ANTH245-2007-11-26

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Neuromancer

Business

• Responses

Recap

• Blogging and Identity
• Complements discussion of community
• Textual selves
• Fun: http://www.lkozma.net/wpv/index.html?map.it

Segue

• Programs as texts ...

Neuromancer

Background

• Late 1970s and early 1980s
• Punk, Ska and New Wave
• URL for the text: http://project.cyberpunk.ru/lib/neuromancer/

Close Reading

• Page 1:

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned
to a dead channel.
    `It's not like I'm using,' Case heard someone say, as he
shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the
Chat.  `It's like my body's developed this massive drug defi-
ciency.'  It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke.  The Chatsubo
was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there
for a week and never hear two words in Japanese.
    Ratz was tending bar, his prosthetic arm jerking monoto-
nously as he filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin.  He saw
Case and smiled, his teeth a webwork of East European steel
and brown decay.  Case found a place at the bar, between the
unlikely tan on one of Lonny Zone's whores and the crisp naval
uniform of a tall African whose cheekbones were ridged with
precise rows of tribal scars.  `Wage was in here early, with two
joeboys,' Ratz said, shoving a draft across the bar with his
good hand.  `Maybe some business with you, Case?'

Themes and Symbols

Neuromancer can be read as a postmoderm myth -- a narrative rich with condensed symbols of the age, both an encompassment of a preceding world and the portent of the next ...

Multinational Corporations

• Examples?
• Compare to Lyotard
• Mapped onto the body

Cyberspace

• Compare Cyberspace to the World Wide Web
• Community?
• Culture?
• Representation of the matrix
• HCI (Human Computer Interface)

Code

• "code fabric"

Wintermute / Neuromancer

• Conscious mind
• Plans vs. Situations ()

Affordable beauty

• See DEVO image

Meat

• Bodies and Persons

AI

• Turing

Disembodiment

• AI
• SimStim
• Cyberspace
• Riviera's eyes
• Neuromancer's "reality"

Perversity

• Riviera

The Matrix

• Cyberspace as a representation of

Kula

• See pg. 6

Bateson

• Find the reference (p. 84: "He became a subject in an experimental program that sought

to reverse schizophrenia through the application of cybernetic models.")