Chapter 4

Neuromancer

In the loneliness of airports/ I exhale… Heiner Müller. The Hamletmachine. Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag, 1977 (45)

Case awoke from a dream of airports, of Molly’s dark leathers moving ahead of him through the concourses of Narita, Schipol, Orly… William Gibson. Neuromancer. NY: Ace Books, 1984 (43)

One of the most intriguing contradictions of the 1980s information culture was the fact that two of its most innovative artists – playwright Heiner Müller and novelist William Gibson – were located not in the beating heart of Silicon Valley, downtown Tokyo or metropolitan Frankfurt, but in the subaltern zones of East Germany and Vancouver, Canada, two semi-peripheries of the Cold War world-system which later mutated into frontier zones of the European Union and the Pacific Rim, respectively. As a resident of East Germany, a Second World zone literally walled off from the multinational consumer culture by its one-party state, Müller’s greatest theatrical works display what might be called an aesthetics of export-processing resistance – that is to say, they splice a long-running tradition of politicized and deeply subversive Eastern European media productions (Polish filmmakers Andrzej Wajda and Krystof Kieslowski, Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, and countless others) into a variety of multinational forms.

            The result was a multinational Eurotheater capable of playing on both sides of the Berlin Wall, simultaneously. Müller’s 1977 Hamletmachine, to take only the most prominent example, was both the video play-by-play for the Velvet revolutions of 1989-91, as well as the tocsin of the subsequent resistance movements to neoliberalism throughout the core regions of the EU in the 1990s. In the more heavily mediatized zone of Canada, on the other hand, the sheer ubiquity of an imported US consumerism and the direct onslaught of neo-conservativism fostered a rather different cultural dialectic. Gibson’s ingenious response was to outflank the deeply conservative media culture of the day on its own grounds, by mobilizing the mediatic tropes of the East Asian region – at that point, still an industrial semi-periphery vis-à-vis the US, and not yet a metropole in its own right – against the hegemonic Thatcherite aesthetics of the early 1980s, epitomized by James Cameron’s The Terminator and Aliens.

In the specific field of the information culture, Gibson’s greatest achievement was picking up where Burroughs left off, by transforming the Cold War aerospace imaginary mapped out by Burroughs (pilot K9) into the plebian spaces of multinational capital (the airports of Tokyo, Amsterdam, and Paris quoted above). What might be called the Boeing sublime, a.k.a. the pilot’s movement through militarized airspace, is upstaged by the Airbus materialism of the rush of individual subjects through a congested, multinational crowd-space. This crowd-space is not necessarily limited to the urban shopping mall or corporate atrium, but includes anything from globe-hopping business professionals and tourists to hitchhikers and refugees, something subtly relayed in Müller’s magnificent text as the constellation of the airport with the fragments of the disposable snapshot or Polaroid. Travel-time becomes image-space, in a gesture which powerfully anticipates Wong Kar-Wai’s 1994 Chungking Express, a film which recuperated Hong Kong’s quasi-national airspace – grainy images of model airplanes and model stewardesses – from the standpoint of the multinational music video (this is confirmed by the closing credits of this film, a deliciously self-referential cover of the Cranberries, a band hailing from quite another former British colony turned Information Age economic success story: Ireland!).

Gibson’s own text, on the other hand, has its closest mediatic analogue in John Woo’s supercharged Hong Kong action thrillers, which transformed the office blocks, apartments and warehouses of postmodern Hong Kong into the neon datascape of the 3D videogame. One of the most astonishing features of Neuromancer is, indeed, its extraordinary ear for the nonstop rhythms, mediatic cadences and informatic codes of the multinational era, which implies an equivalent sensitivity to the local or neo-national versions of all these things. From the standpoint of form, Neuromancer is a global hack into the cultural databanks of Cold War nationalism, and the authentic realization of Fredric Jameson’s clarion call for an aesthetics of cognitive mapping or global cultural praxis. This call is well worth citing in full:

Rather, I want to suggest that our faulty representations of some immense communicational and computer network are themselves but a distorted figuration of something even deeper, namely, the whole world system of a present-day multinational capitalism. The technology of contemporary society is therefore mesmerizing and fascinating not so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole new decentered global network of the third stage of capital itself. This is a figural process presently best observed in a whole mode of contemporary entertainment literature – one is tempted to characterize it as ‘high-tech paranoia’ – in which the circuits and networks of some putative global computer hookup are narratively mobilized by labyrinthine conspiracies of deadly interlocking and competing information agencies in a complexity often beyond the capacity of the normal reading mind. Yet conspiracy theory (and its garish narrative manifestations) must be seen as a degraded attempt – through the figuration of advanced technology – to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system. It is in terms of that enormous and threatening, yet only dimly perceivable, other reality of economic and social institutions that, in my opinion, the postmodern sublime can alone be adequately theorized.¹

What Gibson gives us, as we shall see, are the means by which we can think that totality, navigate its networks, and analyze its sublime. Neuromancer is not a single hacking run, but rather a whole series of hacks into various interlocking financial, economic and cultural databanks – what amounts, in effect, to an unprecedented burn on the total system, engineered by a new kind of collective resistance.

This strategy poses a number of technical challenges for the reader, not the least of which is the dazzling narrative simplicity of Gibson’s text, which is really the flip side of an unrivaled density. First-time readers, in particular, are often completely taken in by the text’s user-friendly interface, and blaze through the novel in a couple of hours. A closer reading is rewarded with unexpectedly sharp details, surprising colorations of meaning, motifs etched with nanometrical precision, which gradually form vast multinational constellations. This precision is not metaphorical. Neuromancer popularized, among other things, the very term “cyberspace”, search engines (the Flatline), notebook computers (the Ono-Sendai) and even smart cards (electronic credit chips as well as the “microsofts” which, in Gibson’s story, are not software programs, but biocompatible chip-implants), decades before these things became daily realities.² Something similar applies to the plot, which transforms the narrative superstructures of the detective story, the murder-mystery, the action-thriller, the sci-fi blockbuster, the reggae dub, the horror film and the Hong Kong video into something new.

It is therefore the ultimate irony to discover that what makes Neuromancer one of the transcendental works of art of the late 20^th century is not, after all, its legendary acumen with technology, but its stubborn resistance to such. Over and over again, Gibson will insist that, to paraphrase Adorno, the totality precedes the particular, i.e. that the social matrix driving the technology is far more important than any given piece of technology or consumer therein. What makes this possible is the transformation of the comparatively unwieldy discursive structures of Burroughs’ Nova Express, stitched together by the notorious telegraphic hyphens, into nimble informatic registers: biochemistry accedes to genetic engineering, electronics to software, and the cyborg to the hacker. The technological becomes the political, while the political becomes the corporeal.³ This corporeality is not, however, oriented towards a national or Cold War body politic, but is derived out of a new type of multinational code. Witness this potted history of the Internet, which is Gibson’s first coherent attempt to grapple with the problem of how to represent the unrepresentable domain of cyberspace:

‘The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,’ said the voice-over, ‘in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks.’ On the Sony, a two-dimensional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spacial possibilities of logarithmic spirals; cold blue military footage burned through, lab animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire control circuits of tanks and war planes. ‘Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…’⁴

Not the technical glitches of the computer system, but the cultural dissonances of the human system are at issue here: cold blue military footage, lab animals, warplanes and tanks, a two-dimensional videogame, and fractal fern-patterns are all subsumed under the patterns of city lights viewed from an airplane window, i.e. the civilian retake of a heavily militarized aerospace sublime. This description turns out to be an excerpt from a children’s show about the matrix, replayed on Case’s Hosaka computer, a broad hint at one other significant source of visual material, namely the North American children’s TV programs of the 1970s (the spectrum from Sesame Street to Warner Brothers cartoons). It should be emphasized that none of these materials are drawn from the hegemonic visual forms of the 1970s, e.g. the stadium-concert special effects of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or the aerospace sublime of Star Wars. In contrast to the classic modernist artists, Gibson does not simply parody or quote certain aspects of mainstream mass-culture – in the context of the 1970s, this would include everything from the disaster film to the post-Watergate paranoid narrative, and from the rockumentary to the special effects-soaked sci-fi thriller. Rather, Gibson turns the the consumer culture into its own worst enemy: where the great modernist works subverted styles, their multinational successors subvert entire mediatic genres. Thus the attack on Sense/Net reprises punk rock’s ferocious assault on the recording industry, Molly’s simstim rig (the prescient anticipation of the webcam) negates the Hollywood action thriller, and even Case’s dream-contact with the artificial intelligences or AIs negates the mainstream paranoid thriller and big-budget sci-fi spectacular.

This sheds an illuminating light on Jameson’s classic definition of postmodernism as the practice of pastiche rather than parody, i.e. a multiplicity of styles or profusion of dead masks, as opposed to the avant-garde logic of the modernisms, which sought to carve out semi-autonomous or internationalized spaces within a larger monopoly-national framework. Jameson has long noted that these spaces were more than just an allergic reaction to commercializing pressures of the culture-industry, but also registered the need for new forms of specialization in the division of aesthetic labor (something visible in the evolution of auteur cinema vis-à-vis the studio system, or the modernist jazz ensemble vis-à-vis the music industry). Adorno was the first to point out that the great modernist works were as incommensurable with each other as with the mass-culture they reacted against: one cannot really envision Beckett’s universe coexisting with Genet’s, for example, nor the Kurosawa spectacular side-by-side with the Hitchcock thriller. This is true even within a given artist’s own canon; each of the various chapters of Joyce’s Ulysses, as well as the successive compositional innovations of Coltrane’s free jazz period, stage their claim to aesthetic autonomy on the radical break with what came before. Multinational aesthetics, however, does not operate on the modernist logic of positions or situations, set within a specific national or international aesthetic space, but relies instead on highly mobile models or templates which replicate, virus-style, across a multinational array of cultural spaces and platforms.

Gibson’s text overflows with such templates, which have the same general function as the cut-up technique in Burroughs, i.e. reorganize an otherwise disparate or unwieldy range of national, neo-national and international cultural materials into a global icon or tag. The result is very much like the earliest graphical operating systems, which replaced language-based command lines with icons or graphical symbols. Probably the most obvious example here is Case, whose name signals the bland, platinum-grey shells which house the vast majority of computer hardware. Similarly, Molly, the razor-girl bodyguard, echoes the gangster moll; Armitage, a.k.a. Corto, the ex-Special Forces veteran now working for Wintermute, turns out to be an anagram for a cancelled-out or destroyed Midwestern identity (even the name suggests something between a shady arms dealer and a Wall Street arbitrageur); while the Dixie Flatline, the recorded construct of deceased hacker McCoy Pauley, symbolizes the digital service economy of the New South (Atlanta, Pauley’s home turf, was the spawning-grounds for Coke as well as CNN).⁵

These tags are not limited to exclusively North American cultural zones, but can access a wide range of multinational materials, as with the microsofts or silicon chips which users slot directly into their specially-adapted neural cortexes, signifying the fusion of informatic and biologic technologies. It’s worth stressing that Gibson had absolutely no idea that the Microsoft corporation even existed at that point. In various interviews, Gibson noted that he has no formal programming experience, and did not even own a personal computer in 1983: the ultimate hacker novel was written on a low-tech typewriter. Revealingly, Gibson’s initial inspiration for the matrix came when he was watching teenagers playing the arcade videogames of the early 1980s.[Footnote this] In fact, Gibson simply took the two most prevalent linguistic symbols of the information revolution, the “microcomputer” and “software”, and streamlined the result into a single user-friendly icon. Similar strategies are responsible for most of the memorable inventions of the text, e.g. “cyberspace” (cybernetics plus aerospace), the cyberspace “deck” (combining keyboards, joysticks and videogame consoles), “derm” (for dermatological skin-patches), and “vat” (for the artificial life-support systems in which body parts are grown).

Things start to get really interesting, however, when we move from the realm of multinational form to content. Gibson’s first move here is to recode the shift from corporate mainframes to university-based minicomputers and thence to personal microcomputers from the standpoint of a universal social mediation, rather than technology per se. That is, where mainstream narratives generally limit themselves to a utopian (or dystopian) account of the evolution of a specific hardware system, chip design, software language or what have you, Gibson locates all these things within some larger marketplace of data production, dissemination and consumption: the demesne, in short, of the information commodity. Each informatic commodity is tracked down, detective-style, back to its corresponding social and political superstructure, ranging from the Iron Triangle and covert-ops of the military-industrial complex, to the simstim broadcasts and orbital vacation resorts of global entertainment and media firms, all the way to the corporate security agencies, rentier overlords, AIs and Turing Registry agents battling for ultimate control of the matrix.

One of the most stunning examples of the power of this strategy is Gibson’s invention of the term “ice” to describe the otherwise impalpable corporate security and anti-virus programs of the matrix, a term which is later broadened to include the cryogenic freezer systems which store living creatures in a state of suspended animation (they are said to be “on ice”) – a properly neocolonial constellation between bodies of corporate data and human bodies which is deeply unflattering, to say the least, to the corporations in question. Second, the remaining monopoly-national registers still faintly visible in William Burroughs’ work (progressive nationalisms which coexist side-by-side with the remnants of the Hollywood studio system, rather like outdated film reels stacked up next to televisions, or scratchy radio broadcasts piped over telecommunication networks) are replaced by a compact, iridiscent spectrum of aesthetic materials, arranged in a gradient from what we’ll call the neo-national to the multinational. It should be emphasized here that the neo-national is not delimited to the progressive nationalisms of the Third World, but can encompass everything from the politically ambiguous semi-peripheral nationalisms of the Second World, a.k.a. Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, as well as retrograde nationalisms within the industrialized countries themselves. In like manner, the multinational is hardly limited to Anglo-American consumerism, but encompasses the consumer and business cultures of the European Union and the East Asian region.

Informatic form and multinational content converge not, as one might expect, in a specific set of technologies, but in a series of global spaces located within neo-national zones of various kinds, e.g. the Ninsei enclave of Chiba City, an industrial exurb of Tokyo; Sense/Net’s Manhattan headquarters, located in the Sprawl; and finally the Villa Straylight, the Tessier-Ashpool family residence in Freeside. Intriguingly, each of these spaces is endowed with its own characteristic mode of visual aesthetics, ranging from the holographic arcade videogames of Ninsei to the pre-recorded skies of Freeside. The effect is to press a set of mediatic forms into the service of a technologically-reproducible Nature or set of natural bodies, as with this fascinating description of Chiba’s docks:

Now he slept in the cheapest coffins, the ones nearest the port, beneath the quartz-halogen floods that lit the docks all night like vast stages; where you couldn’t see the lights of Tokyo for the glare of the television sky, not even the towering hologram logo of the Fuji Electric Company, and Tokyo Bay was a black expanse where gulls wheeled above drifting shoals of white styrofoam. Behind the port lay the city, factory domes dominated by the vast cubes of corporate arcologies. Port and city were divided by a narrow borderland of older streets, an area with no official name. Night City, with Ninsei at its heart. By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless, the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned silver sky.⁶

This is a dead ringer for the arcade videogame aesthetics of the early 1980s, which replaced the cinematic vista or panorama with greatly simplified graphical codes. The dock-lights of the port, the circular factory domes, and the silhouettes of the giant office-towers function like the overlapping tiers of arcade-style backgrounds, with the transcendental hologram of Fuji Electric helpfully standing in for the videogame’s opening tag or title sequence.⁷ All this is reconfirmed somewhat later, in a scene where Case briefly reminisces about his former girlfriend, Linda Lee, which hinges not on the videoscreen itself but its curious refraction from Linda’s body (“…her face bathed in restless laser light, features reduced to a code: her cheekbones flaring scarlet as Wizard’s Castle burned, forehead drenched with azure when Munich fell to the Tank War, mouth touched with hot gold as a gliding cursor struck sparks from the wall of a skyscraper canyon”).⁸ We will have more to say about this poignant conjunction of video ghosts and the laser-sculpted body somewhat later, but for now it should be emphasized that Gibson neither hides nor glosses the internalized violence inscribed in Linda’s body (she is a drug addict in the final throes of addiction, who is killed by gangsters in the course of the story), but links this to the external violence done to nature, visible in the polluted bay and the toxic sky. The logical antipodes of the drug addict and ravaged ecosphere are the street hustlers and export commodities of Chiba City, neatly underlined by Case’s “coffin” or miniaturized hotel room, and the freight containers of the docks, respectively: the flesh-commodities housed by the former ironically echo the export-commodities encased in the latter.

Chiba City, of course, is clearly a factory-space or zone of production, suggesting that we are primarily dealing with codes of production rather than codes of distribution or consumption. These latter are concentrated in the commercial spaces of the Sprawl, and it’s significant that Gibson will portray these not as doomed, extinct wastelands but as complex ecologies of technology, endowed with a genuinely utopian moment (“Summer in the Sprawl, the mall crowds swaying like windblown grass, a field of flesh shot through with sudden eddies of need and gratification…”).⁹ Such ecological motifs culminate in the entrance to the Finn’s bunker beneath Metro Holographix in Manhattan, wherein the cast-off materials and excess junk of the consumer culture are transformed by a nascent aesthetic of recycling or sampling into something of unexpected beauty (“Case felt the stuff had grown somehow during their absence. Or else it seemed that it was changing subtly, cooking itself down under the pressure of time, silent invisible flakes settling to form a mulch, a crystalline essence of discarded technology, flowering secretly in the Sprawl’s waste places.”).¹⁰ The moment recalls to mind the great line of the Sex Pistols in God Save the Queen, to the effect that “we’re the flowers in the dustbin”, only where the Pistols are referring to the multi-cultural proletariat of London, Case and Molly are greeted at that point by an African-American child with transistors woven into her hair – a clear nod in the direction of an emergent hip hop culture. By contrast, the mainstream culture of the Sprawl is predicated not on the recycling of physical artifacts but on the exchange and consumption of data:

Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis.

Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta…¹¹

Here the modernist urban grid or cityscape is reconfigured with the irregular glass shells of industrial parks, office towers and research complexes, their postmodern exteriors gleaming like advertising icons imprinted on the modernist street map or mass transit network. What sticks out like a sore thumb here is, of course, the reference to the map going nova, a cosmological motif which broadcasts a violent release of kinetic energies (that of the car wreck, plane crash or space accident) as opposed to the nonvisual abstraction of the software crash or bug: the aesthetics of Skylab rather than the Apple II. The map in question is most likely a scansion of the false-color ground images typical of the earliest weather satellites, i.e. a visual form which is no longer a classified Cold War document but not yet a downloadable file on the NASA website. This sheds light on one of the most interesting features of cyberspace, namely the fact that it is nowhere directly visible, but must be intuited through neural impulses; cyberspace is experienced as a set of corporeal rather than visual registers. Put another way, the matrix is predicated not on the fusion of the mass mediatic representation with the data it is meant to represent, but on the complete sundering of the two. Gibson’s first coherent description of cyberspace begins with Case symbolically closing his eyes and rapidly cycling through a sequence of abstract references to various mass-cultural visual tropes, as opposed to examples of these tropes themselves:

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

             Please, he prayed, now –

             A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.

             Now –

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

             And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye, opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.¹²

The matrix is not a set of two-dimensional images, but rather a vast 3D data-space, overrun by a multinational profusion of forms: fluorescent neon, the folded paper shapes of origami, the spatial grid of the chessboard, and the Enlightenment symbols of the inner eye and the pyramid (imprinted on the back of each US one dollar bill, above the Novus Ordo Seclorum banner). It’s also important to note that the mandala is not really the equivalent of the miniaturized Macintosh icon or Microsoft banner stamped on one’s startup screen, but is rather a temporal-kinetic symbol, signifying the time spent powering up or otherwise accessing an electronic interface of some kind (dialing a phone number, booting up a computer, slotting a quarter into an arcade game or vending machine, etc.). But what truly boggles the mind is what Case actually sees in cyberspace: first, the sprawling terraces of a power utility, reminiscent of EU utilities powerhouses Vivendi and E.On; far in the background, the military communication, control and intelligence subsystems which spawned the basic architecture of the Internet back in the late 1960s; and finally, right in the foreground, the explicitly commercial space of the Mitsubishi Bank of America.

Mitsubishi is not just another Japanese bank. It is the financial core of the mighty Mitsubishi business group or keiretsu (the original Japanese word is actually an adjective, but it will be used here as a noun). Not the least of Neuromancer’s achievements is its trail-blazing exegesis of the keiretsu, which the text refers to somewhat inaccurately as “zaibatsu”, a term which actually refers to the prewar Japanese family-run conglomerates such as Mitsui and Sumitomo. The zaibatsu were broken up by the American occupation authorities, and what emerged in their stead were loose-knit alliances of companies which gradually mutated into vast corporate networks, grouped around a financial center of some sort – generally a main or house bank, a central insurance firm, and a trading house (soga shosha). This structure was not the product of a conscious managerial strategy, but the pragmatic result of the exigencies of sheer survival, i.e. the necessity to collectively rebuild from the devastation of WW II, during a socio-economic juncture when functioning capital markets barely existed. It should be stressed that the keiretsu are not US-style conglomerates or monopolies; no central committee or board of directors sets policy for the entire Mitsubishi group, for example. Rather, daily management is highly decentralized, and the emphasis is on group cooperation and long-term cohesion, all paced by the most ferocious competition with the individual firms of other keiretsu and overseas competitors. As a rule, each group member would buy a small number of share in other group members, the result being a highly dispersed but extraordinarily stable structure of long-term, interlocking shareholdings, which protected group members from hostile takeovers and sudden market downturns and gave individual firms privileged access to the long-term credit facilities of the entire group. It also allowed group members to plan and invest in long-term projects, and concentrate on customer quality and market share instead of short-term profit margins or speculative stock market returns.¹³

The Mitsubishi group, for example, encompasses the Mitsubishi Corporation (a trading firm), Meiji Mutual Life Insurance, Mitsubishi Motors, Mitsubishi Electric, and many others besides. With financial assets of close to 1 trillion euros and revenues of approximately 230 billion euros, the Mitsubishi keiretsu is bigger than most of the countries on this planet, and is a global creditor to the tune of some 650 billion euros (assuming an exchange rate of 122 yen per euro). Here are the largest interlocks of the Mitsubishi group, as of 2001:      

Table 1. Mitsubishi Financial Links, 2001 (Data: Japan Company Handbook Fall 2001)

Table 2. Mitsubishi Industrial Links, 2001 (Data: Japan Company Handbook Fall 2001)