It is tempting to think of postmodernism as an indeterministic and antirealist worldview or aesthetic, positioned explicitly against traditional positivist, materialist, and realist positions. But I believe this argument misses the mark, for two reasons. First, and most obviously, it is impossible to characterize postmodernism as a monolith, except in the most polemic of views. Second, and more important to this paper, such a characterization of postmodernism subtly reinscribes the terms of argument that postmodernism apparently rejects: exactly those traditional western metanarratives which formulate all our questions about “reality” through such binaries as realist/antirealist and subject/object.

A convincing rejection of this kind of thinking is to be found in the work of Richard Rorty, who is, strictly speaking, a pragmatist rather than a postmodernist. In his introduction to Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Rorty begins by disarming the entire realism/antirealism debate, which he claims is necessarily predicated in realist terms. Thus, to call antirepresentationalist positions antirealist is to concede realist conditions of argument, for this notion “brings back the very representationalist picture from which we need to escape” (12). Instead, Rorty urges that the entire question of determinate/indeterminate ontology be viewed as incoherent—the wrong question—and that we stop trying to “climb out of our own minds” (14).

Given this qualification, we can understand the postmodernist impulse to ban words like ontology, epistemology, and metaphysics; again, these terms simply beg the realist question. When Jean Baudrillard signals the end of truth and reference (in Simulations), he also signals the end of the vocabulary of truth and reference. From a postmodernist position, then, the “recuperation” of postmodernism into the semantic field of subject/object reality just isn't playing fair.

Into this argument I want to introduce the characterization of William Gibson as a postmodern writer. This characterization brings with it a whole range of issues, from Gibson as a writer within the historical periodization of postmodernism, to Gibson as a writer with postmodern sensibilities, to Gibson as a fictive attempt to think the bewildering space of postmodernism (see Jameson's “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”).

I am not proposing to answer the complex, difficult, and perhaps pedantic question of whether or not Gibson writes “postmodern” fiction. But I will argue that Gibson's universe recapitulates the traditional Western terms for thinking about the world, in that his fiction exhibits a constant tension and interplay between conceptions of determinacy and indeterminacy, realism and antirealism. Further, this interplay yields a reading experience of complex ambiguity. One is tempted to read in terms of metaphor and depth, despite Gibson's much-celebrated “surface style,” which has been associated with techniques such as collage, the use of jump-cut, fractured imagery, and so on. Add to this the obvious romantic strains—as Samuel R. Delany says, “the hard edges of Gibson's dehumanized technologies hide a residing mysticism” (33)—and it becomes useful to read Gibson's fiction in terms of residual modes of thinking (to borrow a term from Raymond Williams), in addition to the more widely identified terms of postmodern space, information-age malaise, and cybernetic deconstruction.¹

I take the traditional ontological debate to be constructed in this way: determinism is synonymous with those viewpoints that privilege rationality, reductionist explanations, and the decidability of truth-claims. By positing a naive or qualified correspondence between truth-claims and nonlinguistic reality, determinism can also be identified with realism. Within this semantic field, indeterminism is simply the flip-side of determinism: the privileged terms are “unknowable.” By problematizing the correspondence between the sign and the real, indeterminism is also antirealism.

The problem with the word “romantic” is, of course, its plurality of usages.² Luckily Gibson's fiction does not engage a thoroughly Romantic aesthetic, but rather the loose collection of popular conceptions and misconceptions that fall under the heading “romantic.” In the cyberspace trilogy, this loose collection manifests itself in four ways. The first is through Gibson's use of the nostalgic and cliched images and themes that enjoy perpetual circulation among adolescent white males; these include the solitary hero, the exotic weapon, and the transcendent will-to-power. The second is the mystical impulse that embraces the irrational or arational depths of the psyche, the belief in meanings and modes of knowing that elude signs and dualistic epistemologies. The third is the belief in and commitment to subjectivity. And the fourth is the frequent use of nature as metaphor and the consequent myth of the Luddite.

Gibson incorporates these “romantic” strains partly as genre-allusion, for each can be found within the sf tradition. The romanticism of cliche and male adolescent fantasy is obvious in the pulp heritage and the comic-book universe. Some, like Veronica Hollinger, have identified it as a possible feature of cyberpunk itself (31). Fascination with modes of knowing that transcend the duality of language and scientific method can be found in the subgenre of “psi,” which explores the world of telepathy, precognition, and other mental powers. Subjectivity is the realm of much New Wave sf, especially the drug-culture varieties, and makes a noticeable appearance in the widely-reported solipsism of Philip K. Dick. The Luddite myth—with its trappings of edenic longing—is most conspicuous in the “spaceship to a virgin world” varieties of fiction.

These diffuse strains of romanticism acquire an air of coherence as part of a tradition that can be exploited. As Carol McGuirk has demonstrated, Gibson positions science-fiction cliches as “centerpieces for his ironic rendition of the genre's history” (121). Each romantic strain also deserves to be taken seriously as an independent impulse, for while Gibson uses romantic images self-consciously and with irony—even mockery—he does not undermine them consistently.

DETERMINISM AND THE ROMANTIC

Hardwiring and instinct are familiar and interconnected tropes in Neuromancer. Molly is “wired” a certain way. Case is motivated by “the warm thing” of anger (§12:152). Even Wintermute is under some kind of compulsion (§17:206). These themes suggest reduction; however, a compulsive or instinctual behavior does not necessarily have a rationally knowable source. Instinct may be forever opaque to rationality.

Wintermute says, “I'm under compulsion myself. And I don't know why.” We find out later that the compulsion is perhaps the “fruition of certain capacities” built into Wintermute by Lady Marie-France. But Molly can only continue to say “the why of that's just the way I'm wired,” and Case's anger is a “strange thing”: “He couldn't take its measure.” This introduces an element of unquantifiability into both instinct and wiring.

Instinct is a deep structure. In deterministic terms that deep structure is known or at least knowable; in the romantic, depth is irrational or arational. Depth is the ocean of the unconscious, closed to rational mapping. But the romantic depth is not unreadable cartography either. While the postmodern rejects the significance of depth, the romantic introduces arational modes of knowing which embrace the deep. Case and Molly are informed by instinct, although that instinct remains rationally opaque.

This kind of knowing is typified by Case's recognition of the “unknowable code” of genetics:

It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheremone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read.

Gibson introduces figures of blindness, infinity and the sea: infinity and the sea are linked as aspects of the romantic image of vast preconsciousness; blindness is the image of wisdom, the “other way of seeing” that engages the arational and the noumenal. “Something” has a reference, but that reference is opaque to rationality.

Though the unknowable code is closed to Case's rational being, Gibson tips his hand and weaves a reductive determinacy into the romantic. The unknowable code is still a code, and further, a genetic code. Though beyond knowing, it is discernible as a function of “spiral and pheremone.” Infinity is not unitary, but built out of “intricacy.”

Perhaps the densest metaphor of the romantic/deterministic tension is the beehive or wasp's nest. This figure originates with cybernetician Norbert Weiner, who claims that the secret of the hive “is in the intercommunication of its members” (182). The sophisticated control of information within the hive makes it an excellent cybernetic metaphor, which Gibson uses to good effect in his description of the yakuza “hives with cybernetic memories, vast single organisms, their DNA coded in silicon” (§17:203). The image becomes almost ubiquitous in Neuromancer, in references from the nest-like Straylite, to holograms that “Swarm like live things” (§12:155), to “a robot gardener striped diagonally with black and yellow” (§12:156). The nest, while the representation and embodiment of cybernetic organization, also resonates with irrational meaning: “Horror. The spinal birth factory, stepped terraces of the hatching cells, blind jaws of unborn moving ceaselessly … Alien” (§10:126). Case is also repulsed by the nest-like ship Marcus Garvey: “There was something obscene about the arrangement, but it had more to do with ideas of feeding than of sex” (§14:166).

When asked what accounts for the resonance of the nest metaphor, Gibson replied, “the fear of bugs, for one thing!” (McCaffery 231). This hints at a primal and emotional response to the nest that competes with the suggestion of information and organization. The horror is unexplainable, and if not quite romantic, at least primal and archetypal, belonging to the “unknowable” and the “blind.” The two patterns—one rational, one emotive and irrational—interpenetrate in one densely ambivalent sequence:

In the dream, just before he'd drenched the nest with fuel, he'd seen the T-A logo of TessierAshpool neatly embossed into its side, as though the wasps themselves had worked it there.

(§10:127)

The T-A logo is corporate information, a representation of organization and control integrated with the biological figure of cybernetic organization. But the sequence resonates with instinctual horror, as the nest simultaneously embodies Case's primal fears. The destruction by fire is embodied in a dream, suggesting the consuming potential of creative power and subjectivity, while also dragging up questions of referentiality and objectivity.

INDETERMINISM AND THE ROMANTIC

John B. Pierce, in an essay on Shelley, distinguishes between two kinds of silence, “one of absence, nihilism and vacancy; another of presence, potentiality and plenitude” (104). In a mystical context, the silence of presence is that meaning which perpetually outwits language; as the Tao Te Ching says, “The way that can be spoken of / Is not the constant way” (57). For the romantic, the way can be known intuitively. For the indeterminist, the way is hopelessly closed to apprehension, which is circumscribed by signs. The indeterministic account is that there is no absolute meaning; the romantic account is that absolute meaning is mystical.

Silence is identified with transcendence in Neuromancer. Wintermute and Neuromancer lose their Turing names when they unite, as oneness is accompanied by a loss of signs. Case experiences an almost determinate silence when he is surgically corrected: “Then black fire found the branching tributaries of the nerves, pain beyond anything to which the name of pain is given …” (§2:31). The pain outwits reference, but still bears meaning and existence. This kind of non-referential but somehow knowable silence is suggested again when Case finds himself “singing a song without words or tune” (§20:233).

Against the image of silence is a pattern that privileges the word against other signs. This nostalgic pattern resists the textual plurality of the information age and affirms monolithic literary culture. Straylight, an image of technological decay, is full of books (§13:207, §20:232). This might be irony, but it links with another powerful image. Amidst all the high-tech gimmickry that Case and Molly must employ to execute Wintermute's plan, there is a final and all-important key: “the magic word” (§14:173). And recall Neuromancer's claim that “to call up a demon you must learn its name” (§21:243).

This word-privileging affirms romantic nostalgia and literary culture at the same time as it undermines the competing romantic impulse towards silence. The word is at once gloriously powerful and hopelessly inadequate. To complicate things, the magic word is never revealed, which deepens its magical effect on the reader. The unknown word—in its absence—captures mystery. This begins to sound postmodern.

DETERMINISM, INDETERMINISM AND THE ROMANTIC

Within traditional ontological arguments, both knowledge and meaning are circumscribed by signs. Again, the argument is organized by the concept of referentiality: if signs refer accurately to a non-linguistic reality, then objective knowledge and stable meaning are both possible; if signs fail to refer, then knowledge becomes indeterminate while meaning becomes elusive and temporary. Thus the Romantic tradition—while positioned firmly within Western ideological traditions—opposes both determinism and indeterminism in its relocation of meaning outside the realm of signs. The mystic dismisses the realist/anti-realist argument, bypassing perception and reference in favor of direct access to the noumenal.

In Gibson's world we see an ironic conflation and negotiation of determinism and indeterminism, typified by technological figures. The world of high-tech is fractured, random, impossible to comprehend, a sort of Toffler's Third Wave gone wild. As reproductive technologies reproduce themselves, simulation colonizes the real: virtual reality leaks out into reality, and referentiality leaks out altogether. But as readers we are continually aware that these experiences of indeterminacy are enabled by determinate mechanisms. We are suspicious that somewhere underneath the doubled Cases, rebel AIs, and voodoo gods there is an infinite series of binary switches. Against technology—the volatile master-metaphor of the intimate hostility of determinacy and indeterminacy—the Romantic positions itself, in an updated version of the old machine/garden binary.

While Neuromancer begins immediately by heralding an earth colonized by technology—“the sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel”—Count Zero begins with a romantic idyll. In the first chapter, Turner, who has just escaped the nightmare world of cybernetic enhancement, finds tranquility in Mexico, where the images are of “deep water” (7), “fingers of sunlight” (4), the “mindless glide of a bird” (4), and the sea (5). Life has a “Simple pattern” here, where one can learn “without words” (5). Fragments, represented by the Dutchman's grafts, are supplanted by unity, the “unity of his body” (6). The precise prose of brand-names and details is replaced by a softer, more familiar style. Even Turner's words are “long spirals of unfocused narrative” that spin out “to join the sound of the sea” (5).

While Neuromancer begins in the Sprawl and in Chiba, both of which embody high-tech in every way, Mona Lisa Overdrive begins in a quaintly nostalgic London. The first chapter of Neuromancer disorients the reader immediately; the first chapter of Mona Lisa Overdrive is familiar and reassuring. Contrast Neuromancer's first sentence with a sentence in the first chapter of Mona Lisa Overdrive: “the late afternoon sky was colorless” (5). London exhibits “rows and shops of houses” (5), “stone and brick” (6), and the “pervasive hint of burning, of archaic fuels” (7). History is “the very fabric of things” (5). In contrast, Chiba exhibits “tanks of blue mutant carp” (8), “an uneasy blend of Japanese traditional pale Milanese plastics” (9), and a “constant subliminal hum” (7).

It would appear that the fragmented world of Neuromancer is compromised by the romantic in Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. But the idyll in Count Zero is soon shattered. Turner notices a boat on the ocean, a boat that will prove to be the invasion of the romantic, as the corporate world comes to bear Turner away. Gibson completes this displacement with a nice touch: Turner's farewell to his lover is described in the most hackneyed of romantic terms: “She didn't look back” (§1:8). This simultaneously displaces the romantic and undermines it as a hopeless cliche. In Mona Lisa Overdrive the reassuring “London prose” gives way to the detailed hyperprose of Chapter Two. It seems, then, that Gibson's trilogy undermines the romantic. This is true, to a point. But Gibson folds his meanings inside-out more than once, and we have not seen the last of the romantic.

One pattern that suggests a displacement of deterministic/indeterministic technology is the familiar romantic image of the ruined cottage, of nature reclaiming itself from the technological. Near the end of Neuromancer there is the image of “old machines given up to the mineral rituals of rust” (§23:261). Mona Lisa Overdrive introduces the expansive metaphor of the sea, and “the entropic nature of expensive houses built too close to the sea” (§3:17). In a cybernetic sense entropy is the measure of a system's disorganization. But in Gibson's metaphor entropy specifically describes the degeneration of technology, the deconstruction of human enterprises by eternal processes.

Count Zero engages the romantic pattern most thoroughly. In Chapter 1 the sand has “subsided, allowing the structure's facade to cave in” (§1:6), suggesting not only natural entropy, but the illusory nature of human constructions. The hotel fares no better: “The waves had licked away its foundation” (§1:7). Chapter Seven introduces the mall, symbol par excellence of consumer culture and breeding ground of simulation: today one can find a microcosmic world reproduced within the mall, including wave-pools that simulate the ocean. In Count Zero the mall is a ruin: “Perhaps eighty meters from the highway the jagged ocean began. The expanse between had once been a parking lot” (§7:42). One sound remains, always: “the sea, surf pounding” (§7:42). In the last chapter a plane is gradually subsumed by nature: “It was settling into the loam there, but you could still sit in the cockpit and pretend to fly it” (§36:245). The simulation still possible in the plane is gradually displaced by all too real natural processes. In Chapter 17 Turner and Angie pass “stumps of wooden poles that had once supported telephone wires, overgrown now with bramble and honeysuckle” (128). The natural continually renews itself from inside the artificial constructions that have temporarily enclosed it. The machine in the garden becomes the garden in the machine.

Of course, we suspect by now that Gibson will fold the meaning back on itself once again. For every image of nature colonizing technology there is another of technology colonizing nature. Even in Count Zero, the most “romantic” of the three novels, technology gets in its licks: “The Maas Biolabs North America facility was carved into the heart of a sheer mesa, a table of rock thrusting from the desert floor” (§14:88). The sheerness of the mesa is a testament to the power of the technology, which drives into the heart of the natural.

The interplay of determinism, indeterminism, and romanticism does not resolve itself in Count Zero. The idyll of Chapter One is shattered, but returns in the form of the squirrel wood and the farm. In fact, “The Squirrel Wood” is Count Zero's last chapter, suggesting the ultimate triumph of the romantic. The return to the idyll is in conventional mythic terms the return to Eden. But nothing triumphs here.

Instead the idyll in Count Zero incorporates all three tendencies in an unresolvable metaphor. In Chapter 17, the idyll is shot through with natural images like “running water” (125), “deep green shadow” (125), and bees grazing “in flowering grass” (129). “Water down stones” is “one of the oldest songs” (125), and Turner sleeps with “his forehead against the grass,” dreaming of the water (126). Even technology is described in organic terms: “the house had grown, sprouting wings and workshops” (130). But the natural is also compromised:

Turner found that if he half closed his eyes, from his seat on the wooden porch swing, he could almost see an apple tree that was no longer there, a tree that had once supported a length of silvery-gray hemp rope and an ancient automobile tire.

(135)

The image contains a hint of romantic nostalgia, but clearly suggests an absence and disappearance of the natural. Memory of the natural is intertwined with memory of the technological, as the apple tree supports an automobile tire. The interpenetration of technology and nature is further suggested by Rudy, who “hates the city” but recognizes that “it all comes in on line anyway” (136).

This interpenetration also incorporates indeterminate simulation, as, for instance, in the representational capabilities of the plane in the squirrel wood: “the mimetic coating showed him leaf and lichen, twigs …” (127). While the plane mimics nature, a crow mimics technology, “braking with its feathers spread like black mechanical wings” (127). Meanwhile, the gateway to the farm has “hinges lost in morning glory and rust” (130), but the farm itself is protected by “augmented dogs” (130). This introduces the figure of the prosthesis, which integrates the technological with the biological.

Both the squirrel wood and the farm seem to fail as romantic idylls. Yet the last two pages of Count Zero recapitulate the romantic images: bees buzzing, water over rocks, squirrels in the trees, an old road, and of course the mimetic plane settling into the loam. The boy asks Turner if the squirrels will “come back over and over and get shot,” and Turner answers, “well, almost always …” (§36:246).

Gibson enters the idyll to shoot squirrels, but he also lets some of them live. In a world where technology is invasive, the romantic is still pervasive, and—depending on the reader—even persuasive.³ The romantic manages fragmentation, the unreadable dimensions of computer space, and the experience of indeterminacy by re-locating meaning outside the realm of signs and contemporary experience. In Mona Lisa Overdrive Angie dreams of Straylight, “of corridors winding in upon themselves, muted tints of ancient carpet” (§7:51). Accompanying the implosive impulse, the hive gone wild, is the readable dimension of the ancient carpet, the magic carpet.

But, as I have argued, the tensive pattern in Gibson's fiction is also a complimentary pattern, for all three strains finally reintroduce traditional Western modes of understanding and representation. While Gibson's world is in many ways tangential with Baudrillard's simulacrum, it never loses sight of the referent or the original in its invocation of simulation and high-tech indeterminacy. More importantly, it never completely lets go of its impulse to locate meaning within depth, ambiguity, and metaphor.

A whole universe of nostalgia lurks beneath the technologies of the postmodern age. Sally explains: “You know what bothers me? It's how sometimes you'll see 'em sticking new tile up in these stations, but they don't take down the old tile first” (Mona Lisa Overdrive §9:66). Gentry offers a similar metaphor, using paint as his medium: “he didn't dust or clean anything, just lay down a thick coat over all the crud …” (§10:79). Gibson's awareness of his own use of gomi is obvious:

“This is awfully crude, isn't it?” Angie said, and actually laughed.

“I know,” Molly said, intent on her driving. “Sometimes that's just the way to go.”

(§33:241)

Beneath the glossy surface of the prose—the collage, the junk-heap of fractured images, the invocation of all things hyper—there is a suspiciously residual set of impulses, as Gibson burns archaic fuels to run a postmodern engine.

Notes

1. See, for example, Veronica Hollinger, “Cybernetic Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and Postmodernism,” Mosaic 23:29-44, Spring 1990; Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, “Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism,” Mississippi Review 16:266-7, 1988; Scott Bukatman, “The Cybernetic (City) State: Terminal Space Becomes Phenomenal,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 2:43-68, Summer 1989.

2. Arthur O. Lovejoy discusses this plurality in “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,” Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1948), 228-253.

3. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. writes that Neuromancer's narrator and anti-hero, Case, is “committed to the materialization of the futurist program in the world and yet also full of vague regrets for the affects and relations lost in the transformation” (230-31). This suggests that Gibson's relationship with his own fictive world of imploding technologies is partly characterized by unease, regret, and ambivalence. See “The Sentimental Futurist: Cybernetics and Art in William Gibson's Neuromancer,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 33:221-40, Spring 1992.

Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. NY: Semiotexte, 1983.

Delany, Samuel R. “Is Cyberpunk a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?” Mississippi Review 16:28-35, 1988.

Gibson, William. Count Zero. NY: Ace Books, 1987.

———. Mona Lisa Overdrive. NY: Bantam Books, 1988.

———. Neuromancer. NY: Ace Books, 1984.

Hollinger, Veronica. “Cybernetic Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and Postmodernism.” Mosaic 23:29-44, Spring 1990.

Jameson, Fredric. “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. By Jameson. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. 1-54.

Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. Trans. D.C. Lau. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1987.

McCaffery, Larry. “Interview with William Gibson.” Mississippi Review 16:217-36, 1988.

McGuirk, Carol. “The ‘New’ Romancers: Science Fiction Innovators from Gernsback to Gibson.” Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative. Ed. George Slusser and Thomas Shippey. Athens: Georgia UP, 1992. 108-129.

Pierce, John B. “‘Mont Blanc’ and Prometheus Unbound: Shelley's Use of the Rhetoric of Silence.” Keats-Shelley Journal 38:103-26, 1989.

Rorty, Richard. Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers. Vol 1. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.

Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. NY: John Wiley and Sons, 1948.