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)
• p. 51:

`Cyberspace.  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.  Unthinkable complexity.  Lines
of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and 
constellations of data.  Like city lights, receding . . . .'

Code

• As fabric (pp. 61, 169, 181, 216, 262)

Wintermute / Neuromancer

• Wintermute as "purposive mind," conscious decision maker (p. 229)
• Plans vs. Situations ()

Power =

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 graphical representation of (p. 51)
• Radical subjectivity (p. 63)
• Compared to sex; literal "ecstacy" (pp. 16, 33)

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.")