---The tension
between a growing affinity with technology and concerns about protecting
the environment have found unique expression in contemporary forms of science
fiction, including cybernetic (aka cyberpunk, postcyberpunk) literature.
The effects of harvesting nature in an effort to smooth the way toward
a utopian future raise fundamental questions to pioneers and practitioners
of these postmodern literary movements. How do we exploit technology while
simultaneously preserving a natural order? To what degree is technology
an extension of a natural order? To what degree are humans merely a species
of technology?
---
Since the 1960s, science fiction has concerned itself with ecological issues,
exploring the consequences of technology and industry on a fragile planet.
Unlike "golden age" science fiction, which could posit fantastic worlds
in distant futures as backdrops for speculations about our fate, more contemporary
forms of science fiction tend to ground us in worlds that are close to
immediate experience. This quality lends a sense of urgency to the work,
an appeal to social ethics. When reading of alien worlds millennia away
that may echo ours, we are hardly challenged to address the social ills
portrayed. These later forms of science fiction represent mandates to act
on the concerns expressed, and to act now. Indeed, these stories and cybernetic
literature are good shorthand expressions for capturing a prevalent contemporary
sensibility regarding our place in nature and our responsibility for discovering
an ecologically sustainable future. ENG 307U invites us to consider the
inevitable negotiation of this terrain and the incorporation, integration,
and embodiment of organism and machine while surveying the vitalization
of machine.
--- The seeds
of ecologically oriented science fiction originated in the New Wave movement,
a term coined by writer Judith Merril in a 1966 essay in The Magazine of
Fantasy and Science Fiction. The New Wave shifted emphasis from the physical
to the social sciences, radicalized notions of community, and acknowledged
that science and technology can be used for dark purposes. New Wavers experimented
with gender, relationships, and ideas of self as a series of constructed
identities more influenced by social, political, and economic forces than
by biological states. Ecofeminist science fiction boomed in the late 1960s
and in the 1970s with groundbreaking works like Ursula K. Le Guin's The
Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and Joanna Russ's Female Man (1975). The effect
was a shift in science fiction from "hard science," the desire to portray
plausibly a world in which unimagined technological advances have occurred,
to "soft science" emphasizing the interpersonal and psychological. This
explosive interest in gender construction fortuitously intersected with
the ecological movement labeled "ecofeminism" in the 1970s.
--- Science
fiction of this type largely began as a reaction against a mechanistic
worldview. It questions the notion that natural and social systems are
like smoothly running machines, a disturbing view that produces an ethic
of domination and reduces nature to a commodity. In such a world, hierarchies
prevail; people dominate nature, men dominate women, the rich dominate
the weak, all because "that's the way things are." Writers of science fiction
turn this view upside down, creating worlds where nature and culture subtly
and intricately interconnect, where things aren't all black or white, where
traditionally dominant institutions devolve into close knit and caring
communities.
--- The mechanistic
worldview has dominated western culture since the 17th century scientific
revolution, which constructs the world as a vast machine made up of interchangeable
atomic parts easily manipulated by humans. The earth is not a living entity
but an inert construction insensitive to human conduct. By extension, humans
function to run the machine efficiently. Sir Francis Bacon could be used
as a poster child for the growing dominance of the mechanistic view. For
Bacon, nature must be made a "slave" in the service of the human drive
to improve our material condition. Science and technology therefore become
the means by which humans bring nature into servitude--quite in contrast
with the assumption that scientific inquiry and the tools it invents to
probe its subject represent an earnest desire to understand nature rather
than to control it.
--- The view
that the earth is a machine and that technology helps us manipulate it
displaced the organic perspective prevalent in the Renaissance, which holds
that the earth is a living being. Its winds are the breath of a respiratory
system, its rivers and streams the blood coursing through circulatory veins,
its seasons the signs of a reproductive cycle linking birth to death in
endless patterns of renewal. The organic view did not disappear completely,
of course. We see it re-emerge in notable "back to nature" movements including
Romanticism, American transcendentalism, the philosophies of Goethe and
Schiller, and to some degree in Karl Marx's early conceptualization of
socialism. It is worth noting the relevance of this latter manifestation,
since extrapolating a mechanistic worldview to industrial capitalism is
not a difficult stretch. In The Communist Manifesto Marx asks, "Subjection
of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry
and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing
of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations
conjured out of the ground--what earlier century had even a presentiment
that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?" Marx
recognized capitalistic society itself as a machine that exists to produce
goods for consumption, one that exploits human labor as another expendable
natural resource that always will be in abundant supply. Killing this machine,
Marx believed, would inevitably return us to a more natural order; the
equalizing effect of socialism on the social classes means less production
for production's sake and de facto more conservation of resources, with
emphasis placed on what we need to live well, not on what we need to dominate
others. Threads of Marxist ideology therefore run throughout contemporary
science fiction, which similarly imagines replacing a social construct
defined by one group's domination over others with egalitarian, even utopian,
alternatives. An important distinction between Marxism and some forms of
science fiction is the latter's prevalent tendency to embrace pacifist
means to the revolutionary end, in contrast with Marx's belief that only
violent overthrow can effect real change.
---
Authors of cybernetic fiction, often regarded as a sub-genre of science
fiction are equally concerned with the themes that give contemporary science
fiction its identity, yet these writers tend to imagine dystopian consequences
of the problems that both address. The term "cybernetic literature" therefore
is intended to suggest a tradition encompassing several postmodern movements
and extending the discussion of ecological sustainability raised notably
by ecofeminists. Cybernetics (from the Greek kubernetes or pilot) is a
term coined in the 1940s and used to characterize emerging communication
technologies. Its meaning came to suggest someone who could control and
direct flows of information. The first crest of the new wave is cyberpunk,
whose luminaries include the likes of William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, Bruce
Sterling, and Nicole Griffith. Cyberpunk stories are "cyber" because they
depict characters who control information technology and who are, ironically,
controlled by it. These characters are "punk" because their central value
is social resistance, particularly resistance against media and multinational
corporations that recycle people's desires into commodities for sale.
--- Like other
forms of contemporary science fiction, cyberpunk questions the hierarchies
of the existing world, but it portrays more specifically the post-industrial
anxiety of present times. As William Gibson has said, "Technology has already
changed us, and now we have to figure a way to stay sane within that change."
In this obsession with technology, cyberpunk writers embrace what many
consider the most recent of four significant revolutions of thought that
have produced profound psychic transformations in the human condition.
The first is Copernican; the earth, and by extension, human kind, is not
the center of the universe. The second is Darwinian; humans are not unique.
The third is psychoanalytic; humans are behavioral systems in which reason
does not always rule. The fourth is technological; our capacity to create
and apply technology defines our identity as a species. As Joseph W. Slade
puts the matter, "Technology is what makes humans human."
---
It is little wonder, then, that cyberpunk literature surveys emerging technologies
in order to predict evolutionary horizons. The most notable of these is
the now popularized notion of cyberspace, a metaphysical dimension we slip
into through computer cables. Gibson first conceived of cyberspace as a
transcendent experience owing to "a consensual hallucination." Through
computer implants in the brain, humans can "jack in" to a matrix of electrical
impulses that produce virtual experiences. In essence, one's mind is transformed
into a computer program that can access worldwide information systems in
seconds. It is an artificial reality that, according to Pat Cadigan, offers
a conception of what information looks like. Cyberspace is limitless, a
metaphysical plane populated by information cowboys, ghosts, personifications
of electronic and biological forces, and independent artificially intelligent
programs, all of whom exist in or come to the matrix to acquire the new
commodity dominating economic exchange: Information.
--- Perhaps
the greatest appeal of the concept of cyberspace is the sense that it offers
the last frontier for human experimentation and exploitation. As John Perry
Barlow points out, cyberspace has much in common with the 19th century
western frontier: "It is vast, unmapped, culturally and legally ambiguous,
verbally terse, hard to get around in, and up for grabs. It is, of course,
a perfect breeding ground for outlaws and new ideas about liberty." Catherine
Richards sees the cyberpunk in cyberspace as a nostalgic throwback mixing
elements of beat rebel with techno-surrealism, a "Jack Kerouac on the road
to the new virgin frontier." Cyberpunk heroes can be characterized as marginal
figures who may be cybernetically enhanced but who represent the last and
best of the human spirit. Typically they stand in opposition to the dehumanizing
multinational corporations and the "dance of biz," to invoke Gibson once
more. Their prototype comes from the wild west but also 1940s film noir
and hard-boiled detective novels in the style of Raymond Chandler. Thus,
they possess a chivalric, even romantic, quality while maintaining an image
of rough independence.
--- The dominant
themes of cyberpunk include the cybernetic breakdown of the classic nature/culture
opposition, where the privileged status of humans over machines is questioned.
In previous science fiction, notably the work of influential masters such
as Philip K. Dick, the idea that machines can be "more human than human"
finds disturbing application; in an increasingly technological world, humans
risk becoming automatons, devoid of empathy, existing as mechanistic devices
rather than as souls in organic bodies. In cyberpunk, by contrast, the
distinctions blur. Humans can be part machine; machines can be part human;
in fact, the synthesis of human and machine is viewed as an inevitable
step on the evolutionary ladder. Cybervisions imagine a potentially nonnatural
future populated by cybernetically enhanced humans whose organic nature
becomes superceded by hybrid cyborg forms. Cyberpunk thus acknowledges
that the Alien or Other resides within us. The possible variations on human
existence are manifold, ranging from meat to mind. That is, one can exist
housed either in a physical, organic body, or one can exist as a series
of electronically captured memories on CD disks played in cyberspace. Organic
bodies tend to be augmented with prosthetic limbs, implanted circuitry,
cosmetic surgery, and genetic alteration while the mind makes use of brain-computer
interfaces, artificial intelligence, and neurochemistry. What is human,
and what is self, in this bold new world?
---
Cyberpunk poses several central questions: Are we becoming post-human entities?
Are we becoming less organic even as multinational corporations, which
seek to thrive and reproduce, become the dominant evolving organisms? Gibson
imagines, for example, Tessier Ashpool, an "immortal hive" that began as
a family business and grew to become an artificially intelligent computer
program whose human creators slumber in cryonic chambers while the program
replicates itself and runs the show. Multinationals acquire supreme power
as individuals become more marginalized and governments are subsumed to
the megacorporations.
--- Since the
1980s, cyberpunk and other forms of contemporary science fiction, including
ribofunk and steampunk, have moved through postmodern phases to encompass
chaos and complexity theory. Connie Willis, Nicole Griffith, Neal Stephenson,
and William Gibson in his more recent work are foraying into this newer
territory. Chaos theory suggests that we may rely too heavily on the deterministic,
linear equations we use to predict the behavior of simple mechanisms. In
a world where small effects may produce large effects, chaos abounds. To
cite the prevalent metaphor coined by MIT Professor Edward Lorenz, a butterfly
flapping its wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas. Lorenz developed
weather-predicting models based on nonlinear equations, which take into
account the chaotic, as opposed to linear, relationships that govern vast
environmental systems. The ecological models originating in chaos and complexity
theory since have been applied in biological, neurological, genetic, and
molecular biological studies.
--- As heirs
to the cyberpunk world in which existence is dominated by multinational
conglomerates marketing junk, a commercial enterprise devoid of ethics
beyond making a buck, a society that represents the ultimate triumph of
late capitalism, cybervisionaries embrace chaos and complexity theory because
it offers the only hope for the individual trapped in an overwhelming system.
If a butterfly's wings can blow a tornado into being, then the actions
of a single individual can bring about social change and a rebirth of political
consciousness.
---
Another significant emerging technology of interest to the cybernetic tradition
is nanotechnology, an experimental science used to manipulate matter at
the molecular level in order to build molecular computers. Through the
process of manipulating atoms and complex organic patterns, one can make
essentially anything that is physically possible. The alchemical machine
predicted by nanotechnologists would be able to turn hayseed into fillet
mignon. The extraordinary outcomes predicted include the eradication of
poverty, hunger, and aging, as nanotechnology promises to give humans utter
control over physical matter, a cornucopia of previously scarce commodities.
The original conception of this revolutionary science came from Nobel laureate
Richard Feynman, but it was Eric Drexler who popularized the theory, bringing
it into mainstream discussion. Of interest to the Pacific Northwest, nanotechnology
is among the University of Washington's and, more recently, Portland State
University's cutting edge research interests.
---
As explored by science fiction writers, the application of nanotechnology
raises troubling questions and generates cautionary tales. Neal Stephenson,
for example, challenges the assumption that this new biological manipulation
will facilitate global egalitarianism. In his view, the wealthy will obtain
more access to the fruits of this technology, creating a stronger divide
between those who have and those who need. In Greg Bear's prognostications,
the development of nanotechnology will parallel that of atomic fusion,
originally conceived as a means of providing benign and abundant energy
but ultimately appropriated by the military for machines of war. Finally,
for William Gibson, along with these threats comes the possibility that
the creatures produced by nanotechnology will self-perpetuate, in turn
creating alien architectures that will blur the distinction between what
is organic yet ersatz and what is natural.
--- Will our
growing dependence on technology displace us from nature? This class invites
you to experience diverse visions of possible worlds where the distinctions
between technology and biology, utopian wishfulness and cynical realism,
urban and rural, virtual and real, blur and are re-shaped.
introduction : syllabus : assignments : resources
copyright geared sun arts 2001