John Fekete
The Post-Liberal Mind/Body, Postmodern
Fiction, and the Case of Cyberpunk SF
Larry McCaffery, ed. Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and
Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham, NC, and London: Duke UP, 1991.
xvii+387. $49.95 cloth, $17.95 paper.
We see through eyeglasses and contacts; we eat with dentures. We remove cataracts and
replace the lenses. We insert video cameras inside our bodies to aid in "keyhole"
surgery; we remove our gall bladders and throw them away. We replace our hearts, kidneys,
and livers with other organs: human, baboon, or manufactured. By diet or surgery, we
change the shapes of our breasts, faces, torsos. We transform inoperable brain tumors
genetically into things we can destroy chemically. We abort fetuses, and create new life in
vitro. And these are just the medical interventions. We also time-shift our
simulation programming on television, put disembodied interlocutors on hold on our
telephones, and post messages in electronic space through our computer modems. We jog
through our cities acoustically jacked into our Walkmans.
We live through our technologies, as McLuhan says, mythically and in depth, everywhere
and every when. Technologies are us. But we keep under control our anxieties about how
close to our bodies and inner lives our technologies have gotten by keeping fragmented our
awareness of an amplified new interface between machinery and the human body. By the same
token, we also keep reduced and under control our sense of the transformative or
transgressive technological potentials available for our minds and bodies. Nevertheless,
many of us are still uneasy even with answering machines, and many of our most heated
social debates and control initiatives have increasingly to do with technological
interventions into our minds and bodies: pharmaceuticals, abortion, pornography, film and
video, youth music, electronic games, programming: sex, drugs, rock and roll, and
software.
Cyberpunk SF in the 1980s made a striking vision out of the tendency in our culture to
program our mental lives and to mutate our bodies--out of the spreading designer
phenomenon whose extrapolation is often described as body invasion (prosthetics, implants,
genetics) and mind invasion (neurochemistry, neurosurgery, brain-computer interface,
artificial intelligence). Most of us spend our time at work, in shopping malls, or at home
on the telephone or in front of the video screen, continuing to process reality through
ego-identity and personality, and absorbing the new technical options on an ad-hoc basis
into personal style. But when the technological interface is foregrounded, in the way that
SF typically foregrounds a whole novel environment, then it can become much more striking,
engaging, and unsettling. As an environment, technology can be fearsome, satisfying,
sublime, responsive, or enigmatic--a second nature that is ready made, which solicits our
constant response, and which, because it is made, can be potentially remade over
and over again.
Cyberpunk SF was not the first SF writing to incorporate technological mediations of
mind and body. A long line from Mary Shelley to Shepherd Mead in the 1950s, David Compton
and Philip Dick in the 1960s, and, most prominently and influentially, John Brunner,
Joanna Russ, and Sam Delany in the 1970s, though mainly unacknowledged in cyberpunk
discussions, has experimented successfully with the ingredients of cyberpunk, including
particularly the biology/electronics interactions. Nor can cyberpunk SF claim to be the
first fiction of an underground or counterculture, which latter has consistently produced
a steady stream of "dangerous visions" for a quarter of a century (including Michael
Moorcock, J.G. Ballard, Norman Spinrad, and Marge Piercy), both in England and in the US,
to name only two obvious sites, and not only inside the SF genre but also outside, in
state-of-the art "mainstream" fiction, from Richard Brautigan and Thomas Pynchon to Ann
Beattie, Kathy Acker, and William Vollmann, and a range of writings based in the
differentials of ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, or other cultural articulations. It
also seems exaggerated to describe cyberpunk SF as "the apotheosis of postmodernism," as
do Istvan Csicsery-Ronay (disapproving of its amnesia) and Larry McCaffery (approving of
it as "mirror"), both here (182) and in the cyberpunk issue of the Mississippi
Review (47/48:8, 266, 1988). Such characterizations, not only reduce the feature
wealth of both cyberpunk and postmodernism, but also dilute cyberpunk SF's normal
specificity (and thus its specific novelty and effects) as a transitional literary form.
The cyberpunk phenomenon of the 1980s, including the label "cyberpunk" itself, which
at this juncture seems likely to endure, became prominent, not only because of good
marketing (by Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, Takayuki Tatsumi, McCaffery, and others), but
also because in some way it touched a nerve. Our culture presents itself as being on the
threshold of a major mutation of the liberal mind/body system of categories. The
figuration of such a possibility as an everyday fact of life in a near-future projection
makes for a novel and original literary subgrouping--especially as this is elaborated, in
its current early forms, from the vantage of the lower or lowest social strata (extending
upward from there, at least by implication, to the highest economic and status levels of
global cartelization and symbolization). Previous approaches to this complex, like Frankenstein,
Asimov's robotics, or even Russ's Whileawayan induction-helmet cybernetics, have tended to
figure the technological interface as either a narrative singularity (however powerful) in
the world of the liberal mind/body, or as a narrative setting of no direct consequence for
the (chiefly higher-level and otherwise consequential) liberal actants.
Cyberpunk, diverging from the prevailing previous accounts of technological anxiety,
pro or con, has found a way to implode the traditional SF theme par excellence
and to glory in a vision of the banality of the techno-human symbiosis in the
post-liberal mind/body, from Gibson's constructs to Pat Cadigan's franchised personalities
and synners. "Je est l'autre," wrote Rimbaud, an early punk (if pre-cyber) poet; in
cyberpunk SF we become others not only for-others but also for-ourselves. At least in
principle. Whether cyberpunk poetics has delivered or can deliver on this post-liberal,
deconstructive, narratological principle, while producing texts that are narratively or
conceptually effective, is another question that remains for a detailed critical
discussion that is so far non-existent.
Meanwhile, the relatively modest proposition that cyberpunk SF can be seen as
"one particularly intriguing example of the 'postmodernization' of SF" (McCaffery,
"Introduction" 11) is both reasonable and a reasonable justification for the collection
of art and commentary in the current volume. The framing difficulty of the text, however,
is that McCaffery cannot make up his mind whether he wants to talk about literature or
instead to make Significant Statements about Society. His approach to the postmodern is by
way of technology, which is a narrative operator in the fiction and an economic and
sensory/ideological operator in the society (mostly elided by McCaffery under the rubric
"culture"). But McCaffery announces simultaneously and repetitively an affinity for the
literature of the postmodern and a hostility to the "culture" of the postmodern. What
possible grounds there may be for such a bifurcation never becomes analytically coherent
in his presentation of his arguments.
Nonetheless, once the bifurcation is set in place, a kind of relationship of political
epistemology is mobilized between the two terms by assertion. In effect, postmodern
culture is somehow known to be a degrading effect of the logic of the new stage of
multinational capitalism (after Ernest Mandel and Jameson) which underpins it.
(Ironically, McCaffery makes prominent use of Jean Baudrillard's term "desert of the
real," though this notion of "desert" is a recycling of De Tocqueville's aristocratic
disdain for 19th-century American democracy.) At the same time, postmodern literature,
including postmodern SF (cyberpunk), is to be applauded as the "breakthrough realism of
our time," providing a "cognitive mapping" (again following Jameson) that can help us
to situate ourselves in the distorting postmodern world (16). When all is said and done, McCaffery represents the literary innovation by way of an epistemological subordination of
its poetics to a sociological imperative to produce a mimetic account.
By constantly diverting attention from the literature to such rusty sociographic
theories, McCaffery manages to distract from the freshness of cyberpunk SF to the tragic
tedium of a pseudo-theoretical academic discourse that is increasingly invading SF. In one
way or another, explicitly or implicitly, the privileged interpretative terms and the
privileged scale of assessment and evaluation associated with this discourse always rest
on the proposition that SF--or at least that SF which is worthy of serious attention--is
the literary equivalent of the critique of capital. Another version of this proposition is
that the world is sick and thus distorts everyday perception and experience; the job of
art is to identify and resist the ever-new forms of the sickness, and the role of the
critic/ theorist, miraculously healthy when armed with the truths known to an
anti-capitalist hermeneutic, is to provide due political praise or disapprobation. An
obsessive, simplistic, and devastatingly short-sighted schema.
McCaffery's desire to claim cyberpunk as both "rupture" (2) and "realism" (16), as
not only innovative but uniquely and exclusively competent, and as not only "techno-urban-guerilla" art (12) but also a representation of
"the most salient
features of our lives" which, moreover, serves "to empower" us by providing knowledge
to use against the "postmodern world that systematically distorts our sense of who or
where we are, of what is 'real' at all, of what is most valuable about human life"
(16)--all these are efforts to endow his enthusiasms with sociological density, political
correctness, and epistemological urgency. This amounts to the cool, time-honored posture
of the typical, adversarial humanist, forever colonizing new trends to suit an old
argument. In McCaffery's case, however, irritating as each appearance of this
automatically assumed posture may be in the context of an advocacy of literary innovation,
at least it always seems a kind of afterthought, a shadow of his literary enthusiasms,
rather than an antidote to them.
The enthusiasms have always been in evidence. McCaffery closed his introduction to the
special cyberpunk issue of the Mississippi Review with characteristic promotional
energy (if with somewhat questionable taste and judgment):
Almost twenty years ago, Jimi Hendrix (who seems to have stepped off the pages of one
of c-p's [sic] wildest episodes), offered the following recommendation: "Electric woman
waits for you and me. So it's time to take a ride." Ready? JACK-IN. (47/48:15)
Nor has McCaffery been alone in his enthusiasm for the novelties of the contemporary
technoscape. It is well documented that Gibson, Sterling, and the rest of their group,
like a whole generation that grew up with the ever-expanding technological apparatus of
rock, film, and video, have continued to be exuberant fans of the technical trends of
virtual reality. One has to work very hard to make out of cyberpunk SF a radical
opposition. In the context of a generally perceptive article about punk music, even
McCaffery admits this parenthetically (and goes on to ignore it, as he promises):
(For the present I will ignore the many ironies and complexities involved with
capitalism's ability to co-opt instantaneously even those forms most expressly opposed to
its operations.) ("Cutting Up" 293).
What remains is the figure of the rebel, outsider, social inferior, victim,
punk, monster, Other. A narrative strategy. Strike a pose.
McCaffery's theoretical vices do not quite vitiate the virtues of this book, thanks to
the merits of both his editing and the actual texts. McCaffery's taste in literature is
excellent, and as a mediator of avant-garde literary culture to a widening audience, his
contributions--in volumes of interviews, biographies, bibliographies, and edited
collections of fiction and criticism in books and special issues of journals (including
the cyberpunk issue of the Mississippi Review already mentioned and the
postmodern-fiction issue of the electronic journal Postmodern Culture scheduled
for the fall of 1992)-- continue to be bold, impressive, influential, and much needed.
McCaffery likes to read good books; and his role, as in this text, in introducing
interesting and off-beat literary artifacts to readers who might otherwise miss them, is
to provide a laudable service with an infectious enthusiasm. This evaluation may stand, I
suspect, even if his canonizing efforts, so soon after the emergence of a literary
tendency, remain in the framework of a promotional enterprise on behalf of a mutually
reinforcing affinity group.
Storming the Reality Studio is an expanded book-form publication of the
special double number (47/48, 1988) of the Mississippi Review that McCaffery
guest-edited. That issue was 288 pages. This book has 376 pages. That issue contained 150
pages of imaginative writing, more than half the text, whereas this volume has only 140
pages, just over a third of the text, preserving about a third of the special-issue
material and adding some 80 pages. Three of the 24 authors represented are women: Kathy
Acker, Pat Cadigan, and Misha. Eighteen of the 24 fiction entries in this section are
excerpts from longer works of fiction. There are also four poems by Rob Hardin, and a
short comic strip by Jim O'Barr. The cyberpunk material proper is about 88 pages in all,
less than a quarter of the overall text, and it includes short pieces, frequently
excerpts, by most of the well-known figures: Cadigan, William Gibson, Richard Kadrey, Marc
Laidlaw, Rudy Rucker, Lucius Shepard, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, and two pieces by Bruce
Sterling--democratically presented in alphabetical order. K.W. Jeter is a notable absence.
A story by Samuel Delany, "Among the Blobs," is also included, as it was in the special
issue, although its designation as cyberpunk is oddly stretching a point.
This is complemented by some 52 pages of "postmodern" fiction, mostly two-three page
excerpts from books, by Acker, J.G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, Don DeLillo, Harold
Jaffe, Thom Jorek, Mark Leyner, Joseph McElroy, Misha, Ted Mooney, Thomas Pynchon, and
William Vollmann. The very short selections, even though McCaffery's excellent feel for
what he reads guides him to intelligent choices, unfortunately amount to something less
than the galaxy of stars might otherwise be. The package of deployed editorial strategies
underwrites an end result where the values of the writings themselves tend to be
subordinated, as I have suggested above, to a thesis about the Significant Value of
Postmodern Writing as a mimesis of New Realities. As it turns out, the whole is less than
the sum of its parts.
McCaffery's argument is that postmodernism is a set of ruptures and dislocations in
postindustrial society and its culture, closely tied to technological developments, and
that there is an international multi-media and multi-genre dialogue of writers, critics,
musicians, video and performance artists, and so forth, linked by the fact that they are
uniquely in touch with these changes in our global life and by the corresponding fact that
they all rely on "themes and aesthetic modes previously associated with SF" (2-3). McCaffery is particularly interested in showing that SF and avant-garde literature are
related, and in showing the affinities between such "postmodern" writing and "postmodern" theory. The book includes a good short piece by Brian McHale which makes
the arguments for the cross-fertilizing feedback loops between the different strata of
culture and, in particular, between SF since the 1970s and state-of-the-art mainstream
fiction. His emphasis falls on the traffic in models between different cultural
sites, including the exchange of postmodern forms and ingredients (311). Although
McCaffery's (like Gibson's) own preferences point instead to the popular thesis of
postmodern mongrelization (266), that is, a melting of everything previously
solid and the collapse of boundaries of genre and stratification, with the consequence of
an ad-lib intermixing of declassified ingredients, McHale's article, which keeps its focus
steadily on the literature itself, does probably more than any other to provide actual
support for McCaffery's editorial goals.
Where the special issue had 130 pages of critical and theoretical commentary, all of it
centered on cyberpunk SF, this book has 236 pages of discursive text, including all seven
of the essays (but not the symposium) from the special issue, some new essays on
cyberpunk, plus a number of short selections from noted theoretical texts. Thus there are
two pages from Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology, three pages from Jean-François
Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition, ten pages each from Jameson's Postmodernism,
or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and Arthur Kroker and David Cook's The
Postmodern Scene. None of these excerpts has to do with contemporary literature as
such. The material specifically about cyberpunk SF includes interesting, though already
familiar, testimonial entries by leading cyberpunk writers Sterling and Gibson (who are
also represented in the imaginative writing section), as well as intelligent cartographic
elucidations by one former and two current editors of SFS, Darko Suvin, Veronica
Hollinger, and Csicsery-Ronay. Timothy Leary, David Porush, George Slusser, Brooks Landon,
Tom Maddox, McCaffery himself, and Joan Gordon round out this section.
Slusser and Landon raise provocative problems about the relationships between visual
image and language. Gordon, the only woman besides Hollinger in this section of 20
entries, occupies the token position of an affirmative "woman's point of view." The
12-page Kadrey-McCaffery annotated bibliography, "Cyberpunk 101: A Schematic Guide to Storming
the Reality Studio," deserves special mention for its flashes of intelligence,
linguistic interest, and canonizing effectiveness. At the same time, it must be lamented
that neither this article, nor any other in the volume, makes any learned effort to
connect the new SF with either the genre tradition of SF or the wider traditions of
American fiction that lie behind or beyond the experimental (postmodern) subsection of the
contemporary.
These pieces generally are of a good quality, but are all overviews on roughly the same
level of abstraction and in many respects overlap: good for a first approach, including a
first approach to marketing, but they leave a lot to be desired in terms of any subsequent
investigation or assessment, not to mention the analytic or theoretical needs of an
academic audience for which the book appears to be designed. (Apropos of this latter, the
absence of an index is a real shortcoming; apart from the inconvenience to the reader, it
means also the loss of a pedagogic opportunity to make explicit some of the linkages that
are announced in McCaffery's "Introduction.")
So what do we have here as an overall collection? Read for their own virtues, singly,
all the entries may stimulate a reader entirely new to them with their own qualities.
Taken together, the selections may frustrate both those readers familiar with their
sources (which offer not only more but sometimes different and actually more pertinent
dimensions) and also those wishing to explore the implications of the materials and
especially of the thesis that links them together. On the title page, the book is
subtitled A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction, but the book's
cover drops the "science" and makes the larger claim of A Casebook of Cyberpunk and
Postmodern Fiction. An error, no doubt, but it is emblematic of McCaffery's own
slippery theoretical formulations whose immodest rhetorical intent is, first, to dismiss
"most contemporary American authors," "with only a handful of exceptions" (9) as
obsolete; second, to advocate postmodern fiction--especially where it borrows from SF--as
the only fiction that is in touch with the novelties of "the postmodern condition"; and
finally, to promote cyberpunk SF as the cutting edge of postmodern fiction on the argument
that it alone deals systematically with the most crucial issues of our day.
The "casebook" in truth provides not nearly enough "case" material about postmodern
fiction (a few pages of literary excerpts and no critical analysis) to permit any
conclusions about it at all. Nor is the "postmodern condition" documented with evidence
or argument beyond the occasional rhetorical allusion to some new stage of capitalism that
is multinational and deeply involved with cybernetic, informational, and cultural
technologies. Perhaps, if McCaffery's "Introduction" had been included as just one among
the many alphabetically ordered discursive essays in the text, the text might have been
more readily susceptible to alternative appropriations. As it is, his effort to frame his
editing work in an encompassing argument forces the conclusion that his case about
postmodernism is not made.
There may just be something of a case here about cyberpunk, however, at least in terms
of the amount of critical discussion and the number of imaginative entries. But a better
book would have had more fiction and a more variegated set of approaches to the materials,
including more close-up analysis and more scholarship with respect to intertextual
contextualization. And the most modest and most reasonable case that McCaffery wants to
establish--which is also the most congenial and the most interesting and valuable--to the
effect that American culture now comprises a notable interaction between genre SF and the
literary avant-garde, would have benefited from a less lazy reprise, four years after the
fact of the special issue, of the latter's uniquely cyberpunk-related critical focus, and
a more intensive inquiry into the relations between prominent contemporary literary
categories.
I would stress, as well, that novel payoffs might accrue to a literary poetics that
escapes being held in privileged interpretive bondage to a given socio-economic schematism
such as McCaffery attempts to sustain. The speed and density projected as the everyday,
near-future, urban experience in the most successful cyberpunk works--whether read as
analogy to the present or extrapolation forward, and whether their readers are identified
with punk, underground, or countercultural marginality or with some other social position
altogether--may arguably deliver their exhilarating effects precisely because these do
not underwrite with any special privilege the cognitive transparency and rhetorical
critique that occupy such central position for McCaffery.
In this respect, against the grain of the framing commentary, the texts may be
appropriate as aids in withstanding the apocalyptic disdain for the present that has
always been a hallmark of the political and humanist traditions that McCaffery and so many
other literary or cultural critics espouse. If indeed the near future holds a world
"unimaginably transformed" (9), then we are well advised to look for intellectual tools
that do not constrain the articulation of fictional allusions to that unimaginable
transformation by reducing them to a thin congruence with the always already pre-conceived
terms of a consoling incantation about the capitalist "logic that underlies the
postmodern condition" (16).
In the specifics of the matter, I would venture one step further. Cyber and punk
together have accounted for the power and flavor of the 1980s version of the technological
interface in SF. And yet, the future of the writing around that interface probably lies
beyond that collocation. My guess is that the exhilaration of adventures in cyberia has
finally wider resonance than the punk's eye view of urban desperation and technosleaze.
The punk form of literary cyberiana, I expect, belongs to a specific moment. Not only does
it not exhaust the formal possibilities of the fictive region, but it signals only the
early stages of a thoroughgoing literary interest in whatever may be conceivable for a
technological imaginary, and especially for its still only embryonic post-liberal
varieties. There is no reason why the allegedly "totally ambivalent" cyberpunk attitude
to technology ("An Interview with William Gibson" 274) should not prove susceptible of
interesting fictional figuration, within and without SF, in relation to a variety of emplotments and a range of differentially elaborated matrices of conceivable social and
cultural strata. The destiny of such literary exploration does not depend on the current
forms of cyberpunk SF, which may therefore continue or atrophy, as the case may be,
without diminishing the merits of what has been achieved in the first heroic moments.
In this vein, a final comment may be appropriate. The "reality studio" (in that
phrase from Burroughs's Nova Express, further popularized by Leary and friends in
the psychedelic era) is not the kind of thing that is literally susceptible to being
stormed, captured, destroyed, or emptied out, and there is no utopian consolation entailed
in confronting the machineries of semiotic control. The title of the volume is itself an
instance of McCaffery's constant and politically motivated back-sliding toward the cliches
of some kind of neo-realism, given to privileged representation. By contrast, if the pluralization
of realities were to become an ontological feature of prominent literary and
conceptual trends, in and out of SF and SF-related critical discourse, as it has already
in some cyberpunk and postmodernist texts, and if this pluralization could escape
being reduced by powerful objectivizing currents of thought, then the postmodernization of
the cultural agendas might indeed take on and consolidate some novel imaginative forms.
What is likely to remain of interest about this new McCaffery volume, then, is not so
much whether in the aggregate it provides or fails to provide a realistic and sustainable
cognitive mapping of "our" future or a prefiguration of the future of significant SF or
non-SF avant-garde literature at large. Rather, its achievement, like its ambition, is
likely to be measured in terms of its relative successes in fixing within literary time a
moment in the emergence of the figuration of a post-liberal mind/body conception. If the
emergence is successful and the figuration survives, then, in time, similar and related
figurations are likely to mutate through literature, philosophy, and the arts in ways yet
unknown. Some morticians already anticipate that cyberpunk SF per se may be
moribund today and, by then, long dead. But it will have given birth to something new and
viable. Long live cyberpunk.
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