The Glow is Gone

Historicism and the Cyberpunk Mode

August 5, 2010 at 3:38 p (fiction, theory)

For the past six weeks I have been immersed in cyberpunk, that stylized, detached vision of the present-as-future through SF’s historicizing lens. I wrote an essay for the class that tried to capsule some of the theoretical debate surrounding this sub-genre. I wasn’t entirely successful and should’ve critiqued more actual works than frame the debate, but hey, suck my dick.

---

In his immense meditation on science fiction, Archaeologies of the Future, Fredric Jameson considers cyberpunk co-founder William Gibson’s then most recent novel Pattern Recognition. Jameson has maintained an interest in the cyberpunk genre as a critic interested in the cultural postmodern and late capitalism, two principal features of the latter being cybernetic technology and globalizing dynamics, both of which happen to be important components of the cyberpunk milieu.[1] In the essay “Fear and Loathing in Globalization,” Jameson reviews Pattern Recognition and the recent consideration by critics that Gibson has “evolved” from his cyberpunk roots (or perhaps even science fiction at all) to a more respectable form of generalized fiction. This is an interesting consideration, Jameson thinks, since cyberpunk, Jameson’s preeminent literature of late capitalism, “sends back more reliable information about the contemporary world than an exhausted realism (or an exhausted modernism either).”[2]

This fairly recent snapshot must be viewed as a distillation of a debate in which Jameson has engaged for decades regarding the merits of the science fiction genre and the deeper implications of historicism. Jameson can be seen privileging science fiction as far back as the 1970s in an essay for the inaugural Science Fiction Studies publication: “[Science Fiction] is in its very nature a symbolic meditation on history itself, comparable in its emergence as a new genre to the birth of the historical novel around the time of the French Revolution.”[3] Science fiction under this consideration is, far from the mass culture escapism it is popularly associated with, an alternative to the high modern literature previously canonized by academics and offers us a critical, historically-minded mode of cultural production.

In short, Jameson privileges science fiction because it engages in historical self-consciousness. Historicism itself is a highly ambiguous mode in Marxist criticism. The concept that specific contexts such as time, place, and condition, are central to historical thought while the notion of fundamental, immutable laws of social behavior is rejected, was criticized by Marx himself in his Theses on Feurbach:

“The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change [Selbstveränderung] can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.”[4]

We must also frame Jameson’s views of science fiction in the ongoing debate between Marxist strains of thought in the 1960s and 1970s, of which Jameson was very much a participant. Jameson’s assumption that science fiction as a genre is best engaged historically because it exhibits historical self-consciousness was, in many ways, a counter to the anti-historicist Marxism championed by Louis Althusser. As Darren Jorgensen has pointed out recently, Jameson’s insistence that science fiction is more historical than other genres might contain a contradiction, for if history is what determines genre, no one genre should ever be “more historical” than another : “Jameson defers to history as the ground for his analysis while discursively constructing this history, relying on texts to construct that which is also a material horizon for the production of meaning.”[5]

The deferral to history also occurs in the work of Darko Suvin, who proclaimed that science fiction was a uniquely historical genre because of its ability to clarify its author’s empirical environment.[6] Historicism here results in a circularity where agency is claimed for an entire genre because it speaks toward the conditions of its production. In The Political Unconscious and his earlier essays, Jameson privileges a kind of dialectical “metacommentary” that preserves the basic meaning of a text while also subjecting it to the Hegelian method, locating it within the larger historical totality.[7] Jorgensen believes this to be a demonstrative refutation of the kind of scientific, anti-historicist Marxist theory put forth by Althusser, and which he believed would be better able to produce a revolutionary consciousness.[8] Althusser believed historicism to be neither scientific nor especially revolutionary because it is ideologically fixed, stuck by an awareness of historical content that it has already determined to be historical.[9]

Althusser opposed historicist circularity on the grounds of ideology, which he believed to be in service of whatever discourse enlisted it. Ideology possesses a conditional autonomy since its actual content or message is dependent upon a reflective, circular structure (it produces the object of criticism as well as the criticism itself). While Jameson claims that everything is ideological, Althusser claims a “science” which eludes ideology, making Marxist historiography untenable. The content of ideology is less important to Althusser than the fact of its production.

As Jorgensen goes on to discuss, for many Marxist theorists who were a part of the activism and would-be revolutionary politics of the 1960s, culminating in the May 1968 defeat, Jameson’s take on Marxism appears to be retreating from the push for revolutionary consciousness. His attempts to use Althusser’s structuralist terminology when reviewing the work of Philip K. Dick and Ursula Le Guin[10] appear to be a reconciliation between his own dialectical Marxism and structuralism; James Iffland and Cornel West have criticized this approach as veering away from actual revolutionary Marxism, as the principal site of revolutionary struggle and class conflict is disregarded in favor of aesthetics, even though Jameson wants to subsume these capitalist aesthetics in a larger historical vision in which Marxism is a favorable alternative. Jorgensen summarizes:

As actual, lived communism recedes into the past, it is tempting to read this shift from revolution to art as part of a retreat from real-world politics. Like the ambivalence of art itself towards politics, Jameson’s metacommentary forges no new paths for revolutionary action. It ‘either rests upon no specifiable historical forces potentially capable of actualizing it or upon the notion that every conceivable historical force embodies it”, and Marxism comes to have “little or no political consequences”, no praxis to accompany its theory. As Althusser recognized, ideological analysis alone is not enough to produce revolution.” [11]

One wonders where the cyberpunk genre fits in this debate. Cyberpunk is commonly seen as a confluence of the literary realms of science fiction and postmodern literature[12], a movement starting in the 1980s that produced a body of fiction exploring the technological ramifications of a post-industrial, media-driven society. At once concerned with a fairly dystopic near-future and using hardboiled/noir language as a vehicle, cyberpunk resonated as a means of exploring technology’s assistance in the postmodern destabilization of the self – this deconstruction being seen as anti-humanist.[13]

Cyberpunk’s inaugural (or at least definitive) moment occurs in William Gibson’s Neuromancer[14]: the story concerns Henry Dorsett Case, a debauched hustler in the criminal underworld of Chiba City, Japan. Once a talented hacker, Case was caught stealing from his employers, who retaliated by damaging his central nervous system with a mycotoxin, leaving him unable to use the interface to access cyberspace (the Matrix) or any kind of global communications network. Unemployable and addicted to drugs, Case searches underground medical clinics for a cure. Case eventually encounters Molly Millions, an augmented post-human mercenary for an ex-military officer named Armitage, who offers to cure Case in exchange for his service as a hacker. Case is eager for a chance to regain his criminal life but neither Case nor Molly knows what their employer’s motives actually are.

Neuromancer is a work of science fiction that embodies many of the globalizing dynamics, fragmentation of self, and pastiche of styles Jameson found so central to postmodern culture itself. Gibson wrote reflexively of the present (1984) by imagining a vastly altered speculative future; this techno-future would become a trope throughout his early fiction until the publication of Pattern Recognition[15] (2003), Gibson’s first novel to take place in the “present” (2002).. The novel traces advertising consultant Cayce Pollard, who reacts to corporate logos and advertisements as if allergic, as she pursues a new contract with the marketing firm Blue Ant to judge the efficacy of a proposed new corporate logo for a shoe company. After the presentation, the company CEO Hubertus Bigend offers Cayce a new contract: to uncover who is responsible for distributing a sensational series of anonymous, artistic video clips on the internet. Cayce had already been following the video series independently and participating in an online message forum theorizing their meaning and setting. Wary of disrupting the artistic process and mystery of the videos, she reluctantly agrees and sets about to uncover the filmmaker(s).

Pattern Recognition eschews most of the genre tropes of science fiction and cyberpunk, a fact that many critics read as Gibson’s ascendance into the normative world of literary fiction, and which Jameson believed was actually closer to the true cyberpunk than ever before in its emphasis on globalization and technological paranoia. Pattern Recognition, more than simply taking place in the present is, thematically and structurally, about the present. Cayce repeatedly expresses the desire to be in the here and now (“she must be present for the new segment” [23]), and how the allure of the mysterious video clips comes from their authenticity: “There is a lack of evidence, an absence of stylistic clues, that Cayce understands to be utterly masterful…untrammeled by even the most basic conventions of the day.” (23)

In many ways, Gibson’s shift from novels about a non-existent speculative future (like that of Neuromancer) to the present-minded meditation of Pattern Recognition facilitates the debate on historicism: would either novel foster the revolutionary consciousness proposed by Althusser? It seems ironic to consider, but on several levels the “estrangement” of Neuromancer contains more revolutionary potential than the foregrounded reality and present-mindedness of Pattern Recognition. It is unlikely that Gibson is proposing Neuromancer’s dystopic world as anything remotely preferable, nor does the novel really engage in a sustained agitation for social change in the Raeganite 1980s, but by the simple act of a speculative future rather than a less metaphorical present, Gibson is engaging the potentiality of change, itself revolutionary. As Jameson charts Gibson’s move toward more accurately representative cyberpunk literature in his sloughing of genre tropes[16] he is tacitly charting Gibson’s move toward the clarified historicism Althusser and Jorgensen seek to critique:

“Marxist intellectuals…particular discouragement lies in revolutions that failed to actualize in the west, and yet upon which Marxist critique is based. For Western Marxists, this revolution might just as well be [science fiction], belonging as it does to the imagination of some speculative future. Yet, as we have seen, Althusser’s critique of historicism points to a consciousness of the revolutionary possibilities of reading that exceeds this historicist ideology.”[17]

Science fiction, then, offers the greatest revolutionary potential as it breaks away from simple expressivity in its depictions. Althusser’s anti-historicist study of Marx helps to illustrate how such expressivity has developed alongside capitalism; Althusser regards literary studies themselves as caught up in a systemic determination of value that is implicit in the ideological ramifications of capitalism itself.[18] Neuromancer is the more revolutionary text not because it produces greater cognitive estrangement but because it identifies with revolutionary consciousness , producing an awareness of the absolute difference that creates it. Althusser prefers to envision science fiction not in a bourgeois understanding of the novel, but as a possible experimental science. Reading science fiction then helps differentiate the text from its own ideological form, overcoming the process of generic reproduction and fostering a consciousness of real change.

---

[1] Fredric Jameson. Archaeologies of the Future: the Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005): 21.

[2] Ibid., 384.

[3] Fredric Jameson. “In Retrospect” Science Fiction Studies 1:1 (Fall 1974): 275.

[4] Karl Marx. “Theses on Feuerbach, III”

[5] Mark Bould & China Mieville, eds. Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2009): 197.

[6] Darko Suvin. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the History and Poetics of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979): 8-9.

[7] Fredric Jameson. “Metacommentary”, PMLA 86:1 (January 1971): 9-18.

[8] Bould & Mieville, 198-199.

[9] Louis Althusser & Etienne Balibar. Reading Capital (London: New Left Books, 1970): 119-140.

[10] Jameson. Archaeologies: 267-280.

[11] Bould & Mieville, 200-201.

[12] Larry McCaffrey, ed. Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991): 1-16.

[13] Ibid., 204.

[14] William Gibson. Neuromancer (Ace, 1984).

[15] William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (New York: Putnam, 2003).

[16] Jameson. Archaeologies: 384.

[17] Bould & Mieville, 208.

[18] Althusser & Balibar, Reading Capital: 125-126.

---

Permalink 1 Comment