-Caveat Lector- Current events are making many of the insights and attitudes of the Cyberpunk movement of the early 90s seem as prophetic now as they seemed then. Here is an article I published (more an editing job than anything, really, excising such phrases as "Prigoninic cathexis") in 1990. Wade through the pretentious language and perhaps you'll see what I mean...
Chris ******* CYBERPUNKTUATIONS The following is composed of extracts from an article by MARK DOWNHAM on Cyberpunk which appeared in London's VAGUE magazine . A disorganized mixture of clear apercus and tortuous prolixity, it lends itself to rearrangement and bowdlerisation. Here are a few of his more interesting statements. Chris ******************** OF CYBERPUNK FICTION >>> Cyberpunk began as a loose generational nexus of writers swapping letters, manuscripts, ideas. >>> Cyberpunk crunches together neuro- and physical chemistry, genetic biology, structural linguistics, cybernetics, bio-technology and cyborg engineering into a fantastic series of fictions. >>> There is no typical cyberpunk, although the general project does have central themes, tenets, and topics. I'd say it is an eighties milieu - nineties, post-2001 would equally do - it is a product of the interzone between hard technologies/sciences and nihilo-romanticist surrealism. Its precursors are Michael Moorcock, Langdon Jones, Harlan Ellison, Samuel Delaney, Norman Spinrad, Brian Aldiss, John Varley, Philip. K. Dick, Alfred Bester, the strange pulsing entropies of Thomas Pynchon, the panic-theory of Baudrillard, the Situationist International, Larry Niven, Roger Zelaney, H.G. Wells, the "programming phenomena" control-data buzz of Guy Debord, and the seminal genius of J.G. Ballard. >>> Cyberpunk was essentially initiated by J.G.Ballard in The Atrocity Exhibition. Ballard details the collapse of a landscape through which lines of deterritorialisation have proceeded to absolute tolerances, fractal zones in which sheer contiguity replaces syntax... >>> Ballard's work is an attempt to grasp the contradiction of representational analysis of the future directly. These inundated near-futures transform our own present into the recognisably determinate past of something yet to come. >>> Cyberpunk, as Philip K. Dick's novels and the films of David Cronenberg, deals with a near-future world congested with the coming technologies of everyday life and pushes the thresholds to the point where the psychoses rip through and the Metrophage gets ugly... >>> Thomas Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow explores the obliteration of outdated territories, languages, affiliations, of any boundaries or forms that have impeded the installation of cybernetics--the theory of messages and their control is here intermeshed with the hegemony of what Pynchon calls the mega-cartel, the zaibatsu, the multinationals. >>> Cyberpunk is the literary incarnation of this colliding of fictional worlds, between the high-octane five star fantasies of the multi-nationals and the junk-cult feral scams of the street guerillas living off their products, but fantastically mutating them. >>> Certain central themes spring up repeatedly in Cyberpunk. Firstly, the theme of body invasion, the target vehicle: prosthetic limbs, implanted circuitry, cosmetic surgery, cyberspace, DNA, genetic alteration. Secondly, the real hard edge of mind invasion: brain-computer interfaces, artificial intelligences, neuro-chemistry--all the techniques radically redefining the nature of humanity, the nature of the self. >>> Cyberpunk is gorged with detail-it uses carefully constructed intricacy and readily extrapolates into daily life. It goes for crammed or condensed prose: rapid, dizzying, skidding bursts of novel information, sensory overload, a special brilliant feeling that makes you crisp at the edges--submerging the reader in the equivalent of a titanic blast of information, great gulfs of linguistic intensity as the vasopressin hits. >>> Cyberpunk has a strong garage-band aesthetic. It grapples with the raw core of the near future--its myths, its ideas, its coming practices. It is a pop culture which is theorizing itself into a more cohesive and self-determined existence. Of BLADE RUNNER >>> Blade Runner is really about Roy Batty/Rutger Hauer/method actors in general. >>> The Cyberpunk must allow him/herself to be swept into the multiple currents that cross the city and beckon at random, to clear a path through a deliberately confused atmosphere of this fictive metropolis and distinguish the real from the irreal even in the most indiscernible cases. >>>Roy's murder of Tyrell is the most meaningful statement in the whole of Cyberpunk : "It is a fearful thing to meet your maker." Of the Media-Induced Experience: "THE SPECTACLE": >>> For Baudrillard, television--chief purveyor of the Spectacle--is a paradigm of failed escape combinations, of implosive effects, of remembered codes that make you forget yourself to pieces; the Videodrome collapses any distinction between receiver and sender, between the medium and the real. Baudrillard's subject is locked into an uninterrupted interface with the video screen in a universe of fascination. >>> Through the 1960's television collaborated with the automobile in the virtual annexation of all spaces. The television screen and car windshield reconciled visual experience with the velocities and discontinuities of the marketplace. As windows they seemed to open onto extensive space in which autonomous movement might be possible-instead they have become apertures that frame our transit through streams of disjunct objects and affects, across disintegrating and hyper-abundant surfaces. >>> The pervasive imagery of programming phenomena are now enveloping us-a sensorily expanded data-chatter, image-flick world of digitized life and languages mediated by video display screens--the formation of a discipline shifting inevitably towards cyberspace. >>>In Cyberpunk whatever drifts across the retinal socket, the screen, or the home computer is part of the same homogeneity. >>> Now the screens of the home computer and word processor have succeeded the automobile as core products in an ongoing relocation and hierarchisation of productive forces. >>> Cyberpunk engages the whole notion of the Spectacle: the Videodrome, the satellite media net, the multinational corporation--they are the stuff of Cyberpunk and continually reappear in its fictions. OF THE CONVERGENCE OF DISCIPLINES >>> The differentials between the sciences and the humanities; the gulf between literary culture, the formal structures of art and politics and the culture of science, the world of engineering and industry--it's all converging. The advances of science are deeply radical--potentially revolutionary even, if utilised appropriately. >>> Cyberpunk comes from the realm where the computer hacker has locked into the post-art political culture and its discontents. Cyberpunk explores interzones, especially those between the multi-nationals and street cultures; the street always finds its own use for things, call them technological artifacts or the virtual technologies of the Videodrome. >>> In Cyberpunk, geographical frontiers no longer exist, and in their place are being manufactured vast micro-electronic territories. >>>The convergence of television, telecommunications, computers is creating an ideology of technological determinism, and prefabricated futures which mirror the present Spectacle. >>>Cyberpunk both involves itself in and carries out a radical critique of the processes involved, with a view to transformatory change. OF SYSTEMS AND CYBERNETICS >>> Cyberpunk is a pop-cultural fascination with cybernetic systems, including a vast array of machines and apparatuses that exhibit computational power. Such systems contain a dynamic, even if wasted, quotient of intelligence. Telephone networks, communication satellites, radar systems, programmable laser video-discs, robots, biogenetically engineered cells, rocket guidance systems, videotex networks--all exhibit a capacity to process information and execute actions. They are all cybernetic in that they are self-regulating mechanisms or systems within predefined limits and in relation to predefined tasks. >>> Cyberpunk uses the computer and AI to symbolise the entire spectrum of networks, systems, and devices that exemplify cybernetic or automated but intelligent behaviour. >>> There are no truly entropic or closed systems in Cyberpunk as there are in Situationist theory; all processes impinge upon and are effected by other processes in some way. Systems feed energy into each other. Feedback exists between systems that are not in themselves closed but contingent upon other systems. A system is closed when entropy, virtual technologies, the Videodrome, gas or electricity bills dominate the feedback process, that is when the measure of energy lost is greater than the measure of energy gained. A candle is a good example. >>> There is no more opposition in the Cyberpunk territory between the abstractions of money and the apparent materiality of commodities; money and what it can buy are now fundamentally of the same substance. >>> Cyberpunks not only understand that cybernetics is a conveyance of information theory and cognitive psychology, but that these are the dominant phenomenologies of a virtual society. For instance, the problem of tracking anti-aircraft weapons against extremely fast targets has led to research into, and the development of, intelligent mechanisms capable of predicting future states faster than the unaugmented human brain can do. Never strike where your opponent is, but at the space they will occupy in the future. Of the Media-Induced Experience: "THE SPECTACLE": >>> For Baudrillard, television-chief purveyor of the Spectacle-is a paradigm of failed escape combinations, of implosive effects, of remembered codes information theory and cognitive psychology, but that these are the dominant phenomenologies of a virtual society. For instance, the problem of tracking anti-aircraft weapons against extremely fast targets has led to research into, and the development of, intelligent mechanisms capable of predicting future states faster than the unaugmented human brain can do. Never strike where your opponent is, but at the space they will occupy in the future. >>> Cyberpunk makes clear that information is a name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it and make our adjustments felt upon it-to live effectively is to live with adequate information, the fictions of Cyberpunk. >>>Cyberspace as described by William Gibson in Neuromancer was prefigured in Nicola Tesla's 1901 plan for a world system of totally interconnected, planetary communications. He believed he could engineer a globe unified by the universal regulation of time and fully traversed by flows of language, images, and money-all reduced to an undifferentiated flux of electrical energy. OF THE AIMS OF CYBERPUNK >>> Cyberpunk is a radical interrogation of the virtual technologies at work in contemporary society. >>>Situationist Cyberpunk flicks aside the general form of Marxist analysis...and suggests that the classical definition of productive forces is too restrictive and expands the analysis further into the whole murky field of significations, transmissions, communications, materialisations, reifications- programming phenomena. >>> Cyberpunk attempts to de-mythologize the established cultural codes, in order to decipher concealed strategies of domination, desire, will, power, and the will to power. Cue dry ice, smoke, Leni Riefenstahl. >>> Cyberpunk is hammering away against a system of appearances that is so thoroughly of the social/material that its operations are indistinguishable from those of the entire hegemonic order. They are the hegemonic order. >>> One of the key roles of the expanding electronic grid is to articulate a new social and geopolitical stratification based on immediacy of access to data. The aim of Cyberpunk is to create a state of temporary gridlock in order to insert certain secrets of its own. >>> For Cyberpunk, the computer is much more than an object; it is also an icon and a metaphor that suggests new ways of thinking about ourselves and our new environments, new ways of constructing images of what it means to be human. >>> Cyberpunk is potentially a a scrambled mass of referential fictions stolen from the near future in search of an operational strategy for the living of life, which in itself is increasingly experiencing slippage into the virtual technologies of the near future. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. 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