or the Sprawl in BAMA are presented as chaotic crumbling urban sectors where masses of people live in a perpetual swirl of criminal business. There, no one promenades down long avenues in order to see and be seen because that spatial structure in combination with that ideology of vision and free time has changed. Again, this does not imply the elimination of a facet of modernity so much as an extension or intensification of elements just beneath the surface of 19th-century Paris. In Gibson, the equivalent of those long narrow panoptic corridors are the pristine neon cityscapes in cyberspace; similarly, visual jouissance has shifted its site of operation—moving from the street onto simstim screens and into cyberspace. Indeed, Haussmann's type of urban configurations, which sought in part to keep confrontation at bay, seems in the process of breaking down—Gibson's urban sprawls having become crime-infested spaces. One might regard this transformation as an inevitable result of the exclusionary tactics of capitalism, the “proletariat” now resorting to crime within a system that has finally revealed itself to be openly “criminal.” Or one might see the breakdown as an abandonment of certain sectors of the city by the ruling elite, and a further entrenchment of reified space, which is abstracted another level away from the material world.

I have spoken earlier of the interpellative function of public space, the way it constitutes the movements of subjects and their ways of seeing. One of the possible equivalents in Gibson's cyberpunk novels involves, first of all, the manifestation of the decline in spatial order in the specific coded posturing of various ephemeral subcultures or gangs, whose purpose continues to be that of being seen, but also that of marking out their territory. Another reflection of decaying urban Haussmannesque space (or perhaps a cause) are the underground hit and run attacks of a tiny section of class-conscious gangs like the “Panther Moderns” in Neuromancer. Described as “nihilistic technofetishists,” the Moderns are born from an increasingly chaotic urban world; they attempt to appropriate technology in order to subvert its power sources—in this case the Sense-Net Library, but ultimately, although they are unaware of it, the complete structure of the matrix itself.

The interpellative function of cyberspace, even in its more constructive active form of sabotage, is essentially like the passive mode of simstim viewers. A difference is the kind of conflation between subject and object world, since cyberspace's bodiless jouissance remains charged with the possibilities of a positive distance between operator and data, such as the awareness that this otherwise seductive virtual world is an abstraction, not a real manifestation of our concrete labor. In other words, the subject/object relation in the matrix is essentially an epistemological one, not an ontological one as in the case of simstim. This is why Neuromancer tries to appeal to Case's physical needs in order to flatline his real self outside the beach construct.

In terms of private space, an example might be the private sectors within the matrix, protected by ice of varying intensity (which causes intruders' brain death or “flatlining”). As an example of concrete lived private space, one might consider Ashpool's crammed room, an equivalent to the cluttered 19th-century bourgeois apartment, though it now tends to connote the vestiges of humanity (albeit demented and artificially prolonged) rather than personal wealth and control over private space (although Ashpool does jealously protect his). Gibson's description of Molly's encounter with Ashpool is noteworthy not only because of all the objects filling his room, some of which undoubtedly end up in the robot's boxes, but because of his Victorian dress and the small detail of his missing slipper which suggests his fallible humanity.

He wore a heavy robe of maroon silk, quilted around the long cuffs and shawl collar. One foot was bare, the other in a black velvet slipper with an embroidered gold foxhead over the instep. He motioned her into the room. “Slow darling.” The room was very large, cluttered with an assortment of things that made no sense to Case. He saw a gray steel rack of old-fashioned Sony monitors, a wide brass bed heaped with sheepskins, with pillows that seemed to have been made from the kind of rug used to pave the corridors. Molly's eyes darted from a huge Telefunken entertainment console to shelves of antique disk recordings, their crumbling spines cased in clear plastic, to a wide worktable littered with slabs of silicon. Case registered the cyberspace deck and trodes. …

[Ashpool] sank back into the creased softness of a huge leather arm-chair with square chrome legs, but the gun never wavered. He put her fletcher on a brass table beside the chair, knocking over a plastic vial of red pills. The table was thick with vials, bottles of liquor, soft plastic envelopes spilling white powders. Case noticed an old-fashioned glass hypodermic and a plain steel spoon.

(182-83)

Three other observations might be made about this scene. First, there is a tension between the kinds of objects in the old man's room: some belong to the 20th century and perhaps earlier (since Ashpool is 200 years old, his life extended by frozen sleep), yet others like the cyberspace deck are contemporary. The combination of either hand-made or high-tech things belonging to different periods makes no sense to Case because he is not used to seeing old and new in sharp juxtaposition, having grown up in a culture where obsolescence precedes (if not replaces) death. Second, Molly's entrance coincides with Ashpool's murder of one of his cloned daughters and his own planned suicide. After two centuries of an existence interspersed with dark dream-filled cybersleep he has decided to end his perverse life. The episode concerns primeval and age-old human terrors and atrocities of a family within the larger context of a plot run by an artificial intelligence, whose new existence is simultaneous with one of its creators' demise. Third, the scene's perspective is unusual because Case sees things through Molly's machine eyes, via a simstim rig. He has not accessed her memories but entered her body. There are no sexual connotations at this point so much as questions about the private “space” of the body and its invasion by some external “public” force. In Gibson, private space sometimes appears less as an unfortunate bourgeois by-product than a retreat or haven for his characters, a place of resistance to whatever overwhelming power—whether AI or corporate clan—that seeks to manipulate them. Case's “coffin” in Night City, his physical screening by the Finn's scanners and his avoidance of Wintermute's sinister telephone calls, are some examples of resistance to invasion of the private (i.e. personal) by a corporate public (“private”) sphere. This point takes us back to the corporate takeover of bodies and the invasion of human memories, but it also raises the issue of gendered space.

Molly was once a “neural cut-out” or prostitute in a Sprawl brothel. As she explains to Case, she had a microchip slotted into her head during her work in a sex cubicle that allowed any number of identities or personas desired by customers to be installed, and which replaced her own consciousness during use.

“Costs to go to Chiba, costs to get the surgery, costs to have them jack your nervous system up so you'll have reflexes to go with the gear. … You know how I got the money, when I was starting out? Here. Not here, but a place like it, in the Sprawl. Joke, to start with, 'cause once they plant the cut-out chip, it seems like free money. Wake up sore, sometimes, but that's it. Renting the goods is all. You aren't in, when it's happening. House has software for whatever a customer wants to pay for. … Fine. I was getting my money. Trouble was, the cut-out and the circuitry the Chiba clinics put in weren't compatible. So the worktime started bleeding in and I could remember it. …

“They knew you were picking up on this stuff? That you were conscious while you were working?”

“I wasn't conscious. It's like cyberspace, but blank. Silver. It smells like rain. … You can see yourself orgasm, it's like a little nova right on the rim of space. But I was starting to remember. Like dreams, you know. And they didn't tell me. They switched the software and started renting to speciality markets.”

(147-48)

Molly's experience under the software's “anaesthetic” is presented in spatial terms, as being inside the emptiness of a blank monitor into which images are constantly encroaching. If the image is the final stage of commodity reification, the monitor is the end point of a long process of the spatial/physical control of women. What Gibson seems to suggest here is not only that Molly's physical and mental relation to the space she was allotted was severely reified, but that her situation foregrounds the one for women that has actually existed in capitalism since its inception.

Gibson's apparently critical stance, however, is tempered by the fact that he makes Molly choose prostitution to finance her physical reconstruction. Also, as Nicola Nixon suggests, Gibson unconsciously figures the matrix “as a feminine space” and implies that the “matrix turf can potentially be won back, reconquered” by men (227). But such gendered readings overlook the way that Gibson frequently presents the matrix as multinational capitalist space in which all subjects are potentially in danger of losing touch with their original selves, in which they are all reduced to the Ono Sendai riders whose only significance is to the information bases of major corporations or military systems, or in which subjects are seduced into abandoning the real world for some virtual offshoot of cyberspace.

Gibson's narrative form both reflects and attempts to repudiate the political situation he addresses. His prose style both participates in and undoes the transformations in postmodernism bound up with the shift from modernist spatial form to so-called schizophrenic narrative or anti-narrative, wherein the modernist fragmentation is intensified without the underlying volition toward wholeness and where a series of ephemeral presents are unbound in a cohesive linear time frame. On the one hand, and especially in Neuromancer, he allies himself with postmodernism's “time sickness” via his full-throttle presentation of technological and cultural evolutions in equally high-speed narrative; he dramatizes the spectacular simulational surfaces of late capitalism through his visually-charged style; and he provides a sense of the uncertain center of relations among late capitalist subjects, the unlocalizable center of the economy's workings, the information overload in late capitalism and the typical postmodernist urban wastelands, all in densely detailed highly complex language and narrative form. Where Gibson differs from the postmodernist tendency is in refusing fully to translate “time sickness” into the kind of hyper-fragmented disconnected units evident in works like J. G. Ballard's Love and Napalm. Rather, by founding his novels on the popular form of hardboiled detective/picaresque novels, by appropriating borrowed forms, he tempers the ahistoricity of schizophrenic form while at the same time narratively introducing questions about our culture's loss of historical sense.

Gibson's spatial devices of juxtaposition and superspecificity represent the experience of inhabiting modern mega-cities. The process whereby 19th-century Paris underwent fragmentation in the enforcement of a new homogenization is intensified at every turn. Spatial reorganization continues to mean separating rich from poor, not necessarily by pushing the latter toward the urban periphery or relocating them in downtown cores or even in the slightly better conditions of middle-class suburbs, but by an increasingly chaotic agglomeration of spaces where a constantly growing middle and lower class is imprisoned, separated from the privileged and rarefied atmosphere of orbiting colonies or virtual spaces accessed through high technology.

What I would like to suggest here is not only that these spaces are all jammed together in a vast complex network, that the speed of change—particularly in the world of “biz”—is perpetually increasing so that any improvement in characters' standard of living depends on continual awareness of changing conditions and lightning reactions to them, but that these elements are translated into style and narrative form. Thus, the importance of juxtaposition, as Brian McHale notes:

Gibson's fiction functions at every level, even down to the “micro” structures of phrases and neologisms, on the principle of incongruous juxtaposition—juxtapositions of American culture with Japanese culture, of high technology with the “subculture” of the “street” and the underworld, and so on. The term “cyberpunk” has been constructed according to this incongruity principle.

(309-10)

While juxtaposition on the level of the sentence does not involve Faulkneresque tropes like oxymorons, it tends toward compound words like “pillhead” or “wirehead” which conflate a technological and biological component to describe different types of addicted individuals. Other compounds like “slamhound” (a mobile heat-sensitive explosive) are inserted into the omniscient narrative as part of Gibson's defamiliarizing strategy whereby a new world for readers is already fully realized in an objective third-person discourse.

Throughout his trilogy a clash occurs between various idioms—the “dialect” of the street with the formal seriousness of a pseudo-modernism, the technical or computer jargon with the near romantic descriptions of human experience. What distinguishes Gibson's conflictual languages is above all the speed of transition from one to another, prose that pulsates with sharp filmic or MTV-like emissions of style. Furthermore, the anti-romantic juxtaposition by modernists like T. S. Eliot of urban and agrarian or social and natural is taken a step further by Gibson; the natural world is not so much at odds with or juxtaposed with the urban world but superseded aesthetically by (what appears like, if only superficially) a new dominant in content and in imagery which virtually results in its obsolescence. Most memorably perhaps, the opening sentence of Neuromancer sets the tone by subsuming the most seemingly unassailable part of the phenomenal world within a spectacular regime: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel” (3). This sentence appears to mark a permanent breakdown in the opposition between nature and culture, but one that might suggest a longing for some pristine, pre-technical age, a longing which seems shared by both conservatives and nostalgic socialists.

Other forms of juxtaposition in Gibson's works include the modernist spatial technique of multiple references introduced at different points in order to make readers assemble them coherently. For example, in Count Zero Turner's experience in Heathrow—when a “chunk of memory” falls on him and causes him to vomit—is explained only much later when he recalls the Zeuss-Ikon eyes of the Sense/Net simstim star being carried off in a briefcase by an agent. Similarly, the squirrel wood scene at the end of the novel forces a return to the beginning to construct the full meaning of the denouement: the lost human dimensions in this high-tech world. These dimensions partly involve the reader's own ability to span this narrative distance, to maintain the perspective from which reality and simulation, authentic human experiences and artificially generated ones are always distinguishable, even if the latter seems authentic. Csicsery-Ronay points out that one of the effects of Count Zero's narrative fragmentation is the maintenance of distance between the techno plot and the more “realistic” plot which involves Marly's search for the boxmaker. In Gibson's writing, cross-referencing of this sort foregrounds the sense-making process required to filter through a welter of information overloaded on characters and readers (which is also in keeping with the hardboiled detective genre, its narrative parent).

This process is evident in modernist novels like Lord Jim, The Good Soldier, and Ulysses, although in Gibson's work its purpose is not to depict the complex nature of truth or early 20th-century urban experience in which gossip is a unifying discourse, but rather to continue the modernist dereifying strategy or form of resistance to perpetual social alienation. More than privileging historicization, however, dereification of this kind actually relocates meaning within a journey back and forth across the text (for both characters and readers) so that the process takes on, in and of itself, a degree of importance in the work's final meaning. Appropriately, Gibson's novels also belong to the detective genre, but as such they focus attention not only on the mystery's end but the means to it. His novels clearly move toward closure, but simultaneously involve the return to the origin and evolution of a situation. Thus, Neuromancer is geared toward explaining the intricate network of elements which resolves into the amalgamated sentience calling itself the “matrix,” a sentience which erases all traces of its transformation, so that uninformed subjects will see it as an objective “reality” which confronts them, as Lukacs' capitalist system, like an alien force.

Another component of Gibson's spatialized narrative is the device or style of superspecificity. “[Dashiell] Hammett may have been the first guy,” Gibson recalls, “who turned me onto the idea … which is largely lacking in most SF description. SF authors tend to use generics—‘Then he got into his space suit'” (“Interview” 269). Left over from modernism's “direct treatment of the thing concerned,” Gibson's style involves loading descriptions with minutiae; his best writing is dense to the point of saturation. Any number of excerpts might serve as an example, although a passage from Count Zero in which Marly first meets Joseph Virek in his construct of Guell Park, is particularly instructive because it involves a description of a virtual reality:

As her fingers closed around the cool brass knob, it seemed to squirm, sliding along a touch spectrum of texture and temperature in the first second of contact.

Then it became metal again, green-painted iron, sweeping out and down, along a line of perspective, an old railing she grasped now in wonder.

A few drops of rain blew into her face.

Smell of rain and wet earth.

A confusion of small details, her own memory of a drunken art school picnic warring with the perfection of Virek's illusion.

Below lay the unmistakable panorama of Barcelona, smoke hazing the strange spires of the Church of the Sagrada Familia. … She was in the Guell Park, Antonio Gaudi's tatty fairyland, on its barren rise behind the center of the city. To her left, a giant lizard of crazy-quilt ceramic was frozen in midslide down a bed of tired flowers. …

Josef Virek was perched below her on one of the park's serpentine benches, his wide shoulders hunched in a soft topcoat. … She took her place beside him and peered down at the dirty pavement between the scuffed toes of her black Paris boots. She saw a chip of pale gravel, a rusted paper clip, the small dusty corpse of a bee or hornet. “It's amazingly detailed. …”

(13-14)

The point about superspecificity, besides its role in fleshing out a fictional universe, is its dual paradoxical effect of speeding up and slowing down the narrative. On the one hand the sentences generally follow each other quickly and give the illusion of a camera panning back and forth across a highly complex world. They are condensed, sharpened and visually intense. This is “optical prose, one more proof that the printed word … has succumbed to the fragmentary speed, the instantaneity and monodimensionality of the visual image” (Slusser 334). But on the dereifying side of things, such deliberately detailed prose which tends toward the spatial reified form of Robbe-Grillet's writing actually encourages readers to account for the excess of detail, to apply the lessons learned from focusing on detail to the process of filtering through and distinguishing the critical even unenunciated points in the story, to duplicate narratively the sense-making activity of characters like Case or Marly who rebel against powerful non-human elements. Superspecificity, in short, encourages the modernist activity of reshaping the fragmented, intricate and even counterintuitive narrative patterns into some more cohesive form—of discovering, as Jameson might suggest, the cancelled realist story beneath the surface.

Ultimately, Gibson's work begins the process of mapping out the multinational capitalist world in all its complexity, beginning with the material and virtual spaces that subjects occupy, and going on to explore various political, philosophical, moral and cultural issues. As Larry McCaffery suggests, these include the implications of “recent breakthroughs in cybernetic and genetic engineering, organ transplants and artificial intelligence research,” the control of information for private business in order to wield power over nation-states and individuals, the “social, psychic, political, and behavioral impact resulting from the shift away from the older industrial technologies to the newer information ones,” and the capacities of the media to introduce information into our homes and, indeed, into the “most intimate reaches of our imaginations, our self-definitions, our desires” (8).

Works Cited

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Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.

Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham: Duke UP, 1987.

Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Istvan. “Antimancer: Cybernetics and Art in Gibson's Count Zero.” Science Fiction Studies 22.65 (1995): 63-86.

Gibson, William. Count Zero. 1986. New York: Ace, 1987.

———. “An Interview with William Gibson.” McCaffery 263-85.

———. Mona Lisa Overdrive. 1988. New York: Bantam, 1989.

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

Hollinger, Veronica. “Cybernetic Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and Postmodernism.” McCaffery 203-18.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981.

———. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

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Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. 1974. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.

Lukacs, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: MIT P, 1971.

McCaffery, Larry, ed. and Intro. “Introduction: The Desert of the Real.” Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987.

Nixon, Nichola. “Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?” Science Fiction Studies 19.57 (1992): 219-35.

O'Neil, John. “Bio Technology: Empire, Communications and Bio Power.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 10.1-2 (1986): 66-77.

Sack, Robert David. Place, Modernity, and the Consumer's World: A Relational Framework for Geographical Analysis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.

Slusser, George. “Literary MTV.” McCaffery 334-42.

Soja, Edward. “The Spatiality of Social Life: Toward a Transformative Retheorisation.” Social Relations and Spatial Structures. Ed. Derek Gregory and John Urry. London: MacMillan, 1985. 90-127.

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. London: Chatto, 1973.