Future Past, Future Present

After numerous recommendations from a disparate group of people for the past few years I have managed to get round to reading Neuromancer and, to be honest, it left me feeling rather cold. Perhaps I was expecting too much from it (although how can one expect too much when everyone raves about it) but it felt somewhat dated. As someone who grew up with the computers and who was familiar with the internet from her early teens, I fail to find the world of Neuromancer a possibility. It all feels too past. At one time people maybe thought that the vision of cyberspace presented in Neuromancer was a possibility, that cyberspace would form an all encompassing network over the world, and I concede that in some sense it does, but not in the way that Gibson describes it. I found myself wondering why someone would have to carry about a weighty deck along with the "Flatline's construct" (although I see now where the kaptain got the title for his PhD from); why didn't Case have wireless installed?!?!? I mean, everyone has wireless these days and you can flip the switch to connect to the net just about anywhere. If he could flip into Molly's mind why couldn't he just flip onto the net? Not only the weighty decks but the use of modems, despite it being a future presented not too far in the past it all felt rather archaic; a future that has already past... a future past.


Although perhaps I shouldn't be so hard on Gibson. Maybe some of my prejudices come from the fact that Gibson's ideas have been used and abused by his successors. Maelcum, the owner of the Marcus Garvey, reappears somewhat sickeningly in the Wachowski Brothers' Matrix Trilogy. I can't remember which of the sequels it is but in one of there is a mass of hippies dancing and writhing in Zion. It appears that the Wachowskis plucked their image of freedom fighters straight from Neuromancer and when I was presented with it in their film I was driven to think "I would rather be plugged into the Matrix than stuck in some dump with a load of hippies dancing to some crappy drumming; if that's the road to freedom then no thanks." Unfortunately, the figure of Maelcum, which his "Zion dub" and his Rastafarian manner simply made me remember this feeling. At other times Neuromancer reminded me of the 1995 film Hackers with its abundance of stereotypes and its amusing attempts to utilise computing concepts. Of course, this is not Gibson's fault, but coming to Neuromancer after viewing the various abuses of it makes it difficult to appreciate it as those who read it when it was written.





About half way through the book I lost interest (although I have now finished it) as I was distracted by another shiny object: Philip K. Dick's The Simulacra, which I found for £2 at a book sale in the university. If Neuromancer explores the possibilities of an overabundance of technology then The Simulacra explores its affects upon the human animal. And not only the affects of technology but the movements of desire as they shift throughout the book.

It's quite pertinent that PKD's work begins with a law being passed that bans the use of psychoanalysis; the abolishment of psychoanalysis in a state that must be described as Oedipal. The figure of Nicole, the mother (bad mother, good mother, depending on who's perspective one takes) stands at the head of the state and each citizen aspires only to please her. Ian Duncan's (a resident of the Abraham Lincoln apartment block) single desire is to play his jugs before Nicole, to please her and to see her. He already feels as though he knows her through the medium of TV which transmits a sentimental Nicole to the nation every day; if he is not able to play before her he feels as though he will die, his existence only validated through her. The Oedipal mother transferred from the private sphere into the public.

In his mind Ian saw Nicole propped up in her enormous bed, in her pink, frilly robe, her breakfast on a tray beside her as she scanned the program schedules presented to her for her approval. Already she's heard about us, he thought. She knows of our existence. In that case, we really do exist. Like a child that has to have its mother watching what it does, we're brought into being, validated consensually, by Nicole's gaze.

It is the wish of most of the characters in the book to please the mother; one of the only figures who appears to escape is the character who, to use D&G's terminology, becomes a nomad. Loony Luke and his Jalopy Jungle are constantly moving, a nomad construct that is forced to move from to place to place due to the constraints of the state. He traverses the globe, selling his jalopies, providing lines of flight for citizens who wish to escape the state; a jalopy takes one to Mars where one can set up a solitary existence. Various characters throughout the book are forced into positions where they feel that they have to escape, take a line a flight, to escape the pressure of the all encompassing matriarchal hold of Nicole. Indeed, if one wishes to have some company amidst the vastness of Mars one can circumvent Hegel's life and death struggle and purchase a family of Simulacra who will slip happily into the position of the slave; fully satisfied self-consciousness in a way that Hegel could not have envisaged:

The famnexdo were actually not next door at all; they were part of their owner's entourage. Communication with them was in essence a circular dialogue with oneself; the famnexdo, if they were functioning properly, picked up the covert hopes and dreams of the settler and detailed them back in an articulated fashion.

But my favourite narrative running through this text is the various becomings of Richard Kongrosian, psychokinetic musician who was once a fixture at the Whitehouse. With the ban placed on psychoanalysis Kongrosian no longer has the anchor which keeps him firmly placed in what he believes to be reality. Thus he enters into various becomings. In the first he enters into a zone of indiscernability with a Nitz commercial and becomes-smelly:

That's me, Kongrosian said to himself. I smell bad. He had, due to the commercial, acquired a phobic body odour; he had been contaminated through the commercial, and there was no way to rid himself of the odour: he had for weeks now tried a thousand rituals of rinsing and washing, to no avail.

2nd Becoming: Becoming-imperceptible;

"I am totally invisible now." He held up his hand and arm, saw nothing. "It's come," he added. And he did not hear his voice; that too, was imperceptible.

And, in my favourite scene in the book, the 3rd Becoming: Becoming- (literally) a Body Without Organs;

"I'm turning inside out!" Kongrosian wailed. "Pretty soon if this keeps up I'm going to have to envelop the entire universe and everything in it, and the only thing that'll be outside me will be my internal organs – and then most likely I'll die!"
"Listen, Kongrosian," Pembroke said harshly. He turned the gun towards the psychokinetic concert pianist. "What do you mean by sending the TV crew out of here? I need them in this office; Nicole's going to address the nation. You go and tell them to come back." He gestured at Kongrosian with the gun. "Or go get a White House employee who -"

He broke off. The gun had left his hand.

"Help me!" Kongrosian howled. "It's becoming me and I have to be it!"

The gun vanished into Kongrosian's body.

Without the aid of his psychoanalyst, Kongrosian goes through a process of destratification throughout the narrative until he destratifies absolutely. It's interesting to remember what Deleuze and Guattari say in A Thousand Plateaus:

The BwO is what remains when you take everything away, what you take away is precisely the phantasy, and signifiances and subjectifications as a whole. Psychoanalysis does the opposite: it translates everything into phantasies, it converts everything into phantasy, it retains the phantasy. It royally botches the real, because it botches the BwO.

This is a theme that can be seen as running throughout the book. The drug company, A.G.Chemie, pushes for the ban of psychoanalysis, aware that it is psychoanalysis that maintains the phantasy of Nicole and der Alte, that psychoanalysis translates all of reality into the phantasy of being validated by the Oedipal mother and thus preserves the State. A.G. Chemie, along with Pembroke, Nicole's treacherous aide, aim at a complete destratification so that they can build up their own, fascist, BwO. And it is in the body of Kongrosian that this complete destratification is mirrored as he attempts to keep hold of the phantasy of Nicole but is unable to. Yet, even amidst this manic destratification, Kongrosian attempts to safeguard some of his organism, of his subjectivity: '"You're me," he told it. "You're part of the I-world, not the non-I. Understand?"'

The phantasy of Nicole breaks down at the culminating point of the novel and is a wonderfully Nietzschean moment in which Nicole wonders:

How many people, like Kongrosian, could break with the reality principle? Believe in something they knew intellectually was an illusion?

Few people, after all, were as sick as Richard Kongrosian.

To stay in power she would have to rule a nation of the mentally ill

The simulacrum, carefully upheld by psychoanalysis, has been destroyed and the real comes forth. All belief has been revealed to be belief in an illusion; Nicole has been played by an actress for generations and der Alte has been a simulacrum, replaced every few years by a new one that is voted in by the people. The semblance of democracy is overthrown and the Oedipal mother topples. Who could not be put in mind of the will to truth devaluing itself and leading to nihilism?

Both the BwOs of the fascists and the psychoanalysts represent botched attempts at creating a BwO: too much stratification on one side, too much destratification on the other. (We never find out what happens to Kongrosian, we are left with him attempting to stick his body back together.) It is only the carefully crafted BwO of the chuppers, a race of ape-like men, who have carefully prepared and crafted theirs, that remains. The all out civil war of humankind will leave behind an earth upon which a new people, who have waited patiently, can traverse.

So, to return to Gibson: if Neuromancer portrays a future past then The Simulacra presents a future present or, to put it another way; Neuromancer is a room in Leibniz's pyramid of incompossibilities, a possibility that was never realised and that has been cordoned off in the cosmos from our own world. Conversely, PKD's world is an incompossibility in DeLeibniz's chaosmos: a possibility that is persistently being realised, a virtual that can be actualised in this world, and therefore, unlike Gibson's book it does not feel dated. It feels like a world that intersects this world and that remains a possibility, something that can happen at any moment, is at every moment, is a part of this world.

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