Timothy Burke
Fiction Analysis: Neuromancer
9 November, 2005
In 1916, an association of American artists founded the Society of Independent Artists, an organization dedicated to exhibition of the avant-garde. Its first show that year displayed more than 2,000 works from a variety of international artists; the SIA pledged its exhibitions to be open to all artists and works. Yet there was one item conspicuously absent from the exhibition: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain. Duchamp, despite being a founding member of the Society, failed to convince his fellow artists that his work, a bathroom urinal signed “R. Mutt” (a play on the German armut, or poverty), was art at all. He resigned from the board soon after the incident, and Fountain became a seminal foundation of the Dadaist anti-art movement, introducing the concept of “found art.”
It is perhaps serendipitous, then, that another Duchamp work, his 1915-1923 masterpiece The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even appears briefly in the course of William Gibson’s 1984 science fiction novel Neuromancer. Much like Duchamp’s Fountain, Neuromancer was not so much revolutionary as it was groundbreaking. Gibson’s influence on both science fiction and our view of an increasingly interconnected world is evidenced in the sheer number of ideas and terms common in 21st century culture that is derived from or were popularized by his works: cyberspace, “The Matrix,” cybernetic and genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality.
Gibson foreshadows the auspicious nature of his book from the opening, in which we’re introduced to Case, the anti-hero protagonist. Case is a onetime hacker-for-hire whose decision to embezzle from a previous employer (and their subsequent poisoning via neurotoxin) has left him unable to “jack in,” or interface his mind to the ever-reaching Matrix through which the world’s data is transmitted. Thus he finds himself in the desperate condition of being enslaved to his body, which he refers to as “meat.”
It is not without irony that Case comes to see himself as resembling his namesake; his existence being defined by his awareness and not his body, he leaps at the opportunity to restore his nervous system to its previous condition, though not after questioning the intent of his benefactor. In this, we find not only an investigation of identity issues, but of performance issues as well. While Chvasta (2005) explains performers’ understanding of the body’s presence in virtual spaces predates the actual availability of the technology with which to create these spaces, Schneider (1997) describes the concept of social/digital binaries as a function of sensemaking; in this we can observe Case’s distancing of the polar mind/body dichotomy while still turning to “pleasures of the flesh” immediately upon waking from the surgery which restores his un-bodied existence.
(Incidentally, this interrogation of the social binary was a primary foundation of the works of the French College de Sociologie, a precursor to the Society of Independent Artists and Dadaist ideals; thus we bring M. Duchamp full-circle.)
William
Gibson wasn’t making these connections blindly; his development of The Moderns (described
in the book as “technofetishists”) is derived from
the title of performance artist Laurie Anderson’s 1982 experimental album Big Science.
She held out her hands, palms up, the white fingers slightly spread, and with a barely audible click, ten double-edged, four centimeter scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the burgundy nails. She smiled. The blades slowly withdrew.
This early introduction to the vast world of cybernetic engineering (the use of which constitutes the bulk of Neuromancer’s plot) again incorporates the concept of interconnected body, technology, and identity.
This concept is the foundation of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch’s 1991 book The Embodied Mind. In their attempt to unify the scientific approach to the mind and a definition of the mind through experience, they incorporate the cybernetic/systems theory approaches to self-organization. Their definition of cognition as the emergence of global states in a network of simple components (p. 99) forces us to the point of discussing Neuromancer’s most intriguing character, Wintermute.
Wintermute, a creation of the plutocratic Tessier-Ashpool family, is described in a manner befitting the Varelian perspective:
Wintermute was a simple cube of white light, that very simplicity suggesting extreme complexity.
While initially posited in an antagonist viewpoint, Wintermute later comes to create an alliance with Case, who must utilize his abilities to free the AI from its prison (the Tessier-Ashpool computer system) and allow it access to the Matrix. (There is, of course, the later turn where we learn the true motivation behind Wintermute’s manipulation of Case, Molly, and Tessier-Ashpool matriarch Lady 3Jane, but this constitutes the climax of the novel; it’s not the role of analyst to play spoiler.)
The importance of considering this point, then, is in whether the Wintermute (and its partner AI Neuromancer) entity is worthy of being called exactly that: an entity. In this separation of the conscious entity from its physical embodiment we see a parallel to Varela’s comparison of the connectionist orientation of mind to the cognitive approach. Case himself struggles considerably to make this distinction, despite attempts from others to set him straight; a key point is in establishing his confusion over the physical mainframe computer in which Wintermute is housed and the entity (Gibson’s word) Wintermute.
Of course, we are forced to reconsider our own definition of mindness and awareness. Science-fiction writers have projected the eventual development of artificial intelligence to the point of self-awareness for decades; it is a key point of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Isaac Asimov’s 1950 book I, Robot, and the Terminator series of films. Traditionally, story crafters mark the development of the self-aware AI as a destructive event; thus the moral debate introduced is that of the threatened continuing existence of humanity. Gibson, however, initiates a different moral perspective, questioning the moment at which a self-aware entity acquires the rights and responsibilities afforded biological entities.
This concept has, of course, arisen before (one could point even to Disney’s Pinnochio as a moral question on the topic) but not until Neuromancer are the consequences so directly approached. The Western philosophical tradition embodied in cogito, ergo sum directs us to place the self-aware AI on a parallel platform with those of us who created it. Intelligent systems ethicist Frank Sudia explains the ability to choose, beyond that of simple cognition, delineates the concept of self. In this he then establishes the lack of distinction between creator and created being; “being” and “entity” thus become unequivocally and categorically same (Osterweil, 2001).
Yet we are hesitant to use the terms interchangeably. This is, in no small matter, due to the very different perceptions of the terms. “Being” is an act; the word a gerund. Entity is a nominative, static; we pretend to execute a distinctive ability to manipulate entities as opposed to beings. It is uncomfortable for us to think of artificial intelligences as beings. Indeed, to categorize an AI as a being requires a consideration of whether it is, after all, “artificial” at all. If the human identity is equivalent to the self-aware manufactured one, is not all intelligence regardless of origin authentic? In Gibson’s world where identity can be separated from the body, stored to media, and replicated within both the physical world and the sub-universe of the Matrix, is it not possible for intelligences/identities to be both authentic and artificial simultaneously?
With the questions raised by Neuromancer, it is not surprising to observe its massive impact. Critics of the book praised it to the point of making it the first winner of science fiction’s “triple crown,” taking the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick awards in the same year. DARPAnet would have evolved into our Internet without Neuromancer, but our interpretation of its increasingly pervasive influence in our lives would be considerably different were we not exposed to the idea of “jacking in.” Duchamp didn’t invent Dadaism, he only set it on its way; similarly, Gibson cannot take the full title of “visionary” (after all, much of Neuromancer’s world is reflective of a continued Soviet influence – but is it asking too much for him to predict the events of 1991?) but is yet owed a debt of gratitude for providing us our own pair of lenses, like those of the cybernetically-enhanced Molly, for viewing an increasingly complex digital world.
References
Chvasta, M. (2005). Remembering praxis: Performance in the digital age. Text and Performance Quarterly, 25, 156-170.
Osterweil, N. (2001). Artificial intelligence, real issue. Retrieved November 3, 2005 from http://www.webmd.com/content/article/11/1668_51243.
Schneider, R. (1997). The Explicit Body In
Performance.
Varela, F., Thompson,
E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind.