According to Andrew Ross,

Cyberpunk's idea of a counterpolitics—youthful male heroes with working-class chips on their shoulders and postmodern biochips in their brains—seems to have little to do with the burgeoning power of the great social movements of our day: feminism, ecology, peace, sexual liberation, and civil rights. Curiously enough, there is virtually no trace of these social movements in this genre's “credible” dark future, despite the claim by Sterling that cyberpunk futures are “recognizably and painstakingly drawn from the modern condition.”¹

What's all this hysteria about cyborgs and cyberpunks, anyway? Without turning down the volume on the siren song of cybernetic subjectivity, I will jack into the spectrum of white noise generated by increasingly urgent questions from an unlikely chorus of aging hipsters and neo-New Left academics who want cyberpunks to do politics—prophylactically—for them: What's wrong with (identity) politics out there on the information super-highway? How do WE (women, academics, post-Marxists, critics, citizens, Others) maintain a subversive ethos after the decentering of the State and the fall of the Party? And why aren't the young (cyber)punks worried about affect and authenticity?

At the end of “Johnny Mnemonic,” Gibson's irony cuts such potentially serious or ethical self-fashioning to the quick. Johnny Mnemonic, hacker, pirate, picaro, is constructed out of used parts, including chips of inaccessible “memory” and/or cultural junk that must be decoded by a bionic dolphin, who bears remarkable resemblance to William S. Burroughs. Gibson's eponymous “character” mockingly promises to go beyond his textful fate to achieve real personhood and/or human responsibility: “One day I'll have a surgeon dig all the silicon out of my amygdalae, and I'll live with my own memories and nobody else's, the way other people do.”²

In “Johnny Mnemonic” and several other apparently programmatic texts, Gibson constructs a near future out of textual echolalia that replays frightening, yet familiar, versions of young hacker-reader-writers becoming or simulating textual (re)production and recovery machines. With prosthetic memory and the special knack for remaining marginal to a variety of different cultures, Gibson's typical characters process information that means more to their bosses and to us readers than it does to themselves.³ Gibson knows that, if only because of the web of technology surrounding us, no one—and/or no text—fully possesses only its own memories. Thinking about processing, processors for, messages and memories, Gibson uncannily repeats and foreshadows postmodern meditations on issues of freedom and control of information. Gibson's cyberspace stories, as well as his rather surprising and ephemeral poem “AGRIPPA,” are obsessed with time and memory; these are often machine data of stored memories borrowed from others' pasts. As such, Gibson's “near-future” science fiction is fantastic, not because it has yet to happen but because its characters and scenarios are composed of quotations unrecognized by Gibson's protagonists but vaguely familiar to readers who are used to high-octane mixtures of post-structuralism, high art, and kitsch. How else, it seems fair to ask, are worlds constructed?

Fredric Jameson has noted of architecture that postmodernism is recognizably and differentially quotational; walking through urban spaces, flaneurs require individual guideposts. Just as some people feel more comfortable in decentered structures, some readers and writers welcome new means of textual reproduction. It seems curious to me, though, that critiques of postmodernism have moved from literature to architecture, from time to space.⁴ Still more curious, is the apparent anxiety that turns cultural critics from readers of literature into (still literary) “readers” of hyper- and cyberspace. Perhaps some of the old ghosts are absent from the new disciplinary terrain?⁵

Nevertheless, in a variety of ways, Gibson returns us to the text(s) of literature; specifically, I would argue, to a complex network of conversations about science, poetry, and the visual and plastic arts, of which Charles Olson and Norbert Wiener form an important cluster. Because his pretexts and pretentions are more literary than scientific, and his experiments more temporal than spatial, Gibson is postmodern in more strictly literary historical terms. He takes his place in a line of poet-critics for whom the cultural and/or identity crises of High Modernism—and we might add his obvious exemplars of literary postmodernism, Thomas Pynchon and Philip K. Dick—are at once points of departure and butts of satire. Even though Gibson's metaphorics of information would seem to undo stable models of literary authorship, his habits of allusion, his topoi and tropes of the tradition, are familiar to professional readers of literature and postmodernism as well as to readers of sci-fi pulps. However special, macho and sublime, insipid and profound, by turns, are his heroes and personae, they at once disrobe and invoke authorial presences as well as machine ghosts. Some of these specters are worth entertaining for a moment, if only because they frustrate attempts to fix (that is, to repair and to make static) the writing subject in time and in a comfortable ideological position. Gibson's most interesting texts deal in information; they are also agents and objects of the trade in bodies, specifically in the brain tissue and circuitry that tick and throb with memory and desire—T. S. Eliot's “memory and desire”?—as they are processed through a familiar history of literary and pseudoscientific recurrence to these categories.

If only as a cautionary note against temptations to repeat authorizing antiauthoritarian gestures or certain legitimation routines of literary and critical authorship, it might be useful to recall the ongoing meditation or (non)self-examination staged by poets in terms of critical, scientific, and political authority. I want to bring a somewhat ragtag company of literary and critical personae into play here. First, by recourse to what Charles Olson called his postmodern poetics, I would remind the reader how the discourse, if not the history of cybernetics, is recapitulated in Gibson's cyberpunk fiction and in recent criticism of this genre, which, like the science of cybernetics, deals in literary and extraliterary models of information and authority for memorializing and reconstructing worlds and selves.

Neither ex nihilo nor genealogically, I recite Charles Olson, who spoke, if he did not coin, “postmodern” as he looked to Norbert Wiener's cybernetic model for a resistance to the entropic and alienated condition of poetry and subjectivity after modernism. As a reminder that poetry has long dwelt with technology—or techne—at least in the arena of institutional and identity politics, consider “The Kingfishers,” which, ironically, bridges a gap—or opens a space—for interpretation between such personally and culturally anxious texts as The Waste Land and contemporary cybernetic fiction(s):⁶

What does not change / is the will to change
Not one death but many,
not accumulation but change, the feed-back proves,
                                                                                                                                                      the feed-back is
the law
                    Into the same river no man steps twice
We can be precise. The factors are
in the animal and / or the machine the factors are
communication and / or control, both involve
the message. And what is the message? The message is
a discrete or continuous sequence of measurable
                                                                                                                                                      events distributed in time.(7)

In Olson's poetic transcription of Norbert Wiener's cybernetic definition (the assignment of meaning to a sequence of signals traveling through time), a “message” is also a map. The message that most interests Olson reflects, or simulates, resistance to entropy and meaninglessness by promising a translation of the Mayan Codices that were the special property of priests; incidentally, for the Mayan uninitiated, the penalty for stealing the secret of reading was death.⁸ Olson's favorite feedback mechanisms are calendars and maps by which the past records the future. His own explorations in Mexico's Mayan ruins and textual fragments uncover cybernetic theories proleptically repeated in pre-Columbian chronicles, at once proving and helplessly echoing a Mayan principle of time as anticipatory repetition. If Gibson most often references the loa and legba of Caribbean hoodoo, the following description of the phenomena poetized in Olson's “Kingfishers” helps us read the temporal distortions that constitute “cyberspace,” where, by virtue of entering an apparently interactive information web, the cybernetic subject is constituted by the information it carries. Similarly, one critic notes of the Mayan Chronicles, Chilam Balam, that

the Toltec invasion bears features incontestably proper to the Spanish Conquest; but the converse is also true, so that although we know an invasion is in question, we cannot tell which one, though centuries separate them. … Prophecy is rooted in the past, since time repeats itself; the propitious or disastrous character of the days, months, years, centuries to come is established by the intuitive investigation of a denominator common to the corresponding periods in the past. Reciprocally, today we derive our information about the past of these peoples from their prophecies.⁹

As readers of Melville and/or followers of Ahab, we also know that chronometry and cartography, especially such metaphoric or projective mapping of lands yet to be conquered, are all tied up with Westering, Westernness, and/or death. From Christopher Columbus's line drawings that were soon transformed by the imaginations of proto-ethnographers into Dutch charts that depict yet-to-be-seen savages and landscapes, maps were detailed works of art—or, more specifically, fiction(s).¹⁰ Many of these picture the literary and scientific portraits of New World Calibans or cannibals in their margins. From these interested projections of Eurocentrism onto unseen lands to computer grids that mark the virtual realities of cyberspace, cartographers have determined and recorded social movements and political change.¹¹ Maps also chart the intersections of science and fiction, whether representing imaginary and future worlds, purporting neutrally to depict the real geopolitical condition, or serving as textual metaphors for postmodern criticism and fiction, they are powerful ideological and imperialist tools. I suppose the question to ask is whether maps can be read otherwise, against the use to which their makers drew them and in such a way as to reveal the technics of control and the distortions of time they would conceal.

For such a reading project, the most deliberate and canny of mapmakers and self-promoting explorers and inventors are to be treasured; at the very least, they are resourceful poetic and political adversaries who, for my money, make for more interesting foes than the more evenly matched purveyors of oppositional identities that we might prefer to those crusty old author(itarian)s. Still, as rebels, we can now speed through their texts and further hybridize their houses of fiction as we take them down. Gibson's preferred model—both guide and opponent—is William S. Burroughs, to whom we will recur. Olson, as “Maximus,” the bearer of precious quotations and far-fetched projections, is an equally formidable textual fortress raided by Gibson. However, it is with the aid of supplemental, or prosthetic, reading machinery, including Gibson's hybrid autobiographical and quotational “AGRIPPA,” both elegy and incomplete cybernetic project, that this temporally vexed relationship becomes clear. In the following pages, Olson reads Gibson and others, while Jameson's and others' repressed literary critical training returns to haunt the “cognitive maps” or controllable cyborgs we might prefer as windows and mirrors with which to see our political selves.

It interests me that at least as early as his Harvard M.A. thesis in American studies on Moby Dick, Olson explored the problematics of postmodern subjectivity—sometimes using the very word postmodern.¹² “Projective Verse,” his 1951 manifesto of objectism, characterizes his work as a “projectile” against modernism, and he insists on violent de-definitions of subjectivity in terms once again familiar in the cyberpunk quotational loop, or network:

Objectism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the “subject” and his soul, that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature (with certain instructions to carry out) and those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation call objects. For man is himself an object.¹³

The subject and object of Olson's poetic mapping are postsubjective, or “Objectivist,” history. Thus, he concerns himself with the etymology, word magic, and implications of “history.” In a series of puns on how to tell his story, Olson comes round to one of many equations of scientific experiment and self-discovery, and a sort of hyper-organicism (DNA avant la lettre?), in the isomorphic composition of percepts and the circuitry of gray matter.¹⁴ Attempting to reconcile Herodotus and Thucydides, trying to choose between personal testimony and political history, he supplements his colloquial translation of the beginning of Herodotus's Histories, “in using this as a verb ‘isotia,’ which means to find out for yourself,” with an observation from Robert Duncan, “histology, or the study of cells, and story … the minuteness you're after is the histology, and the result you may come up with is the story.”¹⁵

Olson's celebratory exploration of the body politic and/or the self as the, albeit miscalibrated, measure of all things is an old saw that he uses as a weapon against T. S. Eliot's tragic, or entropic, organicism. The Platonic/Virturvian/Emersonian/perhaps Blakean precedents make a list both long and hydra-headed. But do such inquiries and identity crises, such mappings, always figure the same Oedipal/patriarchal/Western Self? At the moment, I'm not interested in deciding whether Charles Olson and/or “Maximus of Gloucester” was just another Ahab after some Dick or whether he opened the field of poetry—as Beats and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets differentially claimed—in order once again to advance counterhegemonic politics and antiestablishment aesthetics. Inquiry into Olson's correctness and that of his poetic progeny is—by caveat, if necessary—here deferred or redistributed across the computer net of newer writing. Yet Gibson's cyberpunks—let alone Olson, Burroughs, and, before them, Eliot and Melville—certainly have provoked revision at the very least.

“A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway's diacritical and revisionary “effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism,” covers some of this ground. Perhaps only apparently more concerned than Olson with saving or correcting herself as writing subject by drafting an activist affiliation, Haraway charts a man-machine-information interface in order to disturb the allegedly peaceful borders of science, fiction, and/or the science of constructing social reality. Here is how she introduces her socialist feminist war machine into the pitched battle of academic identity politics and the correction of scientific subjects and the objectives of science:

This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.

Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs—creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. … I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings.¹⁶

In the Progressive era, which was also the era of Fordism and Taylorism, natural history museums and other monuments to origins and organicism offered and enforced the political imaginary as they announced its racist and sexist grounding. Meditating on the African/white hunter dioramas and the “TRUTH, KNOWLEDGE, VISION” bas-relief of New York's Natural History Museum, which was built for, and modeled after, the phantasmagoric “manhood” of Teddy Roosevelt, Haraway says that “machines are maps of power, arrested moments of social relations that in turn threaten to govern the living.”¹⁷ Perhaps Haraway's cyborgs were crafted to do battle against this earlier model of white male subjectivity, which was, by the way, quite deliberate and shameless about its deceptions and other abuses of power.

Cyborgs, cyberpunks, and/or postmodern writing machines are also “maps of power” that plot social relations and political representation(s). The military origins and secretly engineered workings of information systems must give pause, even to those, including Haraway, who harbor faith in progressive reappropriation, while facing the fact that “modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I,” which, building upon Wiener's coinage, means “command control communications intelligence.”¹⁸ Haraway's “cyborgs,” which is to say hybridized “cybernetic organisms,” can be demobbed and recoded; she hopes.¹⁹ Not only is Haraway's cyborg unacknowledged by patriarchal science, but it reproduces as it parodies the improvisational—or is it the imperial?—“self” of Emerson's “American Scholar” transposed from his sublime text, Nature. Haraway's cyborg, rather like the patriarchal God or the modernist author, is “outside” history waiting to be written in and on: “The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code” (SCW, 163).²⁰

While I do not want to miss or dismiss Haraway's irony, her clever fracturings and reassemblages of the hegemonic discourse, I would note that her agenda is severely limited by its attention to correcting a few techies and cowboys. Her critique is manifestly fictional and vanguardist or utopian (the latter used to be a bad word—something of a euphemism for nostalgic or reactionary). “Social reality,” Haraway recognizes, “is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction” (SCW, 149). Only half-jestingly, she asks cyborgs to do our (prophylactic) politics for us. The main task of cyborgs is to hold a place in civic and academic centers of power for “‘oppositional consciousness,’ born of the skills for reading webs of power by those refused stable membership in the social categories of race, sex or class” (SCW, 155). In the not too distant future, it is to be supposed, this new consciousness, necessary to effect political change, will spread from a few privileged operatives to the masses.

Haraway's identity politics promises to enter politics diacritically and ironically to disrupt the patriarchal narcissism of the military-industrial complex as well as the academic—and along the way, the science fiction—establishment.²¹ However, Haraway seems, in her own way, to buy wholesale the notion of the engineer's infallibility or perfectibility. Albeit ethnic and regendered, the cyborg partakes of a vanguardism by which race and even gender are occluded by education, class privilege, and/or talent. Haraway manages to select members of the good gender from the “bad boys,” as well as the potentially subversive racial others from the co-opted foot soldiers who still suffer something akin to false consciousness (like Ross's “youthful males with working-class chips,” from my opening citation):

Many scientific and technical workers in Silicon Valley, the high-tech cowboys included, do not want to work on military science. Can these personal preferences and cultural tendencies be welded into progressive politics among this professional middle class in which women, including women of color, are coming to be fairly numerous?

(SCW, 169)

I am not sure how much changes when “different faces” get put in high places, as it were. Perhaps this is to repeat rather than to transform social relations as they are. Nevertheless, we might usefully focus on the stage I used Haraway to set. With a hyperreal update of the formal logic of Walter Benjamin's reading of surrealism in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” perhaps we can make Gibson's cyberpunk fiction reveal the real conditions of its literary sources and the conditions of literary and critical reproduction. Along the way, with reference to Olson and others, we can expose the workings of part of the academic interpretive machinery. To my mind, Gibson is a major player in the sometimes ironic, sometimes utopian quest for the most—or least?—masterful construction of postmodern subjectivity. This is because, rather than taking the high moral ground of judgment or the safe course of evasion, he abusively repeats writer-auteur and conquistador/overreacher scenarios in his hacker—or hack—novels. Implicitly, at least, he satirizes bourgeois corrections to existing political and textual systems. Gibson does not really want to correct the working conditions and representation of the companies in Silicon Valley, universities, or the publishing industry. He is rather more likely to expose the nostalgia and bad faith of our progressive politics than to offer recognizably useful political programs. I think Gibson is more than the current “Rebel Without a Cause”; he is a critic rather than a corrector of writings and subjectivity in the fields of information and American literature.

In this vein, we might consider Fredric Jameson, who rather uncritically delights in being thrust out of museums and other academies into discursive and urban chaos even, however differently from Haraway and Olson, as an urban adventurer, who calls, in so many words, for “a cognitive map,” something like an X to mark his place in postethical, post-Marxian mall culture. Naturally, Jameson is confident that he will recognize himself in the map. Just so, at the end of Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, he regrets that he did not include a chapter on cyberpunk, because it “determines,” he claims, “an orgy of language and representation, an excess of representational consumption. … This is surely the most crucial terrain of ideological struggle today, which has migrated from concept to representation.”²² Herald of a new political art still on the horizon and still to be named, cyberpunk explores computer and communication systems as images of the present state of multinational capitalism. More importantly, according to Jameson, it maps and, in mapping, interpolates a new subjectivity in, and as, the “postmodern sublime.” And Jamesonian cultural critics (presumably Gibson among them) will be the vanguard of a new politics of daring and definition: “The political form of postmodernism … will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale.”²³

Does Jameson accidentally recite Bruce Sterling's manifesto-like announcement of a “cyberpunk movement,” substituting mirroring buildings for reflective sunglasses in which the viewed views himself rather than the viewer? I am thinking of the anthology Mirrorshades. Gibson's erstwhile collaborator and point man for the new genre, Sterling assembles texts and textual metaphors in the style of manifestos past. Making proper the nasty nickname of his sci-fi comrades, Sterling says what the cyberpunk agenda is or was:

For them, the techniques of classical SF—extrapolation, technological literacy—are not just literary tools but an aid to daily life. They are means of understanding and highly valued. [The new SF writers] were independent explorers, whose work reflected something inherent in the times. …

[C]yberpunk—a label none of them chose. But … there is a certain justice in it. The term captures something crucial to the work of these writers, something crucial to the decade as a whole: a new kind of integration. The overlapping of worlds that were formerly separate: the realms of high tech, and the pop underground.

This integration has become our decade's crucial source of cultural energy.²⁴

In awe and terror, Jameson draws from the same underground urban energy when, also tracking the situationists and Baudrillard, he loses himself in a sublime hotel lobby. Jameson tells us that everywhere we look, whether safely within the glass space of a Bonaventure or out on the street, cities critique and construct an American ideology of progress, narcissism, and mastery. In a rather literal fashion, and forgetting the law of dramatic irony by which ideology is always over there and duping the other guy, Jameson reads the postmodern schismatics of subjectivity in postmodern architecture, specifically in the mirrored facades that reflect and mask the decaying or unstable infra- and superstructures of “the city.” Rather plaintively, he calls for a map. By his definition, Jameson's “cognitive map” would only anticipate the problematics addressed by cybernetics:

There is a most interesting convergence between the empirical problems … of city space and … “the representation of the subject's Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence.” Surely this is exactly what the cognitive map is called upon to do, in the narrower framework of daily life in the physical city: to enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of the city's structure as a whole.²⁵

For Jameson, postmodernism remains irresistible and destructive, that is, sublime. It disorients the subject from history and overwhelms the individual with competing discourses and the chaos of consumerism. He can only hope that, after the allegedly failed engagement of Marxism and post-structuralism, the new science fiction can supplement architecture's and other formalist—would he say materialist?—critiques of capitalism to open a space for literature, criticism, and their periodicity.

Is this sort of interested discursive self-reflection, or “cognitive mapping,” not the parallel promise of cyborg subjectivity? Is it also the office, so to speak, of the cyberpunk? Oddly, at this fast passing moment, when the death of global theory is being celebrated in a carnival of tribal and culture wars, from Bosnia to the legislative-presidential budget showdown, science fiction is again the projected site of a new politics. This is, in fact, a nice postrealist, if not a postmodern, condition, a chance for literature once again to have a key role in cultural reproduction. If, as previous generations of Marxists suggested and recent post-Marxists confirm, the task of the (realist) novel is “world building” and/or the description of the relationship of individuals to the state, cyberpunk with near-future technologies of information as its province is a player. During that greatly misunderstood period of “autotelic” modernism, mainstream and popular literature seemed to fall down on the job of representing the material present and projecting an instructive future. Moreover, notwithstanding its symbiotic relationship with the military-industrial complex and consumer culture, science fiction has always announced itself as the safe zone for testing possible worlds. Through the good offices of Jameson, Haraway, Ross, and others, cyberpunk moved quickly out of the popular culture ghetto into the academic metropolis.²⁶ Even before the attention of academic critics, Gibson and the others had created a nearly aleatory file of ready-made answers to literary critical questions about the aims and origins of the new writing.

With a media consciousness that echoes various avant-gardes, and with even greater pc—that is, popular culture—savvy, cyberpunk writers cashed in on this felt need for new worlds and new selves. According to Gibson, cyberspace and cyberculture were concocted out of familiar post-cityscapes, adolescent entertainments of the mall lowlifes, and serious literature. In a 1986 interview, he describes a walk by kids playing in a Vancouver video-arcade as a cybernetic bio-information loop à la Pynchon: “It was like one of those closed systems out of a Pynchon novel: a feedback loop with photons coming off the screens into the kid's eyes, neurons moving through their bodies, and electrons moving through the game. These kids clearly believed in the space games projected.”²⁷

Predictably, cyberpunk is already a dead letter. It has been replaced by an even more realistic, un- or hyper-mediated presentation of postprint textuality. As some of us know, popular culture in print is fast being replaced by electronic impulses on our PC screens. Already interred by its practitioners at various media wakes and academic performances, cyberpunk nevertheless continues to enjoy a profitable half-life. As main authority on yesterday's fad, Gibson continues to mine the matrix, or equation, of mind and body as communication network. Like a properly post-postmodern movement might be expected to do, if literal-mindedly, William Gibson's most computerized text follows new technologies and new textualities from rhizomatic possibility through critical homeostasis to fatally entropic noise. Now that Gibson has failed to produce a self-consuming artifact and/or succeeded in an advertising campaign, we can begin to rethink Gibson's text. If it is to be representative, realistic, and critical, by turns, won't the new postmodern and post-postal text disappear in its reading, thus literally evading, while perfectly reproducing, the conditions of culture and the Culture Industry?²⁸ Has Gibson gone that far? And, in such a world, where Warhol's “fifteen minutes” seems an eternity, how to turn a profit?

Just so, the June 1992 issue of Details: For Men, a lifestyle magazine that runs a mainstream middle course between GQ and Interview, announces Gibson's self-de(con)structing “AGRIPPA (A Book of the Dead)” in the form of a one-play-through PC disc. With a price tag of $450 ($7,500 for a bronze-boxed collectors' copy), to quote the blurby, gossipy description, “[‘AGRIPPA’] comes in a rough-hewn black box adorned with a blinking green light and an LCD that flickers with an endless stream of decoded DNA.”²⁹ We are assured that even though Gibson and Dennis Ashbaugh, his “post-expressionist” packager/illustrator, could infect readers, or “user's,” machines with a virus, being good guys, they decided not to; instead, they play hypertextuality with the LC catalog and its librarians. Signifying on the model of A Difference Engine, “AGRIPPA” defies classification and preservation; it is destroyed by even the cursory read-through. Because “to classify it, they must read it, and to read it, they must destroy it,” it leaves nothing for future scholars and is now—here and now in Seattle—only a rumor.

Ever the unrelenting performer or advertising product, Gibson frustrates the “inquiring reader's” urge to know Gibson and/or the genesis of his art. A serious mockery of autobiography is embedded in a PC—or un-pc—account of the birth of the author out of the spirit and history of popular culture:

Gibson divulges that “Agrippa” was a common brand of photo albums in the 1920's. He claims that the story explains how he became a science-fiction writer, but, of course, he doesn't really explain it. … [“]If it works, it makes the reader uncomfortably aware of how much we tend to accept the contemporary media version of the past. You see it in Westerns, the way the mise-en-scène and the collars on cowboys change through time. It's never really the past; it's always a version of your own time.”³⁰

We don't know exactly whether—or how not—to snap at that factitious bait. Mocking dreams of stable literary genealogies and fixed ends to interpretation, Gibson nearly makes one nostalgic for the bad old times when modern avant-gardists insulted bourgeois critics with a privileged artist and ideal reader. More recently, some of us have had the pleasures of overidentification with computer cowboys warring, in archives, against yellow-pad nerds. Like Kerouac, and just about as indirectly, Gibson bids us join him on the road: in or out there in cyberspace, that uncanny place he probably coined. Yet Gibson is no longer, if he ever was, just a cowboy; not just another Huckster, if only on account of a certain parodic irony that marks his memorial efforts.³¹

Gibson economically displays this professional irony, if you will, in the allusive name of his dissolving text. Why “AGRIPPA (A Book of the Dead)”? Floating above a text that might prove hard to crack, “AGRIPPA” compounds manifold literary affiliations with magical/rhetorical pretensions, at once showing Gibson's control and his loss of textual mastery to old habits of recovery. What with all the DNA and the disappearing lights and switches, his title names Augustus Caesar's martial friend from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra's sad fourth act and/or the historical Roman Consul, Agrippa. Most suggestively, “Agrippa” recalls Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, the notorious Renaissance magician with a unified field theory of the power of proper naming. If the reader can stand another hyper-allusion, Agrippa was to Marlowe and Goethe what Dean Moriarity was to Sal Paradise:

Philosophy is odious and obscure,
Both Law and Physic are for petty wits;
Divinity is basest of the three,
Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible, and vild:
'Tis Magic, Magic that hath ravished me.
Then, gentle friends, aid me in this attempt;
And I that have with concise syllogisms
Gravelled the pastors of the German Church
Will be as cunning as Agrippa was,
Whose shadows made all Europe honour him.(32)

With that gesture, Marlowe's Dr. Faustus invokes the model his author would imitate. Simultaneously, Marlowe evokes the magic with which he, a mere wordmonger, would contest the rival—more manly and respectable—discourses of law, philosophy, and science. Like many a crypto-autobiographer, Marlowe calls up more than a name when he writes the word Agrippa, the proper name for the power of writing.

Cornelius Agrippa, as famous for recognizing the magic of words as for a heretical text on the superior intelligence of women, epitomized the life devoted to mysterious meetings and word wizardry.³³ His augmented biography was the stuff of the Faustus legends. Like today's hacker hero, he was as much the subject of speculation as the supplier of text. To writers in search of vehicles for bildungsroman, his supposed life was like the magic mirror in which he was reputed to recall dead loved ones. Of course, it is at least partially illegitimate, not to say self-revelatory, in now familiar ways, for me to freight Gibson's text with such arcana. Then again, his elaborate evasions, hinged on the accidents and mysticism of proper naming, sweetly provoke such joyful work, turning, as it were, the odious into pleasurable odium. Recalling the way in which Adam named the creatures already named by God, Agrippa accounts for the power and the evasiveness, the control and freedom, inscribed in names, which bear both arbitrariness and the law of the father. He opens space for the conjurer, thus:

God brought all things that he had created before Adam, that he should name them; and as he named any thing, so the name of it was; which names, indeed, contain in them wonderful powers of the things signified. Every voice, therefore, that is significative, first of all signifies by the influence of the celestial harmony; secondly, by the imposition of man, although oftentimes otherwise by this than by that. But when both significations meet in any voice or name, which are put up on them by the said harmony, or men, then that name is with a double virtue, viz., natural and arbitrary, made most efficacious to act as often as it shall be uttered in due place and time, and seriously, with an intention exercised upon the matter rightly disposed, and that can naturally be acted upon by it.³⁴

If that doesn't exactly crack Gibson's code, it reminds initiates (who, with Agrippa, are both total believers and complete skeptics) of the elegance of new modes of textual production, storage, recovery, interpretation, and the viral spread of new intertextualities. Why, then, from Gibson, shouldn't we expect a hybrid of hoax and autobiography? A bit of Agrippa.

When I was finally able to download a naked—that is, unboxed, unillustrated—paper copy of “AGRIPPA,” was somewhat surprised to find a long poem that, not unlike many of Olson's and Pound's, addresses both death and an archive of media and metaphors of resistance and recovery.³⁵ Though hardly just a private cry on the public wall, and as much a parody of the doubly edgy search for origin and originality as a romantic crisis poem, “AGRIPPA” employs a recognizably modernist quotational secularity to rehearse the birth of the author in the persona's failure fully to experience an American boyhood—one would not be wrong to conjure up Norman Rockwell along with Lenny Bruce. In the old technology of camera flashes, Gibson tells that his father died when he was very young. So the packaged hunting, fishing, driving, soldiering experiences of his father's West Virginia boyhood are presented vicariously, poetically, at least doubly mediated by another's memory captured in photos chosen for an album. Readers of Gibson's text are invited to be as conscious of the machines and presentation as of the almost too familiar romantic messages.³⁶ We see both recording device and the construction of his father's “Book of the Dead,” which includes, among other tenderly—or is it viciously?—parodic gestures, his father's memorial to his father:

Then he glued his Kodak prints down
And wrote under them
In chalk-like white pencil:
“Papa's saw mill, Aug. 1919.”
A flat-roofed shack
Against a mountain ridge
In the foreground are tumbled boards and offcuts
He must have smelled the pitch. In August
The sweet hot reek
Of the electric saw
Biting into decades(37)

The poem also lingers over a key passage in Gibson's growth as a writer, the once segregated bus station, where the razed “colored restroom” left space for a magazine stand. Oh so quotationally, from off the heap of mysterious interpellation and interpolations of writers, Gibson confesses:

There it was that I was marked out as a writer,
having discovered in that alcove
copies of certain magazines
esoteric and precious, and, yes,
I knew then, knew utterly,
the deal done in my heart forever,
though how I knew not,
nor ever have.

(“AGRIPPA,” 248-55)

Both resisting and relying on the mystery of proper names (just about all the photographers and their subjects are “William Gibson”) as well as on a cache of memories that these might simulate or stimulate from the reader, Gibson presents the name and the cryptic cartouches of his father's simple scrapbook:

A black book:
          ALBUMS
CA. AGRIPPA
                    Order Extra Leaves
                              By Letter and Name
Inside the cover he inscribed something in soft graphite
Now lost
Then his name
W.F. Gibson Jr.
and something, comma,
1924

(“AGRIPPA,” 4-8, 17-22)

Just as “CA. AGRIPPA” is both the magic name of a Renaissance figure and the quotidian name of a photo album, W. F. Gibson Jr., the “name of the father”—but for the “Jr.,” also Gibson's name and that of his grandfather—recalls an equally imprecise record. Gibson's access to memories of his father is particularly difficult: as a man, fatherless from early boyhood, he can recall “boy things” only through the prosthetic memory of his father, that is, through the snapshot image(s) of a man with fish, car, horse, dog, gun, all the accoutrements of a typical New England boyhood (a trope to which we will return). Not unlike Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (which is better known as the source for the screenplay to Blade Runner), Gibson's text turns on the (in)ability to establish one's identity by means of checking the authenticity of memory—one's own, and that of the father and the machine.³⁸ In a poem that plays at autobiography by making the gaps in the poet's experience and the “Now lost” inscription “and something, comma” of his father's memorial message, Gibson is more interested in the mechanisms that synthesize or record mementos than in recovering the man behind the book or, in this case, the photo album. He is more interested, that is, in textual effects than in heroic (auto)biographical similitude. Nonetheless, as it parodies authorizing or masterful gestures of self-presentation, Gibson's “AGRIPPA (A Book of the Dead)” sublates modernist confessional poetry. Perhaps in the logic of modernism that recreates literary history by trying to escape it, Gibson recuperates a recognizably wounded, if not a stable, writing subject.³⁹ If it weren't for the ever present machines, including the memory that is structured by and as machine language, Gibson might be such a poet. However, the proliferation of borrowed and mediated reflections marked as simulacra, rather than presences, would seem to prevent this return to transcendence.

Gibson presents the sights and angles of cameras and guns as he reminds one of generations of once state-of-the-art reproducing machines and their operators who, because of these machines, are never far from war, death, and writing. The primary focus is not “I,” or self, but “the mechanism,” which becomes the poem's prosaic refrain:

just as I myself discovered
one other summer in an attic trunk,
and beneath that every boy's best treasure
of tarnished actual ammunition
real little bits of war
but also
the mechanism
itself.

(“AGRIPPA,” 109-16)

No more singular (conundrum intended) than the writing subject, “the mechanism” references gun, camera, the book called Agrippa, which is a disc boxed in transformative DNA-simulating metal cover that, as the present case will, nonetheless, amount to the same old Writing in the West:

The mechanism: stamped black tin,
Leatherette over cardboard, bits of boxwood,
A lens
The shudder falls
Forever
Dividing that from this.

(“AGRIPPA,” 98-103)

Near the end of “AGRIPPA,” Gibson recalls the event that made him, despite his father's boyhood, “not even American,” his crossing North, as it were, from Vietnam into Canada:

They must have asked me something
at the border
I was admitted
somehow
and behind me swung the stamped tin shutter
across the very sky
and I went free
to find myself.

(“AGRIPPA,” 277-84)

Again, the “mechanism,” the instrumental metaphorics of cameras. Whether exiled in Canada or roaming “the net,” the character is less important than media of transportation, communication, and reproduction. If cyberspace is populated with the likes of Count Zero and Johnny Mnemonic, themselves—their “selves”—computer operators and/or memory storage devices, then the persona of Gibson's “AGRIPPA” is also only indirectly the orphaned exile who recovers the country as he leaves it. He is always, in any case, just picturing what it was—or would have been—like.

In “Otobiographies” (whose titular pun/misspelling nominates Nietzsche as his own figure of “the inverted cripple” with a prodigiously enlarged and sensitive “ear” for hearing and broadcasting echoes of himself in all texts), Jacques Derrida describes a mechanism that partakes of the same (?) metaphorics as “AGRIPPA” when it gives and destroys the name and the power, for good or evil, of precursor texts:

Must there not be some powerful utterance-producing machine that programs the movements of the two opposing forces at once, and which couples, conjugates, or marries them in a given set, as life (does) death? … [T]hey [life and death] exchange utterances that are allowed to pass through the machine and into each other, carried along by family resemblances, however incompatible they may sometimes appear. Obviously, this “machine” is no longer a machine in the classic philosophical sense, because there is “life” in it or “life” takes part in it, and because it plays with the opposition life/death.⁴⁰

Both Gibson's cryptic poem and the photo album that accidentally conjures my favorite magicians would seem to verge on the diabolical authority and joyous freedom of the writing imagination so well known to (readers of) Nietzsche. Memorial, autobiographical, confessional writing—three names for the same textuality?—all play over the abyss that separates life from death. Just as earlier interpreters of a certain ilk (Nietzsche or a clattering string of new-Nietzscheans), Gibson brings the names and signatures of his more fictional, scientific, and science-fictional forebears into his text. His cyberspace is overpopulated with “utterance-producing machines” that seem, to my ear, cocked at this angle, obsessively to recount and provoke legitimation crises in the discursive politics of modern information science and literary authorship.⁴¹

Inevitably, through Olson or by other means, Gibson returns us to Wiener's original act of naming “cybernetics.” Wiener proclaimed himself founder of this science of “informatics” and, at the same time, critic of its/his own impulse to authority, authorship, and domination. Wiener's word and science cybernetics has not quite gone the route of modernism; it has not been “post-ed” and “dated” as “postmodern.” But it has been abbreviated, or portmanteaued, into “cyborg,” “cyberpunk,” and “cyberspace.” Before he coined the term, and announced the discipline of cybernetics at MIT, Norbert Wiener's major paid accomplishment had been a mathematical formula to predict the trajectory of missiles in World War II. In a word, he founded the department, or space, that preceded the much discussed media lab. He refigured the man-machine interface and planned, or imagined, an efficient, yet in some sense uncontrollable, man-machine, a kind of prosthetic sensorium modeled on radar tracking devices but capable of introducing energy and change into an entropic, or chaotic, world. Not just a computer or communications network but a better man. According to the cybernetic map, or model, the nervous system, whether processing DNA or electronic signal, is an information machine. Wiener says, “From one standpoint, we may consider a machine as a prime mover, a source of energy. This is not the standpoint we shall take. … For us, a machine is a device for converting incoming messages into outgoing messages. A message, from this point of view, is a sequence of quantities that represents signals in the message.”⁴²

Wiener had a fine sense of his own “word magic,” as he called it. Perhaps—but only perhaps—Wiener had more the poet-propagandist's than the scientist's sense when he named his new science in such a way as to achieve academic mastery and eliminate departmental wars:

[We] had already become aware of the essential unity of the set of problems centering about communication, control and statistical mechanics, whether in the machine or in living tissue. … After much consideration, we have come to the conclusion that all the existing terminology has too heavy a bias to one … [discipline] or another. … [A]s happens so often to scientists, we have been forced to coin at least one artificial neo-Greek expression to fill the gap. We have decided to call the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal, by the name Cybernetics, which we form from the Greek [word] meaning steersman. In choosing this term, we wish to recognize that the first significant paper on feedback mechanisms is an article on governors, which was published by Clerk Maxwell in 1868, and that governor is derived from a Latin corruption of [that word]. We also wish to refer to the fact that the steering engines of a ship are indeed one of the earliest and best-developed forms of feedback mechanism.⁴³

There remains some question about whether the emphasis falls on the freeplay and uncontrolled potential of the mechanism or the control imposed by the helmsman, whose will and power are newly inseparable from the mechanism. There is loads to say about the figure of the engineer, the imagined hero of so many histories and fictions of technology, who is, according to Wiener, the proper scientific authority and writing subject.

There are almost too many places in Gibson's novels and interviews where he (or his publicists) defines cyberspace. Count Zero's “mankind's unthinkably complex consensual hallucination” is particularly apt in this context.⁴⁴ Another instance in “Academy Leader,” a short programmatic preface to a book about cyberspace abusively echoes Wiener's founding rhetoric:

Just a chance operator in the gasoline crack of history, officer. …

Assembled word cyberspace from small and readily available components of language. Neologic spasm: the primal act of pop poetics. Preceded any concept whatever. Slick and hollow—awaiting received meaning.

All I did: folded words as taught. Now other words accrete in the interstices.⁴⁵

By inserting William Burroughs's cut-up method in this (self-)reflexion, Gibson at once shows control over a vast network of quotations and marks his aimless entry into an information system that exceeds his authorial intention, if not our interpretive competence. If Gibson tends to restrict his allusions to modern literature and pop science through the magic of quotation and the dropping of proper names and signature tropes, he tempts certain readers to work out the problematics of citation encrypted in (his) text. There is something of a challenge here to a context of citations: who can reach for the most precious high-table quotation? However, since Gibson has referenced Eliot, Olson, and, more obviously, Joyce and Burroughs, this challenge raises the specter of a total war machine of words that might go well beyond what were once the monopoly cultural capital of such multinationals as the Joyce Industry.

When Wiener coined his new science, questions immediately arose about the character, and the ubiquity, of the military-industrial research complex: Can one call it a government or the thing governing cybernetics and information science at their origin? Wiener gives air to the margin of error and corruption opened up between the perfectly running machine of state and the way things are. While believing in a science based on personal ethics and an ethic of personalism, a forerunner, perhaps, of Deleuze and Guattari's “minor science” and thus affiliated with a trans-statal total war or meaning machine, Wiener gave space to a cautionary French review of Cybernetics, the book, in his more popular book, The Human Use of Human Beings.⁴⁶La Monde, of 28 December 1948, provided international advertisement for an American invention in the form of French critique and the following letter from Pere Dubarle, a Dominican friar:

Can't one conceive of a State apparatus covering all systems of political decision, either under a regime of many states distributed over the earth, or under the apparently much more simple regime of a human government of this planet? At present nothing prevents our thinking of this. We may dream of the time when the machine a gouverner may come to supply—whether for good or evil—the present obvious inadequacy of the brain when the latter is concerned with the customary machine of politics.⁴⁷

With faith in a state on the model of an automaton, a utopian organic government or his own new Leviathan, Wiener endorses not a separation but an isomorphism and convertability of brain and state. From where does change come? Who bridges or corrects the current political disequilibrium? Either the machine is somehow self-correcting or the engineer must play the part of benevolent dictator.

If Haraway insists on futuristic and horizontal cyborg subjectivities that might gain power by “seizing the tools to make the world that marked them as other” (SCW, 175), and Gibson parodies such utopian or Oedipal moments, Wiener simply figures and affiliates himself with a long line of engineers who have invented automatons out of the political desires and personal necessities of their day. In God and Golem, Inc., Wiener claims to be above simony to the State, which, perhaps then—1947—a researcher making weapons systems at MIT could evade?⁴⁸ But, more than that, he claims that the human artificer of new human beings, or automata, is a responsive amateur—bricoleur?—who fashions homunculi or machines made out of materials and concepts ready to hand. A bit like black glass buildings and mirrorshades, Wiener's historical survey of automata reflects the interdependency of military machines and mnemonic aids; and, withholding a promise of agency, Wiener traces the progress of artificer and automaton:

At every stage of technique since Daedalus or Hero of Alexandria, the ability of the artificer to produce a working simulacrum of a living organism has always intrigued people. This desire to produce and to study automata has always been expressed in terms of the living technique of the age. In the days of magic, we have the bizarre and sinister concept of the golem, that figure of clay into which the Rabbi of Prague breathed life with the blasphemy of the Ineffable Name of God. … Finally the present automaton opens doors by means of photocells, or points guns to the place at which a radar beam picks up an airplane, or computes the solution of a differential equation.⁴⁹

Though he comforted himself with the personal identity of inventor/explorer, a complacent monadology instead of today's anxious or guilty nomadology, Wiener usefully defined life and self as a defiance of the second law of thermodynamics, which dictates, or promises, that all things move toward chaos, all messages toward noise. He prefigured a version of “negentropic islands”:⁵⁰

Life is an island here and now in a dying world. The process by which we living beings resist the general stream of corruption and decay is known as homeostasis. …

… It is the pattern maintained by this homeostasis, which is the touchstone of our personal identity. Our tissues change as we live. … We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.⁵¹

For Wiener, the system was only as good as its engineer, even though, or because, that engineer chose the pattern of his identity and the course of his journey within the state apparatus. Curiously enough, this figure of the engineer above the state, but one in the Samurai garb and code of total war, also figures in Deleuze and Guattari's Nomadology, which, therefore, despite its call for “nomad science” as an equal and unaccommodated twin to “minor literature” privileges a pantheon of warriors against the fixtures of State, ideology, and self. Among artist-philosophers, such as Nietzsche and Guattari, all sorts of figures of Romantic risk, not just Daedalian artificers, are heroes.⁵² “Nomad science” generates essential, or open, problems; but still at the point of entry or translation between the state and the machine of war, between repetition and change, stands the engineer:

Problemata are the war machine itself, and are inseparable from the inclined planes, passages to the limit, vortices, and projections. … It is as if the “savant” of nomad science were caught between a rock and a hard place, between the war machine that nourishes and inspires him and the State that imposes upon him a rational order (ordre des raisons).

The figure of the engineer (in particular the military engineer), with all its ambivalence, is illustrative of this situation. Most significant are perhaps the borderline phenomena where nomad science exerts pressure on State science, and conversely, where State science appropriates and transforms the elements of nomad science.⁵³

Again, even in French poststructuralism, we see something of the sublime temptations of borderline phenomena and personae: the pilot who is also of the river, floating forever in the liminality of fluid identity or in the renewable innocence of Olson's “figure of outward”⁵⁴ finding himself in the virgin land of America's Whitmaniac (cyber) Vistas. Such militant versions of independent American selfhood fully capable of counterhegemonic practices from within the state or the status quo are presented and withdrawn by Gibson and his characters, who deal in cultural memory that mocks the sanctity of individualizing experience and emotion.

At the beginning and end of Count Zero, a novel that frequently finds its characters arguing over definitions in at least two registers or discourses, Gibson sets out most clearly the terms of a prosthetic memory that makes one what she/he is—and is not. His version of cybernetic memory, which, in a most un-Hegelian or antiromantic fashion, spins, by means of mechanical inertia or overamped feedback, out of a character/operator's immediate control, is made up of quotations and similar scraps of others' experiences. We are in the world of Johnny Mnemonic again. The memories Gibson assigns to, even grafts into, his characters come from favorite literary, mystical-hermetic, and pop culture sources that he—let alone we, who are specially trained to strain for the precious citation—can hardly resist identifying at every turn. Made of language, they must be made to work in, and on, the model of the information and simulation machines that are the special toys and areas of expertise of Gibson's characters. Bobby, aka Count Zero, has the questionable luck of being able to survive killer increments and decrements of the virtually real information in which he deals. Though he can bear the shocking return to his unsettling origins, an indifferent mother and/or an unreliable kibbled electronic deck (mater = matrix = matter = man/machine interface), Bobby is sometimes at a loss as to how to understand anything outside his prosthetic existence as a very high-tech boy in the world of simulation and stimulation (i.e., his “simstim,” or memory/autoaffection machine). Even as he, the dramatically ironic picaro, stumbles through Gibson's echoing multimedia intertext, Bobby remains ignorant of his place in the cultural reproduction machine he operates.

Because we readers have the benefit of overhearing a lecture intended for Bobby, we see again that metaphor looms large in the long history of inescapable confluences of myths of men, arms, and mechanical conveyances. This particular example, by bringing together the special vocabulary of Caribbean hoodoo and hacker argot, performs the translation it describes:

“Bobby, do you know what a metaphor is?”

“A component? Like a capacitor?”

“No. Never mind metaphor, then. When [we] talk to you about the loas and their horses, as we call those few the loa choose to ride, you should pretend that we are talking two languages at once. One of them you already understand. That's the language of street tech, as you call it. … Maybe we call something Ougou Feray that you might call an icebreaker, you understand? But at the same time, with the same words we are talking about other things, and that you don't need to understand. You don't need to.” He put his toothpick away.

Bobby took a deep breath. “Beauvoir said that Jackie's a horse for a snake, a snake called Danbala. You run that by me in street tech?”

“Certainly. Think of Jackie as a deck, Bobby, a cyberspace deck, a very pretty one with nice ankles.” Lucas grinned and Bobby blushed. “Think of Danbala, who some people call the snake, as a program. Say as an icebreaker. Danbala slots into the Jackie deck. Jackie cuts ice. That's all.”

“Okay,” Bobby said, getting the hang of it, “then what's the matrix? If she's a deck, and Danbala's a program, what's cyberspace?”

“The world,” Lucas said.

(CZ, 114)⁵⁵

This joke provides rich ground for noting how the shifting plates of tech talk and mysticism generate catalogs of transitional or mediating quotations from slightly more legitimate discourses. Suffice it to say that Gibson offers another instance of that old saw, “matrix”—that is, pun on mother, intersection, and site of organic and mechanical origin and/or reproduction. Dodging Gibson's apparent misogyny for another coy metaphor for the complex textual fate of “Woman,” doubled figure for truth and my sex, whose identity cannot be authoritatively fixed, I return to Derrida's “Otobiographies.” Wondering about accidents of language in Nietzsche's text that seem to valorize women despite their author's notorious misogyny, Derrida (in an interview with Christie McDonald, who plays the part of feminist advocate) seems to offer a reading of the nineteenth-century ironist that we can insert into Bobby's memory and/or metaphorics:

Was the matrix of what was to be the future of feminism already there at the end of the last century? You smile, no doubt, as I do, at the mention of this word. [The word matrix in English like matrice in French comes from the Latin matrix, meaning womb. In both languages it has taken on, among others, the following two meanings: 1) a situation or surrounding substance within which something originates, develops, or is contained; 2) in printing it means a metal plate used for casting typefaces.] Let us make use of this figure from anatomy or printing a bit longer to ask whether a program, or locus of begetting, was not already in place in the nineteenth century for all those … socio-political demands, alliances with other forces, the alternatives of compromise or various radicalisms, the strategies of discourses, various forms of writing, theory or literature, etc.⁵⁶

Derrida's tantalizing offer of redemption aside, Bobby Newmark, Johnny Mnemonic, and Gibson's other virtual author-surrogates seem to offer little that is heroic, original, or directly useful for today's radical and/or identity politics. This does not mean that Gibson falls uncritically into modes of authorial exhibitionism as he stages so many encounters of a proximately Oedipal kind with his literary precursors and poststructuralist mentors. Sure, not unlike James Joyce and William Burroughs, his masterpieces scandalously cannibalize styles and ideas. Nevertheless, pace Norbert Wiener, whose anxiety about authoritarianism reveals his own desire for complete discursive control, as well as Andrew Ross and Donna Haraway, who would indict Gibson for refusing to endorse a political agenda of unilateral resistance to authority, Gibson causes a major disruption in the literary and scientific writing subject.

There is no recovering the liberal, bourgeois, morally responsible citizen from Gibson's text. Instead, in the place where so many recent cultural critics begin again to fashion individual(istic) utopias out of old images, Gibson leaves a blank, a specular, or echoing, textual knot—a Derridean “utterance-producing machine”? Recall the beginning of this essay, where Charles Olson's “Kingfishers,” rising doubly phoenixlike out of the rejectamenta of Eliot's blasted “heap of broken images,” escapes modernist despair by celebrating the demise of an outworn subjectivity. In like fashion, Gibson teases one with multitudinous approaches to nostalgia, from the loss of his own father at seven to the variegated and prolonged boyhoods of Huck Finn, Henry David Thoreau, and Jack Kerouac. By invoking Naked Lunch rather than a movable feast of happier adventures, Gibson goes beyond Olson of Glouster, who addresses Eliot of St. Louis. It seems to make a difference that Gibson recalls a more disruptive St. Louis master, “leaving the faintest tang of Player Navy Cut and opening piano bars of East St. Louis, this dangerous old literary gentleman who sent so many of us out, under sealed orders. … Inspector Lee taught a new angle.”⁵⁷

Gibson uses and abuses William Burroughs when, quoting the inveterate quoter, he mixes vaguely autobiographical memories with parodies of authorial reflections and invocations—sometimes subtly, sometimes grossly. For example, Turner, whose story begins after he is blown up and reconstructed out of bits of junk, including a memory chip from a mystery repairman named Dutchman (recalling Richard Wagner, Washington Irving, LeRoi Jones). This chip in Bobby's head contains, among other inaccessible memories, a “New England boyhood” (CZ, 1). During his recovery from certain death, Turner spent “most of three months in a ROM-generated simstim construct of an idealized New England boyhood of the previous century. … He read Conan Doyle by the light of a sixty-watt bulb behind a parchment shade printed with clipper ships. He masturbated in the smell of clean sheets and thought about cheerleaders … but in the morning his mother called him down to Wheaties, eggs and bacon, coffee with milk and sugar” (CZ, 1-2). At the end of the novel, Turner, in the tracks of the Dutchman before him, takes a boy squirrel shooting, as though in Rip Van Winkle's New York:

When the boy was seven, Turner took Rudy's old nylon stocked Winchester and they hiked together along the old road and back up into the clearing. …

… Uncle Rudy was one of the things he didn't understand, like some of his father's jokes. Once he'd asked why he has red hair, where he'd gotten it, and his father had just laughed and said he'd gotten it from the Dutchman. …

In the clearing, his father taught him to shoot, setting up lengths of pine against the trunk of a tree. When the boy tired of it, they lay on their backs, watching the squirrels.

(CZ, 245)

Again, one recalls that Johnny Mnemonic is a mostly organic storage device for other people's—or others' machine—memories. Johnny maps his vocation and self, thus:

“The stored data are fed in through a modified series of microsurgical contraautism prostheses.” I reeled off a numb version of my standard sales pitch. “Client's code is stored in a special chip: barring Squids, which we in the trade don't like to talk about.” …

“Superconducting quantum interference detectors. Used them in the war to find submarines, suss out enemy cyber systems.”⁵⁸

We cannot be surprised to find that the cyborg dolphin, who reads, among other things, a swastika out of Johnny's stored, or prosthetic, memory, is a junkie, whose unmistakable contextual markers identify him as William Burroughs—with a thread pointing to Wiener, the radar missile detector, if not to Olson's Projective/Projectile Poetics. This is another passage through which Gibson enters into that otobiographical machine Derrida identifies as the Nietzschean “utterance-producing machine.”

It seems appropriate, then, to end this engagement of Gibson's hyperallusive text with one last allusion to another of Burroughs's—and perhaps “AGRIPPA's”—perversions of autobiography. At the end of “Academy Leader,” Gibson has what appears to be a quote form, and about, Burroughs: “The targeted numerals of the ACADEMY LEADER were hypnogogic sigils preceding the dreamstate of film.”⁵⁹ One OED definition of sigilism is: “The following appear to be the principal crimes against which the edicts of the Inquisition were fulminated: immorality in the confessional, sigilism (or revealing the secrets of the confessional).” This might remind one of H. D.'s figurative, irreverent, or transferential play, in Tribute to Freud, of her mentor's name.⁶⁰

Though one might doubt, and, in doubting, augment, the depth and breadth of Gibson's literary allusions, he brings down the wrath of those who want reality and/or autobiographical fiction grounded in the ethical responsibility of Western subjectivity. Yet, in this day, when it is ever easier to pull texts from various files, many of which interfere radically and therapeutically with the recuperation of ethical regimes from which some of us still dream an escape, I value what I take to be Gibson's heresies, his almost obsessive parodies of confessional and memorial gestures.

Of course, from a different angle, Gibson, like Burroughs, might be thought drearily ethical in offering a conspiracy theory about information control. It would seem that Gibson's text is infected by a virulent infection that sickened Coleridge. The many-headed, headless, or organless author exerts control over—or is controlled by?—a machine that, notwithstanding a certain black humor, keeps reasserting the powerful name(s) of the father(s) in the overused form of authorial anxiety: “Gentle reader, the ugliness of that spectacle buggers description. … Gentle reader, I fain would spare you this, but my pen hath its will like the Ancient Mariner.”⁶¹ Junkie writer, William S. Burroughs inserts himself into his text. As (sur)realist documentarist of experiments in self-authoring, on the one hand, and unprotected exposure to the language and/or propaganda virus, on the other, the program speaks:

There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing. … I am a recording instrument. … Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function. … I am not an entertainer. …

Patrolling is, in fact, my principal occupation. … No matter how tight Security, I am always somewhere Outside giving orders and Inside this straight jacket of jelly that gives and stretches but always reforms ahead of every moment, though, impulse, stamped with the seal of alien inspection.⁶²

William S. Burroughs is behind William Gibson in more instances than can be counted here, but I want to end with Johnny Mnemonic consulting the junkie bionic dolphin that houses the interpretive machine of Jones (Burroughs), who worked for the navy during World War II. As Johnny describes it, “I can see them slipping up when he was demobbed, letting him out of the navy with that gear intact, but how does a cybernetic dolphin get wired to smack?” Molly Millions, Johnny's companion, who knows her war machine, answers: “‘The war,’ … ‘They all were. Navy did it. How else you get 'em working for you?’” Paying Jones in pure heroin, Johnny gets the following reading of the inaccessible memory chip he carries in his head.

R                                                  RRRRRR
R                                                  R
RRRRRRRRRRR
                                                  R                                                  R
RRRRRR                                                                                                    R

The arms of the red swastika were twisted in her silver glasses.⁶³

Reflected in lights off Molly's mirrorshades, the icon of cyberpunk's spectral identity politics, we read the cultural memory that Johnny acts out but cannot own—or own up to. It is unclear whether this enigmatic trace affirms, indicts, or parodies the desire to master and map the Self, that peculiarly Western obsession. It does seem clear, though, that, at the entropic or banal end of the allusive textuality of (post)modernism, we cannot discard our books along with other and newer prostheses and prophylactics. We feel this in Johnny's doomed urgency to engage politics more directly. But who, after all, is Johnny?

Notes

1. Andrew Ross, Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the Age of Limits (New York: Verso, 1991), 152. Is it worth noting that “feminism, ecology, peace …” name issues and interests or mark affiliation in academic and/or identity politics? They are not yet “great social movements.” Sociopolitical categories, they do not determine or achieve political action. Ross also complains that one will have problems identifying with cyberpunk and its writers if one does not have the experience of, or taste for, “suicidal speed freaks.” Perhaps Ross simply has markedly bourgeois and highly moralistic expectations of literary authors and authority. Gibson's use of the suicidal speed freak/dissolute junky positions has a long and distinguished history, particularly in postsymbolist writing, that involves rather serious experiments regarding the function of literature, morality, and other “opiates of the people.” Besides, professor, what's wrong with liking—or even being—a working-class punk with attitude and affect?

2. William Gibson, “Johnny Mnemonic,” in Burning Chrome (New York: Ace Books, 1987), 22.

3. The search for roots—constructing a past from which to dissent or descend, and on which to base politics and culture—is a timeworn mythopoetic trope, itself bearing no fixed value or inevitable practical consequences. Alongside sci-fi utopianism and dystopianism (which might create a future as a basis for the present), various Oedipal scenarios, and romantic nostalgia, one might recall the memorial urgency of Langston Hughes, who (dare one say like Johnny Mnemonic?) seeks to manufacture an African American cultural memory that he will not understand: “So long, / So far away / Is Africa. / Not even memories alive / Save those that history books create. … There comes this song I do not understand / This song of an atavistic land.” From Langston Hughes, Selected Poems (New York: Random House, 1959), 3.

4. Paul Virilio compellingly notes that electronics and time, not geography and space, are the emergent modes and media of postindustrial politics and capital: “There is a movement from geo- to chrono-politics: the distribution of territory becomes the distribution of time. The distribution of territory is outmoded, minimal.” See Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer, Pure War, trans. Mark Polizotti (New York: Semiotext[e]; Foreign Agents Series, 1983), 115.

5. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 125. Jameson claims that “architectural space is a way of philosophizing,” which involves problem solving that is at once cognitive, pictorial, and, beyond these, immediately sensuous. Not only does he prize the material and public aspect of architecture; buildings formally “evade the imperialism of photography” (and of writing?). Houses and other buildings resist reification to hold out the promise of exposure to the sublime object. The sublime remains untamed by interpretation, yet, like Nietzsche's favorite philosophizing locus in the high mountains, forever tempts the philosopher to become himself in facing the terror of sublimity.

6. M. Keith Booker, “Technology, History, and the Postmodern Imagination: The Cyberpunk Fiction of William Gibson,” Arizona Quarterly 50, no. 4 (winter 1995): 63-87, uses Eliot (the high moral seriousness as well as the alienation) and Jameson (architectural metaphors and historical responsibility) to place Gibson within the historical and literary political categories of modernism and postmodernism. I prefer Gibson's practice of a more de(con)structive poetics, to which Charles Olson and William Burroughs are key.

7. Charles Olson, “The Kingfishers,” in Selected Writings, ed. Robert Creeley (New York: New Directions, 1966), 170-71.

8. Olson's 1951 Mexican letters to Creeley, excerpted in Selected Writings as “Mayan Letters” (69-130), suggest the general fifties craze for understanding Mayan human sacrifice and decoding Mayan glyphs, which, like Linear A, remain uncertainly translated. Among the Mayans, only the highest warrior-priests, keepers of the calendar and laws, knew how to read the Codices; theft of secrets meant death. This enthusiasm for unknown and ancient power, wisdom, and information dots texts around the time Olson wrote his speculative poetics in Mexico. For example, it floats to the surface as a destructive force (of Eve's toying with “the knowledge of good and evil”?) in Burroughs's junk dream/confession/memorial to his wife at the end of Naked Lunch: “‘Death was their Culture Hero,’ said my Old Lady looking up from the Mayan Codices … ‘They got fire and speech and the corn seed from death … Death turns into a maize seed.’ The Ouab Days are upon us / raw pealed winds of hate and mischance / blew the shot.” See William Burroughs, “Atrophied Preface: Wouldn't You?” in Naked Lunch (New York: Grove, 1959), 233.

9. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 85.

10. Cecil Jane, ed., The Four Voyages of Columbus: A History in Eight Documents Including Five by Christopher Columbus, in the Original Spanish with English Translations, two volumes bound as one (New York: Dover, 1988). “Columbus and the World Map,” vol. 2, lxxvi-lxxxiv, is particularly informative in this regard.

11. Many such maps are in the possession of guild museums in various European cities; the museum of Haarlem, an early mapmaking capital, is an important repository of such documents as well as of the instruments and records of the earliest cartographers. I recommend “Episode uit de verovering van Amerika,” a painting by Jan Mostaert (ca. 1475-1556) in Frans Halsmusem, Haarlem, The Netherlands, as a representative fantasy of “American” natives and landscapes. These sorts of geographically, ethnographically confused pictures (this one replete with Dutch cows on a desert countryside with naked white savages approaching a rock dwelling) often appeared in the margins or other free spaces of early maps. Although it treats principally the British seventeenth-century Platt-Maker and Drapers' Company, helpful essays are collected in Norman J. W. Thrower, ed., The Compleat Plattmaker: Essays on Chart, Map, and Globe Making in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).

12. C. L. R. James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (Detroit: Bewick Editions, 1978). This work, which was first published in 1953, puts an anti-imperialist spin to the analysis of the Marlovian figure of Ahab, with whose authorial presence Olson tends to overidentify.

13. Charles Olson, Selected Writings, 24.

14. In a powerful metaphor for postmodern subjectivity, “The Body without Organs,” Deleuze and Guattari revisit Mayan Mexico through Artaud, Carlos Castenada, and others. They elaborate, for example, Castenada's nagual intensities, the hallucinatory state (is it on William Burroughs's favorite drug, Yage?) of experimental self-dissolution and wandering: “the body without organs has replaced the organism and experimentation has replaced all interpretation. … Flows of intensity, their fluids, their fibres … have replaced the world of the subject. Becomings, becomings-animal, becomings-molecular, have replaced history, individual or general.” See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 162.

15. Charles Olson, “On History,” in Muthologos: The Collected Lectures and Interviews, vol. 1 (Bolinas, Calif.: Four Seasons Foundation, 1971), 7.

16. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 149. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as SCW.

17. Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989), 54. A few pages later, in what I take to be slippage from critique into contemporary identity politics, Haraway says, “Experience in this public monument will be intensely personal; this structure is one of North America's spaces for joining the duality of self and community” (63).

18. The best short introduction to the military/information subtext of things “cyber,” from Norbert Wiener to the recent past, is Les Levidow and Kevin Robins, eds., Cyborg Worlds: The Military Information Society (London: Free Association, 1989). Stewart Brand, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (New York: Viking, 1987) and Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Knopf, 1995), two leading figures at the Media Lab, provide a more positive spin on the changes cybernetics has wrought on the discourses of information and its practitioners.

19. In the face of metaphors drawn from military, communications, and surveillance machines, Haraway performs her own rite of renaming of de- and re-legitimation, taking the worthwhile risk of contamination in order to harness the power of the beast or the knowledge of the trainer/operator for her rhetorical task of political correction: “The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism” (SCW, 152).

20. Andrew Ross similarly announces the promising urgency of sci-fi's remaking of sexual identity, calling for the undoing of the superhero: “Symptoms of the newly fortified contours of masculinity could be found in the inflated physiques of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. … These exaggerated parodies of masculine posture in the age of Reagan were at once a response to the redundancy of working muscle in a post-industrial age, to the technological regime of cyborg masculinity; and, of course, to the general threat of waning patriarchal power. Cyberpunk bodies, by contrast, held no such guarantee of lasting invulnerability, at least not without prosthetic help. … Such a body would be a battleground in itself, where traditional male ‘resistance’ to domination is uneasily coopted by the cutting-edge logic of new capitalist technologies” (Strange Weather, 153).

21. Deleuze and Guattari's version of State appropriation of the War Machine, perhaps revering the usual protocols of resistance, shows power taken from the artist/producer by the state rather than a recoding of state power. See “Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine,” in A Thousand Plateaus, 418.

22. Jameson, Postmodernism, 321. In the first endnote to the first page of this book, Jameson enthuses about an absence in his argument: “This is the place to regret the absence from this book of a chapter on cyberpunk, henceforth, for many of us, the supreme literary expression if not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself” (419).

23. Jameson, Postmodernism, 54.

24. Bruce Sterling, Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (New York: Ace Books, 1987), xi.

25. Jameson, Postmodernism, 51.

26. On this, there are numerous journal essays and commentaries. Among the most interesting literary/cultural studies anthologies devoted to cyberpunk and “cyberspace” as it issued from Gibson's coinage are Mark Dery, ed., Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994) and Larry McCaffery, ed., Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991). Michael Benedikt's Cyberspace: The First Steps (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), which came out of the first international conference on cyberspace (Austin, Texas, 1990), places a short piece by Gibson among the models and ongoing projects of engineers, research scientists, and sociologists engaged by information theory.

27. Larry McCaffery, “An Interview with William Gibson,” in Storming the Reality Studio, 272. In this interview, referencing ready-to-hand popular culture artifacts as well as literary texts, Gibson (usefully?) speaks of postmodern “cultural mongrelization,” in which “fiction, television, music, film all provide material … and codes that creep into my writing in ways both deliberate and unconscious” (266).

28. A suitable model of Culture Industry as a false-consciousness-producing mechanism capable of management by a centralized state or corporation is in Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Monthly Review Books, 1972). Incidentally, the first chapter treats Odysseus, chained to the mast but privileged to hear the Siren's song, as an allegory for the modern artist and cultural capitalist.

29. Gavin Edwards, “Cyber Lit,” Details: For Men (June 1992), 134.

30. Edwards, “Cyber Lit,” 134.

31. Maddeningly sexist and otherwise retrograde in a way that makes sense of his years-long collaboration with G. Gordon Liddy, Timothy Leary, in “The Cyberpunk: The Individual as Reality Pilot,” in Storming the Reality Studio, 245-58, places cybernetic writing in a literary genealogy of outlaw individuals and genetically New Men that includes Mark Twain and Jack Kerouac (for Huckleberry Finn and Dean Moriarity).

32. Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, scene 2, lines 104-16.

33. See Charles G. Nauert Jr., Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought, Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences, #55 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965), which provides a detailed summary of Agrippa's works and, where possible, credible accounts of his travels and associations.

34. Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of the Occult Philosophy of Magic, rpt. of the 1897 English translation, ed. Willis F. Whitehead (London: Antiquarian, 1971), 208.

35. If, like Agrippa, most proper names are arbitrary and/or echoing puns, one cannot fail to note similarities between “AGRIPPA (A Book of the Dead)” and Ezra Pound's The Cantos. Pound's grandfather, the trailblazer who paid workers in script, reminds one of Gibson's father's father; and as he calls up the dead through Odysseus, Pound is compelled to litter his self-reflexive epic poem with such apparently vitiating or pointless details as the name and credentials of his translator; thus, Pound parodies Odysseus's imprecise invocation of his targeted dead. Similarly, Gibson calls up Agrippa (and Pound and Olson and a host of others) with the name of an old family photo album.

36. Gibson's use of the family photo album to crank up a congeries of machines for manufacturing postmodern subjectivity might be said satirically to reverse what Deleuze and Guattari call “the error of psychoanalysis,” which “was to understand BwO [Body without Organs] phenomena as regressions, projections, phantasies, in terms of an image of the body. As a result, it only grasps the flipside of the BwO and immediately substitutes family photos, childhood memories, and part-objects for a worldwide intensity map.” See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 165. Psychologizing and anthropomorphizing postmodern subjectivity (in the manner of identity politics, à la Jameson as well as Haraway) might be said to repeat this “error.”

37. William Gibson, “AGRIPPA (A Book of the Dead),” etchings by Dennis Ashbaugh (New York: Kevin Begos Publishing, 1992), lines 23-33. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as AGRIPPA; references are to line numbers.

38. Memory as that which distinguishes human from animal and machine is as old as Plato. It is of particular importance to Isaac Asimov's “Rules for Robots” as applied in Philip K. Dick, Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) (New York: Ballantine, 1982, 1968), where “replicants” can—or can they?—be distinguished from humans by memory testing.

39. I refer to Paul de Man's definition of literary history as the plotting of modernist ruptures, in “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford, 1971), 142-65. Roland Barthes's 1968 essay, “Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday, 1977), 142-48, notes how repeated announcements of the uncertain identities of author and reader identify modern writing.

40. Jacques Derrida, “Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name,” trans. Avital Ronell, in The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation: Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida, ed. Christie V. McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 29-30.

41. Richard Kadrey's chapter, “The Toilet Was Full of Nietzsche,” from his novel Metrophage, exemplifies the promiscuous generation of textual garbage that occurs when “Nietzsche” penetrates the fetishized images of commodified information. See McCaffery, Storming the Reality Studio, 34, where pages of a discarded copy of Twilight of the Gods serves as tissue the protagonist uses to wipe away the sweat and other fluids attendant upon speed and overamped exposure to the stimulants of advertising and entertainment. In a more serious part of the same quotational field, see Kathryne V. Lindberg, “In the Name of Nietzsche: Ezra Pound Becomes Himself and Others,” in Nietzsche in American Literature and Thought, ed. Manfred Putz (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1995), 155-76.

42. Norbert Wiener, God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965), 31-32.

43. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or, Control and Communication in the Animal and in the Machine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1948), 11-12.

44. William Gibson, Count Zero (New York: Ace Books, 1986), 38. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as CZ.

45. William Gibson, “Academy Leader,” in Benedikt, Cyberspace: The First Steps, 27.

46. For a compact account of Guattari's version of “total war” and “minor science” and/as a resistance to the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) and traditional philosophical production, see Charles J. Stivale, “Pragmatic Machinic: Discussion with Félix Guattari (19 Mar. 1985),” PRE/TEXT 14, nos. 3-4 (1993): 215-50.

47. Cited in Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (New York: Da Capo, 1954), 178-79.

48. See the preface to Wiener, God and Golem, Inc.

49. Wiener, Cybernetics, 39-40.

50. A phrase recognizable from Michel Serres's recourse to Bergson's resistance to entropy by means of a kind of desperate identity politics that fixes, even as it acknowledges the radical fluidity of, memories and perceptions. See Michel Serres, “The Origin of Language: Biology, Information Theory, and Thermodynamics,” and “Lucretius: Science and Religion,” in his Hermes—Literature, Science and Philosophy, ed. Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 71-83 and 98-124, respectively. On the embodiment, literal and figurative, of memories in perception, see Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1988).

51. Wiener, Human Uses of Human Beings, 95-96.

52. Elaborating a new, representative politics out of the schizophrenic subjectivity of Anti-Oedipus, Jameson announces, and performs, a transformative/translative function for himself, “the logical possibility, alongside both the old closed, centered subject of inner-directed individualism and the new non-subject of the fragmented or schizophrenic self, a third term which would be very precisely the non-centered subject that is a part of an organic group or collective.” Rather than a scientist representative, he projects a single author-negotiation: “Whatever truce or alliance one wants to stage between one's various subject positions, therefore … what will ultimately be at stake is some more concrete truce or allusive between the various real social groups thereby entailed.” See Jameson, Postmodernism, 345.

53. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Nomadology: The War Machine, trans. Brian Massumi (New York: Semiotext[e], 1986), 19-20.

54. Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems (London: Jargon/Corinth, 1960), dedication page. This full dedicatory, yet self-referential, epithet, “for ROBERT CREELEY—the Figure of Forward,” is attached to an ink figure on the title page; both are explained on the copyright page of this beautifully presented book. Still cryptic, this explanation is noteworthy: “A word on the title-page device: this ‘glyph’ becomes Olson's ‘Figure of Outward,’ striding forth from the domain of the infinitely small; and, also, a written character for Maximus himself—the Man in the Word.”

55. Horses are a popular catachresis for the soul and, more recently, for organizing subjectivity. For instance, Plato: “Let [the soul's immortality] be likened to the union of powers in a team of winged steeds and their winged charioteer. Now all the gods' steeds and all their charioteers are good, and of good stock, but with other beings it is not wholly so. With us men, in the first place, it is a pair of steeds that the charioteer controls; moreover one of them is noble and good, and of good stock, which the other has the opposite character, and his stock is opposite” (“Phaedrus,” paragraph 246b, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961], 493). Deleuze and Guattari describe the birth of nomad subjectivity out of masochistic “horseplay”: “The ‘master,’ or rather the mistress-rider, the equestrian, ensures the conversion of forces and the inversion of signs. The masochist constructs an entire assemblage that simultaneously draws and fills the field of immanence of desire; he constitutes a body without organs or plane of consistency using himself, the horse, and the mistress” (A Thousand Plateaus, 156).

56. Derrida, “Interview: Choreographies,” in The Ear of the Other, 164.

57. Gibson, “Academy Leader,” 27.

58. Gibson, “Johnny Mnemonic,” 9.

59. Gibson, “Academy Leader,” 29.

60. H. D. [Hilda Doolittle], Tribute to Freud (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975). See especially 55, 67, 88, but the abuse of Freud's name occurs throughout H. D.'s account of her analysis, as part of the embedded process of memorializing her earlier and current interpretations of ancient texts as well as her dreams and the prized objects Freud used as mnemonic and interpretive devices.

61. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 40.

62. Burroughs, Naked Lunch, 221. William Burroughs comes up in “How to Make Yourself into a Body without Organs,” in A Thousand Plateaus, 150, where the “talking asshole,” or singular orifice, exemplifies modern literary approaches to what Deleuze and Guattari call the Body without Organs, experimental schizo body, or the drugged body.

63. Gibson, “Johnny Mnemonic,” 12.

An earlier version of this paper, “Political Prophylactics, or, How Can Cyborgs (Fail to) Be PC?” was presented at a series of lectures, “Postmodernism Reconsidered,” at the University of Washington, Seattle, 20 May 1992. I thank Charles Altieri, my host, and Dalia Judovitz and Marjorie Perloff, fellow speakers, for encouragement, fellowship, and citations. I thank Tyler Steben, graduate student and computer comrade at Wayne State University, for overloads of information and especially for getting me a copy of William Gibson's “AGRIPPA” from a free, but virtually inaccessible, zone on the Internet.