Lisa Swanstrom

Professor Liu

English 236

PROSPECTUS

Landscape and Locodescription in William Gibson’s Neuromancer

Introduction to the topic:
In 1984 William Gibson’s science fiction novel Neuromancer was published by Ace Books to wide critical acclaim, effectively launching what is now known as the cyberpunk movement. Part heist novel, part sci-fi pulp, and part Romantic Gothic, Neuromancer at its time of publication was a genre-bending book that introduced into mainstream popular consciousness such concepts as “virtual reality,” “cyberpunk,” and, most salient of all, “cyberspace,” a neologism of Gibson’s creation, which he defines in Neuromancer as “A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts…A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. “(51) Gibson’s notion of cyberspace found quick purchase in American popular culture, and the word has become an ersatz signifier for any and every sort of simulated environment, such that virtually real spaces found in amusement parks, research labs, arcades, and shopping malls are frequently regarded as a fulfillment of the prophecy of cyberspace that Gibson envisions in Neuromancer.

Problem:
Such places share in common an important feature with the innovations in Gibson’s work, in that both “real” virtual spaces and Gibson’s representations of virtual spaces push the edge of technological advancement, calling into question secure and cherished notions about memory, consciousness, sensory experience, and human being. It is not surprising, then, that a wide variety of literary criticism has emerged that addresses the intriguing implications of Gibson’s technological imaginings. In How We Became Posthuman, for one example of many, N. Katherine Hayles’ analysis of Gibson’s work criticizes the technological innovation of cyberspace as a perpetuation of Cartesian Dualism, a science-fiction riff on an all-too-familiar myth of a human subject defined by a mind/body split. As rich and important as such criticism is, however, its emphasis on the peculiarities and potential consequences of technological advancement in Gibson’s work has not widely accommodated an equally important discussion of aesthetics.

Approach:
Treating Neuromancer in terms of aesthetic concerns would open a fascinating critical pathway and enrich discussions that focus primarily on questions of the consequences of technological evolution. Accordingly, this project re-locates Neuromancer to the realm of aesthetics and considers Gibson’s cyberspace constructs as virtual landscapes, emphasizing their relation to ideas of the picturesque, beautiful, and sublime found in 18th century discourse.

In order to ground my work firmly in this tradition, I turn to theoretical interpretations of the sublime by Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Weiskel, as well as to critical approaches to the concept of landscape by Alan Liu and W.J.T. Mitchell. And in an attempt to effectively unite discussions of contemporary technological innovation with notions of landscape and aesthetic, I look to theorists such as Christiane Paul and Michael Heim, whose essay “The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace,” provides a fruitful starting point for such a discussion.

Argument:
After examining examples of cyberspace constructs in William Gibson’s fiction through a critical aesthetic lens, I identify two moments of shuddering, trembling liminality at work in chapters 20 and 21 of Neuromancer. Such moments of rupture are hard to classify, suspended as they are between various and disparate categories of experience: motion and repose, artificial and real, beauty and terror, self and other, and life and death.

In one sense, each of these moments functions as a Locodescriptive Moment as Alan Liu defines it in Wordsworth: The Sense of History, i.e., an "uncanny interface" between narrative and descriptive orders. In another sense, however, the moments of liminality that occur in chapters 20 and 21 of Neuromancer , perhaps because they, unlike examples of Romantic poetry that Liu considers, have no real anchor in physical location, seem somehow configured to a different order of intensity: more violent than suggestive, more fissured than interfaced, more shuddering than trembling. By analyzing the various states to which such moments act as gateways, and by observing the scale of effect that such moments engender, I argue that these two ruptures in the landscape of cyberspace mark sublime moments, indications of a transcendent order, one that paradoxically comes most fully into being when it is coupled with a recognition of a lack of origin. By viewing such moments as sublime occurrences, it is my hope to open Gibson’s fiction, as well as similar works of science fiction, to a broader field of critical inquiry.

Note:
This project also has an on-line component, available at the following URL: www.lisaswanstrom.net/landscapeprez.html

Bibliography:
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Ed. Adam Phillips. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York: Ace Books, 1984.

Hayles, Katherine N. How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Heim, Michael. “The Erotic Ontology of Cyberspace,” in Cyberspace: First Steps, Benedikt, Michael, ed. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment (1790). David H. Richter, ed. The Critical Tradition: Classic Text and Contemporary Trends, 2nd ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

Liu, Alan. “The Locodescriptive Moment,” in Wordsworth: The Sense of History. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1989.

Mitchell, W.J.T. “Imperial Landscape,” in Landscape and Power, W.J.T. Mitchell, ed. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002.

Paul, Christiane. Digital Art. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2003.

Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976.

Wimsatt, W.K. "The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery," in Romanticism and Consciousness, Harold Bloom, ed. New York: Norton & Company, 1970.