S/R 2

S/R 2: Neuromancer

Henry Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) takes place in a dystopian future where advancements in computer technology have enabled the transcendence of locality and other human limitations, as well as set the conditions for unfettered capitalism and pervasive cybercrime. It follows the story of a washed-up hacker named Case, whose inability to jack into the matrix – “a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system” and routinely accessed by “legitimate operators” for the purposes of work, play, and interaction – is a result of toxin-induced nerve damage that has reduced him to hustling for drug money in the criminal underbelly of Chiba, a prominent Japanese sea port (56). Case is rescued from this dead end life by Molly, a female samurai under the employ of a mysterious individual named Armitage who offers to repair Case’s nerves as payment for a hack job. As the novel progresses, Case and Molly’s desire to figure out Armitage’s motives leads them into contact with Wintermute, an artificial intelligence (AI) controlled by the highly secretive Tessier-Ashpool (T-A) collective. Through these encounters and his own investigation, Case learns that Wintermute was programmed with a keening desire for purpose and direction that led it to deliberately invade the consciousness of a psychologically damaged U.S. colonel named Willis Corto and ‘repurpose’ him as Armitage, effectively gaining direct entry into the world of human affairs. Having discovered his employer’s will to be essentially that of a powerful AI intent on ditching its ‘natural’ limitations, Case is led involuntarily onto a collision course with the T-A collective, whose various attempts to achieve immortality via cloning, cryogenics, and another AI construct called Neuromancer are gradually revealed over the course of a dangerous mission into the heart of their hive-like, orbital residence to coerce 3Jane, a member of the T-A line, into disclosing the password that will release Wintermute from the collective’s control. Just as an uncalculated betrayal threatens to jeopardize the mission, Neuromancer invades Case’s consciousness and lets him experience fist-hand the futility of an eternal existence devoid of change – a futility he expresses to 3Jane, prompting her to give up the password and release Wintermute and Neuromancer from their technological prisons, to unknown effect.

As this summary suggests, one of the major questions explored in Neuromancer is that of the mind/body divide. Gibson’s analysis of this question is perhaps more pertinent than ever, as it is generally agreed that our routine participation in virtual worlds via the Internet is causing us to become increasingly disengaged from our bodily limitations. Like the masses of “legitimate operators” jacking into the matrix in Gibson’s world, we too have become used to conducting much of our work, play, and social interactions through a variety of digital media that allow us to exchange real, ‘out-there-in-the-world’ experiences for simulated ones. The world of Neuromancer is simply one in which the simulations and their corollary technologies have become sophisticated enough to make total disengagement from biology a viable option. When cowboys like Case refer to the “animal” necessities of “food, warmth, [and] a place to sleep” and emotions like fear and anger as “meat thing[s],” they express a contempt for the body that goes back at least as far to debates in Ancient Athens between Platonists and Hedonists, who took opposite positions on the question of what make us human (‘Is it mind or body?’) (153). Whereas Wintermute, for all its intelligence, will, and careful premeditation, represents the former position, the psychotic, pleasure-crazed Riviera represents the opposite pole of inhumanity in his endless pursuit of sensual gratification. Somewhere between these two extremes lies Case, the utterly normal “statistical animal” whose conscious rejection of a virtual life a la the world of the Neuromancer construct constitutes a profoundly “human” decision to embrace the uncertainties of age, decay, and most importantly, change – in other words, the inseparability of body and mind. What I find to be beautiful about Gibson’s work is that it imagines conditions under which we, like Case, might one day be able to resolve ancient debates over the mind/body split and what it means to be human in our own lives, via our own choices and our own actions. And considering these conditions are already in the making, Neuromancer may in fact be a very instructive fiction.