Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction

Living on the Edge of Burnout

Caroline Alphin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000327946
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

Caroline Alphin presents an original exploration of biopolitics by examining it through the lens of cyberpunk science fiction.

Comprised of five chapters, Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction is guided by four central themes: biopolitics, intensification, resilience, and accelerationism. The first chapters examine the political possibilities of cyberpunk as a genre of science fiction and introduce one kind of neoliberal subject, the self-monitoring cyborg. These are individuals who join fitness/health tracking devices and applications to their body to "self-cultivate". Here, Alphin presents concrete examples of how fitness trackers are a strategy of neoliberal governmentality under the guise of self-cultivation. Moving away from Foucault's biopolitics to themes of intensity and resilience, Alphin draws largely from William Gibson's Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon, along with the film Blade Runner to problematize notions of neoliberal resilience. Alphin returns to biopolitics, intensity, and resilience, connecting these themes to accelerationism as she engages with biohacker discourses. Here she argues that a biohacker is, in part, an intensification of the self-monitoring cyborg and accelerationism is in the end another form of resilience.

Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction is an invaluable resource for those interested in security studies, political sociology, biopolitics, critical IR theory, political theory, cultural studies, and literary theory.

1 The Neoliberal Science Fictions of Cyberpunk

Introduction

As I suggested in the Introduction, this project moves away from more traditional disciplinary aesthetic methods of analyzing literature and film, such as interpretation and representation. In this chapter, I wish to problematize the biopolitical present by weaving in and out of an analysis of the narratives, discourses, and spatio-temporalities of cyberpunk and neoliberalism. By moving/writing/thinking in and out of literary and political/philosophical genres, I seek to produce a series of epistemological interferences within these genres/disciplines, and thus, to disrupt the conceptual and lived biopolitical status-quo of neoliberalism. The goal is to open the door for discomfort with and a critical awareness of the necrotic conditions of competition by highlighting the narrative/fictive nature of the political, moral, and economic theories/practices of neoliberalism. These interferences, as Shapiro argues, help to challenge “the already conceptually invested political status-quo,”¹ and I would suggest the economic and social status-quo too, since it is the case that under neoliberalism “good” everyday life functions through an economic logic.

Cyberpunk can help to bracket and make conscious the necrotic conditions of competition through its spatialization and temporalization of neoliberal biopolitics, security, and corporate capitalism. As a genre, cyberpunk can make familiar the conditions of competition, such as the marketization of space and the production of responsibilized subjectivities, via notions of amplification and cyborganization. The critical possibilities of cyberpunk emerge out of its amplification and cyborganization of the spaces of neoliberal biopolitics and corporate capitalism as it is these genre techniques that weaken the distinction between fiction and the narratives that permeate the everyday.

The Affirmative Speculation of Cyberpunk Science Fiction

In his essay “The Co-Existence of Cyborgs, Humachines and Environments in Postmodernity: Getting Over the End of Nature,” Timothy Luke comments on the ways science fiction makes visible the science facts of a cyborganized environment. These cyborganizing/ed sites and structures highlight the “‘environmental spaces' of transnational capitalist exchange where cyborg beings are cyborganizing/ed…”² For Luke, the figure of the cyborg acts as an analytic for examining the self-evident truths of late- modern liberalism: the notion of a pristine nature independent of the human/cultural/political/economic realm, the preservation of the free individual as the central goal of politics and the state, and the free market as a means of protecting the individual. As a denatured and dehumanized being, the cyborg problematizes liberalism by offering an alternative politics with different subject categories, environments, spaces, and temporalities. In other words, liberalism does not recognize the science fact of cyborganized environments and ontologies, nor can it see the cyborg subjectivities “just beneath the surface of liberal society.”³ Liberal political theories miss the “modernization project of world-systemic capitalism,”⁴ which denatures and dehumanizes⁵ as it seeks to integrate all areas of life into “global networks of exchange.”⁶

Luke's cyborg theory shows how science fiction can “bracket,” “engage,” and “make conscious” the shortcomings of liberal political theory and the workings of power, along with “demystifying” a denaturalist reality. For Luke, science fictions “…are (ab)useful, illusions for (re)inventing our imagination of power, economy, and culture in an environment materially built into and out of scientific facts.”⁷ Similar to the ways Luke's cyborg myth/science fiction familiarize liberal categories and liberal politics, cyberpunk can familiarize the spatial and temporal logic of neoliberalism.

As we saw in the Introduction, Jameson argues that science fiction does not give us visions of the future. Instead, science fiction has a certain kind of realism that “defamiliarizes and restructures our experience of our own present,” and it does “so in specific ways distinct from all other forms of defamiliarization.”⁸ Jameson argues that science fiction is an “elaborate strategy of indirection,” one that offers a gaze through which we can view and critique the present. For Scott Bukatman, “[s]cience fiction…is grounded in the new ‘intolerable spaces' of technological culture and the narrative exists to permit that in a manner now susceptible to human perception, comprehension, and intervention…”⁹ Science fiction provides a conceptual frame.¹⁰ This chapter addresses the ways in which cyberpunk as a genre can denaturalize and familiarize the present, and in so doing, problematize neoliberal notions by highlighting their narrative qualities. I focus on amplification and cyborganization as genre conventions of cyberpunk science fiction, and I show how these two genre conventions are key to how cyberpunk denaturalizes and familiarizes the present. Amplification and cyborganization offer possibilities for a critical awareness that weakens the distinctions between science fiction and neoliberal narratives that can then make the self-evident nature of these narratives into a problem. The neoliberal narratives that I will address are those that insist on the fact that there is a clean separation between the economic and the social, that a subject's character and personhood are defined by individualized responsibility and calculations of risk, and that the free market is a natural phenomenon.

Amplification

Melinda Cooper writes that the capitalist promise, and I think by extension the neoliberal promise too, “is counterbalanced by willful deprivation, its plenitude of possible futures counteractualized as an impoverished, devastated present, always poised on the verge of depletion.”¹¹ As a mode of neoliberal accelerationism,¹² cyberpunk pushes this willful deprivation, as well as the impoverished and devastated present, into some visions of the future. Cyberpunk plays with accelerationism's argument that “the only way out is the way through,”¹³ by offering a vision of the future past the “long-term, slow-motion catastrophe”¹⁴ of the perpetual crises that undergird generalized conditions of competition. It highlights the contradictions that function within neoliberalism (the free market is natural/competition is not natural, the economic and social are separate/the economic and the social are not separate). Neoliberalism benefits from lingering narratives of liberalism (the economic and social are separate, the free market is a natural phenomenon, competition is natural) because these narratives hide or make natural/taken-for-granted the ways neoliberal governmentalities manage their subjects in order to intensify processes of competition. As Michel Foucault highlights in “The Birth of Biopolitics,” unlike liberalism, neoliberalism does not view competition as a process that occurs naturally.¹⁵ Rather neoliberalism must work at producing and maintaining the conditions of competition. Life, subjects, society, and politics become intelligible through market competition. The neoliberal governmentalities that shape and make legible the relationships, interactions, and experiences of individuals in terms of competition are unwilling to recognize these contradictions and the insecurity that emerges out of these relationships/interactions/experiences. As readers interact with cyberpunk, the responsibilized self, the naturalized free market, and the insecurities that develop out of the conditions of competition come into focus as they unfold within the cyberpunk narrative and through its depiction of bodily encounters in city spaces.

According to Loïc Wacquant, “neoliberal ideology in economic matters rests on an impermeable separation between the economic (supposedly governed by the neutral, fluid, and efficient mechanism of the market) and the social (inhabited by the unpredictable arbitrariness of powers and passions).”¹⁶ The separation Wacquant describes hides what Foucault explains is fundamental to neoliberalism: neoliberalism generalizes an analysis of the market economy beyond the economic field as a means of intelligibility.¹⁷ As I suggested above, neoliberalism understands the relationships/interactions/experiences of individuals in terms of an “economic game of competition.”¹⁸ In such a game, the city is often seen as a space for subjects to enhance and utilize their human capital as they compete for jobs. Thus, when people fail to compete, this failure is seen not as a systemic effect, but rather as an individual weakness of character or a subject malfunction. The suggestion that their failures are systemic is often interpreted as de-mobilizing and de-responsibilizing. Wacquant suggests that the “virile rhetoric of personal uprightness and responsibility” is “tailor-made for deflecting attention away” from the state's inability, or perhaps unwillingness, to intervene.¹⁹ And yet, it is not just neoliberal subjects that are made intelligible through the logic of competition. It is also the case that a logic of competition makes certain governmentalities intelligible, since as Foucault suggests, under neoliberalism, there is a permanent “neoliberal market” criticism (e.g., “scrutinizing every action of the public authorities in terms of the game of supply and demand, in terms of efficiency…and the cost of intervention”²⁰) of different governmentalities that are not filtered through competition and an economic grid.²¹

Cyberpunk complicates the myth of the separation between the economic and the social by amplifying to excess the generalization of market economies beyond the economic field. The economic permeates the social, political, and spatial fields of cyberpunk. William Gibson's novel Neuromancer offers a good example of this bleeding of the economic into other spheres. When the protagonist of the novel, Case, finds himself without money, he uses whatever means possible to reenter the economic game of competition:

At first, finding himself alone in Chiba, with little money and less hope of finding a cure, he'd gone into a kind of terminal overdrive, hustling fresh capital with a cold intensity that had seemed to belong to someone else. In the first month, he'd killed two men and a woman over sums that a year before would have seemed ludicrous. Ninsei wore him down until the street itself came to seem the externalization of some death wish.²²

This passage illustrates Case's attempt to replenish his human capital as he commits violent acts. He is in some sense justified in committing these acts by the logic of neoliberal temporalities in Chiba city. The spatial order of Chiba city is dominated by economic competition, which frames many of the social interactions that occur within the city, including murder. Neuromancer illustrates one way in which the cyberpunk genre spatializes a neoliberal reasoning that “would praise and privilege the ‘rational’ logic of unscrupulous, self-preserv...