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Home , Alfred Bester

Chapter One

1. Enter : An Itinerary of Visual Manifestations

A number of critics associated with postmodern theory and criticism, such as Jean-François Lyotard, Fredric Jameson, Brian McHale, David Porush, Arthur Kroker, and Jean Baudrillard, tie the evolution of postmodern culture to technological developments that emerged roughly in the years after World War II. The writers and artists in touch with these changes have been associated with as well as with other modes of production and experimentalism including rock music, television, video art and performance. In that sense, and within the context of post-industrial culture, genre science fiction and the literary avant-garde started interacting with one another. This gave rise to a new kind of experimental writing radical in its form and narrative structure, as a new breed of authors came to the fore, able to combine scientific knowledge with aesthetic, innovative styles. This new stage, characterised by Jameson as “a new and historically original penetration and colonisation of Nature and the Unconscious” (1984: 78), was forced into postmodern society by the introduction of a range of high-tech products such as advanced military weapons, sophisticated surveillance equipment, complex medical methods and practices, prosthetic devices and cellular phones. In addition, the expansion of the advertising, information, and media industries has to be considered, as it underlines the new ideology of the newly-emergent technologically-oriented society where everything is mass-produced, reproduced and commodified. As Greil Marcus has noted, these three powerful industries have:

[…] turned upon individual men and women, seized their subjective emotions and experiences, changed those once evanescent phenomena into objective, replicable commodities, placed them on the market, set their prices, and sold them back to those who had, once, brought emotions and

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experiences out of themselves – to people who, as prisoners of the spectacle, could now find such things only on the market. (1989: 101)

Notable in this regard have been products like TV sets, film projectors, video and CD players, computers, cameras, scanner and fax machines, which more easily than other products have started colonising and exploiting the imaginations, feelings, and desires of individuals. These new technological systems have such a capacity to recreate experiences that people can no longer resist resorting to them to conjure up past events, sounds, and images. Mainstream ‘realist’ writers found technologies such as these difficult to deal with, because of the specialised knowledge that they required.1 In the nineteenth century even the average mind could grasp the changes brought about by the steam engine, but today an analogous understanding of what is taking place, in computer technology for example, is difficult to grasp. By placing science fiction in the context of postmodern theory and criticism an attempt is made to express the contemporary worries of a culture which has shifted away from the norms of older industrial economies, seeking profits from the sale of tangible products which animate images. Radical science fiction, which in the eighties came to be termed cyberpunk, made its appearance as early as the fifties and early sixties, when writers such as , William S. Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and Thomas Pynchon began publishing

1 However, William Gibson wrote on a manual typewriter with little or no knowledge of computer design. Scott Bukatman notes: “It is a tale often told in cybercultural enclaves and English departments: William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a manual typewriter. Really? Yes! There is something charming about the anecdote, and it is not difficult to locate the source of that charm. A simple bit of irony is at work in the apparently singular fact that this novel all about computers, the novel that invented cyberspace (sort of), the hippest, highest novel of the 1980s, should have been written on such an antiquated device. That this primal work of electronic culture was produced, not on a word processor or even an electric typewriter, but rather on an archaic piece of nineteenth-century technology, seems worthy of continual note” (in Dery 1994: 71-72). This point raises the question whether the leap of technology into literature and art is more of an imaginative response to the ubiquity of technological devices rather than a desire to keep up-to- date with upcoming technologies.

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