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Cybernetics and Gendered Spectrality in William Gibson's FICT 7 (2) pp. 115–126 Intellect Limited 2017 Short Fiction in Theory & Practice Volume 7 Number 2 fict © 2017 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/fict.7.2.115_1 Short Fiction in Theory & Practice Intellect 10.1386/fict.7.2.115_1 7 GAÏD GIRARD Université de Bretagne Occidentale 2 115 126 ‘It’s like she is a hologram © 2017 Intellect Ltd stuck behind my eyes’: 2017 Cybernetics and gendered spectrality in William ARTICLES Gibson’s Burning Chrome ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Rereading the short stories contained in the Burning Chrome collection published science fiction in 1986 is a rewarding experience. With two exceptions, all the stories predate the cyberpunk publication of Neuromancer (1984), the novel that made William Gibson world William Gibson famous and launched the cyberpunk genre. Indeed, the concept of cyberspace is gender present in the title short story of the collection and so is the idea of a matrix, cyborgs which hackers try to break into and ‘burn’. Nearly all the stories resort to male spectrality first-person narrators. The proximity and subjectivity thus created between reader and narrator crudely highlights the way in which female characters are pushed to the periphery of an already disembodied and spectralized world. Through a close look at ‘Burning Chrome’, ‘The New Rose Hotel’ and ‘Winter Market’, this article aims to show how corporate global capitalism as represented by Gibson paradoxi- cally reinforces the invisibility of women by using state-of-the art technology to turn them into seductive holograms, disembodied voices and spectral presences. The question is: can the Gibson women fight back against this centrifugal move towards non-existence and how do they go about it? www.intellectbooks.com 115 Gaïd Girard 1. See Bukatman ([1990] ‘Why aren’t there any women in cyberspace?’ asks Scott Bukatman in his 2005: 311–20). seminal book on Terminal Identity (Bukatman [1990] 2005: 314), while insist- 2. ‘No Woman Born’ ing on the unique possibilities offered by science fiction for feminist appro- (C. L. Moore, 1944) and ‘The Girl That Was priation. Before he goes on mentioning an impressive list of female science Plugged In’ (James fiction authors and critics who have transformed and enriched the scope of Tiptree Jr 1969) both the genre,1 he quotes Mary Ann Doane: ‘[W]hen technology intersects with present proto-cyborgic women while Molly the body in the realm of representation, the question of sexual difference is Millions enters the inevitably involved’ (Bukatman [1990] 2005: 314). Although Bukatman’s state- matrix in Neuromancer ment could be qualified,2 the intersection between technology and the body (1984) although she does not control it. indeed takes specific forms in cyberpunk fiction; the emergence of this SF He, She and It (Marge subgenre that conflates ‘the realm of high-tech and the modern pop under- Piercy 1991), a novel inspired by the golem ground’ and ‘radically redefine [s] the nature of humanity, of the self’ (Sterling legend and staging [1986] 1994: ix, xi) is contemporary with the exponential development of digi- several augmented tal technology. Computer networks have created a new spatiality parallel to women postdates Bukatman’s statement the geographic topography of experiential reality, which promotes ‘discorpora- by a year. Gibson tive fantasies of cyberspace’ (Sconce 2000: 206). When operators jack into the has staged a fully matrix, they enter an illusionary world where they move without the encum- competent female cyberspace operator brance of their real body, seeking some measure of spectrality (in the basic in his latest novel, The sense of the disappearance of the body here). How then does sexual difference Peripheral ([2014] 2015). Yet, feminist critics function in a world where virtual reality takes pride of place and disembod- have generally agreed ies its human actors? What happens to women who very rarely operate the with Bukatman’s matrix themselves in a world that ghosts human presence? cultural critique of cyberpunk (e.g. Nicola Nixon: ‘Cyberpunk: Cyberpunk and spectrality Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Cyberpunk fiction famously presented an extensive image of ‘discorporative’ Keeping the Boys Satisfied?’ [1992]). cyberspace in Gibson’s pioneer work Neuromancer ([1984] 2000), defined as ‘a consensual hallucination, a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system’ (Gibson [1984] 2000: 67); the novel created a new and strongly visual image of a technological space in which the forces of late capitalism fight fierce battles for the control of cutting- edge inventions, data vaults and informational networks, protected behind high walls of ICE (Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics) or ice, and labyrin- thine processes. Underground and proletarian console cowboys such as Case, the main protagonist of Neuromancer or Bobby, the initial Gibson hacker of ‘Burning Chrome’ (1982) edgily take part in these battles from time to time. Both characters belong to the underworld of the Sprawl and try to make a living by taking advantage of the interstitial spaces created in the confronta- tions between corporate conglomerates and the Yakusa (the powerful organ- ized crime syndicate), participating in all kinds of black market deals involving high-tech activities. ‘Burning Chrome’ predates Neuromancer and appeared in a collection bearing the same title published later in 1986. It already displays the exhila- rating but dangerous power of cyberspace journeys. It tells of two hackers, Bobby and the narrator, Automatic Jack, who plan to rob Chrome, a (female) big shot in Nighttown by entering her computer system and siphoning off her accounts. The heist requires speed and virtuosity for the intrusion (the burn- ing) not to be detected by the ice walls of cybernetic protection. Gibson uses the expressions ‘cyberspace’ and ‘the matrix’ for the first time in this particular story. This burning presents the first Gibsonian instance of the drug-like state of cerebral intensity the hacker experiences as he interacts through his own deck with somebody else’s computer system and has to be faster than the in-built defences of the other machine. 116 Short Fiction in Theory & Practice ‘It’s like she is a hologram stuck behind my eyes’ As Bruce Sterling puts it: ‘for the cyberpunks, technology is visceral […]; 3. I use here Luckhurst’s phrase in his critique it is pervasive, utterly intimate. Not outside us, but next to us. Under our skin; of Derrida’s Specters often, inside our minds’ (Sterling [1986] 1994: xi). In cyberspace, the body is of Marx, which he sees overridden by the lure of the matrix. Sconce in his cultural history of electric- as too generalizing, a critique Pereen ity explains how the fusing of electrical flow and consciousness creates the addresses, stating illusion of a ‘“presence” [which] exists either as the beatitude of an electroni- in the introduction cally liberated subject or as the incarcerating mirages of an encroaching elec- to her The Spectral Metaphor that ‘not tronic subjectivity’ (Sconce 2000: 12). Automatic Jack, the narrator of the story, all living ghosts are explains how he experiences this brain-computer interface: dispossessed in the same manner or to the same degree, nor is it Bodiless, we [Bobby and Jack] swerve into Chrome’s castle of ice. helpful to universalize And we’re fast, fast. It feels like we’re surfing the crest of the invading the condition of spectralization. program, hanging ten above the seething glitch systems as they mutate. The differential We’re sentient patches of oil swept along corridors of shadow. incarnations Somewhere we have bodies, very far away, in a crowded loft roofed of the spectral metaphor need to be with steel and glass. Somewhere we have microseconds, maybe time left acknowledged’ (Pereen to pull out. 2014: 15). (Gibson [1986] 2003: 184) Jack enjoys being turned into a ‘sentient patch of oil’ in ‘corridors of shadow’, activating rogue programmes in order to reach the heart of heavily protected data bases, incurring the risk of being attacked by neural feedback and ‘flat- lined’, like Dixie in Neuromancer. This voluntary severance from bodily existence can be seen (and has been seen) as an index of the increasing process of de-realization incurred by the development of virtual reality through media screens and digital technology as theorized by Baudrillard. Reality is subsumed by hyper-reality, and indi- vidual identity is ghosted in a world controlled by the economics of communi- cation. This corresponds to a first obvious level of disembodiment in this early cyberpunk text. Yet, the narrator is not the main site of a ghosting process. Once the heist is successfully performed, Jack comes back to reality only to find that Rikki the young girl he is in love with has disappeared. He discov- ers that she too has exploited the possibilities of the underworld to reach her goal to become a simstim (simulated stimulation) star. She will not reap- pear, although the narrator sees spectralized traces of her in countless urban images: And sometimes late at night, I’ll pass a window with posters of simstim stars, all those beautiful, identical eyes staring back at me out of faces that are nearly identical, and sometimes the eyes are hers, but none of the faces are, none of them ever are, and I see her far out on the edge of all this sprawl of night and cities, and then she waves goodbye. (Gibson [1986] 2003: 204) My contention is that in Gibson’s imagined world that dematerializes the body through a full array of virtual connections, women’s bodily existence is pushed even further to the periphery of the represented world of cyberpunk until their presence becomes spectral traces, at one remove from already extensively de-realized male bodies. I follow here Esther Pereen’s lead, who in the wake of Derrida’s ‘spectral turn’,3 is concerned with ‘the living ghosts, […] those people who, already in their lifetime, resemble dispossessed ghosts in that they are ignored and considered expendable’ (Pereen 2014: 14).
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