Cyberpunk Culture and Psychology

Seeing through the Mirrorshades

Anna McFarlane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000424669
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

This book traces developments in cyberpunk culture through a close engagement with the novels of the 'godfather of cyberpunk', William Gibson. Connecting his relational model of 'gestalt' psychology and imagery with that of the posthuman networked identities found in cyberpunk, the author draws out relations with key cultural moments of the last 40 years: postmodernism, posthumanism, 9/11, and the Anthropocene.

By identifying cyberpunk ways of seeing with cyberpunk ways of being, the author shows how a visual style is crucial to cyberpunk on a philosophical level, as well as on an aesthetic level. Tracing a trajectory over Gibson's work that brings him from an emphasis on the visual that elevates the human over posthuman entities to a perspective based on touch, a truly posthuman understanding of humans as networked with their environments, she argues for connections between the visual and the posthuman that have not been explored elsewhere, and that have implications for future work in posthumanism and the arts.

Proposing an innovative model of reading through gestalt psychology, this book will be of key importance to scholars and students in the medical humanities, posthumanism, literary and cultural studies, dystopian and utopian studies, and psychology.

1 Autopoiesis in the Sprawl trilogy

DOI: 10.4324/9781003082477-2

Introduction

The Sprawl trilogy begins with the publication of Neuromancer in 1984, a year already freighted with science-fictional significance thanks to George Orwell’s eponymous dystopia. Gibson’s debut is the most important cyberpunk novel and the ur-text of the genre. Gibson had already coined the term ‘cyberspace’ in his short story ‘Burning Chrome’ – first published in the science fiction magazine Omni in July 1982 and appearing in the collection of the same name in 1986. However, Neuromancer popularised the term, energising the cultural imaginary to think about how to represent the space behind the computer screen. Neuromancer also referred to data-space as ‘the matrix’, and these terms had an influence far beyond cyberpunk and science fiction, inspiring a generation of computer scientists to think about user interfaces and the influence of a networked world on social structures. Neuromancer follows the story of Case, a washed-up ‘cyberspace cowboy’ (11), who was once ‘jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix’ (12). Case is no longer capable of working, or of jacking into the matrix at all, after stealing from employers who punished him by damaging his nervous system with Russian mycotoxin (12), thus banishing him from cyberspace. He hustles for work in Chiba City, Japan, and takes drugs with his sometime-girlfriend Linda Lee until he is tracked down by cyborg, Molly Millions. Molly works for Armitage, a man so damaged by a previous war that the only thing holding his psyche together is the power of an artificial intelligence known as Wintermute. Case agrees that he will help in their plot to combine Wintermute with his counterpart, another artificial intelligence known as Neuromancer. These two intelligences were designed by the nepotistic Tessier-Ashpool family with the intention of preventing them from joining so that their combined power would pose no threat to humanity. Once Wintermute and Neuromancer become one, their knowledge is greater than that of the human race and they are no longer confined to the matrix or the world system. The two novels which complete the trilogy show some of the fallout from Neuromancer and Wintermute’s communion, an event known as ‘When It Changed’. Count Zero follows disgraced curator, Marly, as she is hired by Virek, a cryogenically frozen millionaire, to find the source of some mysterious artworks. Meanwhile, Angie Mitchell, daughter of an eminent scientist, is rescued from the corporation Maas-Neotek carrying a delicate and dangerous deck-of-sorts in her brain. The titular Count Zero, a wannabe hacker also known as Bobby Newmark, finds himself in possession of some black market tech that keeps getting people killed and is taken under the wing of some hackers who explain to him that the matrix is now home to voodoo spirits, or loas, aspects of the one consciousness that had been Wintermute-Neuromancer. In Mona Lisa Overdrive, obsessive hacker, Gentry, attempts to achieve a totalised understanding of cyberspace, something he thinks of as the ‘Shape’ of the matrix, and which he expects will give him some insight into the nature of living systems and their relationship to the universe. Mona Lisa Overdrive gives some more detail about the culture surrounding simstim (simulated stimulation, a kind of full-sensory entertainment medium) and its relationship to the matrix, climaxing with the reunion of Angie Mitchell and Count Zero in a pocket universe of the matrix. Gibson’s debut trilogy is named for the ‘Sprawl’, the spread of urban areas on the USA’s East Coast also known as the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, a frontier society where the rule of law breaks down and the globalised, data-based free market fills the vacuum.

Cyberpunk’s engagement with technology runs deep, using computing and engineering discourse as a metaphor for life, and even consciousness itself. This allows for a subtly drawn hierarchy of conscious, living beings to emerge. As Istvan Csicsery-Ronay puts it:

The metaphors themselves have a life. And in the hands of a master, like Gibson, the fuzzy links can become a subtly constructed, but always merely implied, four-level hierarchy of evolving systems of information processing, from the individual human being’s biological processes and personality, through the total life of society, to non-living artificial intelligences, and ultimately to new entities created out of those AIs.

(‘Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism’, 190)

This chapter traces these systems using the concept of autopoiesis, a definition of life that allows for the inclusion of non-human and non-biological entities, with implications for a posthuman understanding of ontology. Gibson refers to these living systems as ‘gestalt’, highlighting the importance of their relationality over their material substance, and I explore this through examining the role of the matrix, the zaibatsus (the global corporations that rule the geopolitics of Gibson’s world), and the media in the Sprawl trilogy. I also show how viewing identity as gestalt through the concept of autopoiesis complicates the ontology of human individuals, emphasising their interdependence with their environments. Finally, I take a closer look at style in the novels to show that the use of visual imagery in Gibson’s debut trilogy reflects this posthuman content at the level of form.

Autopoiesis

In the Sprawl trilogy, living systems are represented as ‘autopoietic’, a term which literally means ‘self-creation’. Autopoiesis is a way of defining life and cognition that was born from the field of systems theory and cybernetics. For the field of cybernetics, the Macy Conferences on cybernetics (1946–1953) were a defining moment for the discipline. Part of a wider programme of conferences, the Macy Conferences on cybernetics were an opportunity for cybernetics to develop in a truly interdisciplinary fashion, an innovative crucible for inspiring new academic approaches. By bringing together an interest in communication across living and non-living systems in an ambitious, interdisciplinary environment, the conferences almost inevitably produced new ideas about the nature of cognition. Heinz von Foerster, a key participant in the conferences, sought to define cognition in terms of relationality in order to think about living systems through the new science of cybernetics. Cybernetics sought to take a gestalt approach to social and biological systems through the privileging of relations over components. This relational approach meant that cognition could be thought of as separate from the living system and its organic body. Rather than defining cognition as emergent from organic structures such as a brain and nervous system, cybernetics began to view it as a capability that need not be confined to the human, or even the organic. Von Foerster’s criteria for cognition are as follows:

1. the faculty to perceive
2. the faculty to remember
3. the faculty to infer
4. the faculty to learn
5. the faculty to evaluate
6. the faculty to communicate
7. the faculty to move

(Müller and von Foerster, 30)

Von Foerster makes it clear that these seven characteristics must themselves be considered using a holistic, gestalt approach, with the onus placed on their emergent relationships with one another rather than on their status as ‘components’ of cognition:

If one wishes to isolate these faculties functionally, one is doomed to fail. Consequently, if the mechanisms that are responsible for any of these faculties are to be discovered, then the totality of cognitive processes must be considered. If one of these seven faculties is omitted, the system is devoid of cognition.

(29–30)

The approach taken by von Foerster and other cybernetics pioneers Warren MacCulloch and Norbert Wiener was to be hugely influential for Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela as they began to develop a cybernetic approach to biology, an approach they called ‘autopoiesis’. Maturana and Varela combined the insights they gleaned from von Foerster and the wider field of cybernetics with those of phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty who was, in turn, inspired by gestalt theory. Merleau-Ponty references gestalt psychology’s theories throughout his 1945 treatise Phenomenology and Perception and begins to sound like a posthuman cyberspace cowboy as he recognises relationality as key to human being in the world: ‘we witness every minute the miracle of related experience, and yet nobody knows better than we do how this miracle is worked, for we are ourselves this network of relationships’ (xxiii). Varela credits European phenomenology as a key influence in the development of autopoiesis reading Merleau-Ponty alongside Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Of his foray into phenomenology Varela wrote, ‘For the first time I seemed to find in these authors a preoccupation with the range of lived experience which I consider fundamental’ (1996: 409). From these fields of phenomenology and cybernetics, Maturana and Varela developed a relational definition of biology which aimed to explain life and the living system, as well as cognition.

In 1973, Maturana and Varela coined the term ‘autopoiesis’ to capture their new approach, creating a neologism so they could use ‘a word without history’ (xvii) capable of describing the self-making that the biologists observed in autonomous living systems. Previous definitions of life had relied on various biological parameters of the organism, normally focusing on one system; for example, life could be defined by the ability to reproduce, thereby defined by its reproductive system. Alternatively, life could be associated with respiration and associated with the respiratory system. With their theory of autopoiesis, Maturana and Varela began to develop a gestalt approach, a relational approach that recognised that the whole was greater than the sum of its parts:

But if the organism is a unity, in what sense are its component properties its parts? The organismic approach does not answer this question, it merely restates it by insisting that there are elements of organization that subordinate each part to the whole and make the organism a unity.

(5–6)

Maturana and Varela overcome these difficulties by defining living systems by the relations, the organisation, that allows the system to function. They find this organisation to be circular, reflexive and self-producing. The whole is defined with reference to the parts and the parts are defined with relation to the functioning of the whole, as Maturana and Varela write that the parts ‘are those whose synthesis or maintenance [the living system] secures in a manner such that the product of their functioning is the same functioning organization that produces them’ (9). Maturana and Varela, taking their lead from cybernetic definitions of cognition like von Foerster’s, explicitly link autopoiesis to cognition itself: ‘Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition’ (13). This definition of life and of cognition takes the emphasis away from the ‘natural’, organic body in defining life and experience of the world.

Autopoiesis and posthumanism

The emphasis on relationality over the specifics of embodiment that autopoiesis promotes makes it attractive to posthumanist approaches as it takes the focus away from anthropocentric models. Rather than defining the living system as a ‘natural’ organic body, autopoiesis defines life as a pattern of organisation that stands out against a background of randomness. This means that life is not necessarily restricted to the human and other animals, but could potentially encompass artificial intelligence. The predominance of the binary between pattern and randomness is identified by N. Katherine Hayles as one of the defining characteristics of the information age, replacing the importance of the presence/absence binary identified by structuralist and poststructuralist thought as constitutive of society. Hayles even associates the rise of the information society with the rise of deconstruction:

the dialectic between absence and presence came clearly into focus because it was already being displaced as a cultural presupposition by randomness and pattern. Presence and absence were forced into visibility, so to speak, because they were already losing their constitutive power to form the ground for discourse, becoming instead discourse’s subject. In this sense deconstruction is the child of an information age, formulating its theories from strata pushed upward by the emerging substrata beneath.

(72)

Hayles connects this shift from presence/absence to pattern/randomness to the era when randomness ‘was reconceptualised in scientific fields so that it is not mere gibberish but a productive force essential to the evolution of complex systems’ (72). By privileging the pattern/randomness binary at the expense of the presence/absence binary Hayles positions posthumanism as a replacement, or a development of deconstruction; posthumanism is better able to conceptualise pattern/randomness, moving away from presence/absence.

However, others have sought to base their analysis on a combination of the two, rather than the departure that Hayles suggests. In What is Posthumanism? (2010), Cary Wolfe separates Hayles’s account of posthumanism into a ‘posthumanism’ based in deconstruction and systems theory and a ‘transhumanism’ (or ‘bad posthumanism’ [xvii]) that aims to escape embodiment and to maintain the normative human exceptionalism that has characterised the humanist era:

posthumanism in my sense isn’t posthuman at all – in the sense of being ‘after’ our embodiment has been transcended – but is only posthumanist, in the sense that it opposes the fantasies of disembodiment and autonomy, inherited from humanism itself, that Hayles rightly criticizes.

(xv)

Wolfe responds to Hayles’s concern that posthumanism may reinstate the ‘fantasies of disembodiment’ found in humanism rather than offer a truly radical future for subjectivity through arguing that deconstruction is complementary to autopoietic systems theory, allowing for multiple binaries to exist. In gestalt literary criticism, binaries are characterised as constitutive and interdependent rather than antagonistic, as in Wolfe’s analysis. Like the Rubin’s vase image discussed in the Introduction, the two sides define each other, and the traits of human perception highlighted by the gestalt psychologists – the figure/ground distinction and the propensity to see repetition, similarity, and pattern – are privileged in the understanding of life. I adopt Wolfe’s definition of posthumanism as most useful to a project that seeks to situate the subject as embedded in its environment and embodied through the locus of its point of view. As a gestalt approach highlights the importance of perception, thereby locating the subj...