Beyond Disability: Extraordinary Bodies in the Work of William Gibson
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Beyond Disability: Extraordinary Bodies in the Work of William Gibson Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität zu Köln im Fach Englische Philologie vorgelegt von Olga Tarapata geb. am 10.05.1987 in Ratibor (Polen) Köln, 03.04.2018 Olga Tarapata (Dr. phil.) studied English, Biology, and Educational Sciences at the University of Cologne. She completed her dissertation as a scholarship holder of the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne in 2018. She specializes in North American literature and culture, science fiction, and disability studies. Olga Tarapata Beyond Disability: Extraordinary Bodies in the Work of William Gibson This book is a slightly revised version of the author’s doctoral thesis completed in 2018 at the University of Cologne, Faculty of Arts and Humanities. Table of Contents Acknowledgements | 7 1. Introduction: From Prostheses to Processes | 9 2. The Extraordinary Body in Theory | 34 2.1 The Body and Medicine | 34 2.1.1 The Normal Body | 34 2.1.2 The Medical Model of Disability | 42 2.1.3 Medical Romanticism | 44 2.1.4 Mechanical Romantics and Technoromanticism | 45 2.1.5 The Norm and the Novel | 46 2.2 The Body and Society | 52 2.2.1 The Social Model of Disability | 52 2.2.2 Intersectionality | 56 2.3 The Body and Actor-Networks | 66 2.3.1 Actor-Network Theory and the Articulation of the Body | 67 2.3.2 Towards a New Disability Realism | 71 3. Revisiting the Body in Gibson’s Reception | 77 4. The Extraordinary Body in Fiction | 86 4.1. The Body and Medicine: The Sprawl Trilogy | 86 4.1.1 Prosthetics Paradise | 86 4.1.2 Dis|Embodiment | 89 4.1.3 The Body is a Machine | 92 4.1.4 Cyberstatic Bodies | 98 4.1.5 Disability as Punishment | 101 4.1.6 Technoromanticism | 103 4.2. The Body and Society: The Bridge Trilogy | 106 4.2.1 Social Toxicity | 106 4.2.2 Towards Materiality | 114 4.2.3 Singular Context | 118 4.3. The Body and Actor-Networks: The Bigend Trilogy | 126 4.3.1 Psychology | 127 4.3.2 Sensitivity | 130 4.3.3 Capacities of Incapacity | 140 5. Conclusion: Beyond the Extraordinary Body | 147 Works Cited | 153 Acknowledgments In the process of writing this dissertation many people made a difference. First and foremost I would like to thank Hanjo Berressem for his sustained inspiration, encouragement, and criticism, which I have deeply appreciated as a student, assistant, and mentee at the University of Cologne. From entering a lecture hall in my very first semester to leaving the Kathy Acker Library after my doctoral defense, it was Hanjo’s classes that made me feel that I had found the right place for articulating my thoughts and questions about culture, society, life, you name it. Hanjo’s sharp and unapologetic analyses of literature and philosophy, his profound interest in the natural sciences and interdisciplinarity fueled my enthusiasm for knowledge and research and made me aware that academic work also came with responsibility. Without Hanjo this book would not exist today. I would like to thank my second supervisor Urte Helduser for her thorough and constructive criticism as well as my external supervisor David Mitchell, whose own academic work has introduced me to ever new and newly meaningful ways of thinking. Many thanks go to the team of the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne for funding my dissertation, supporting my conference ideas, and generally for establishing an environment that allowed me to meet people, who I value as talented researchers as much as wonderful personalities. In so many ways, I am grateful to Moritz Ingwersen. No matter the geographical location (Cologne, Berlin, Amsterdam, Prague, Bristol, Peterborough, Toronto, Chicago, or Los Angeles) or the locale (gritty punk bars, second-hand book stores, cozy cafés, thick pine forests, the office of the English seminar, or our kitchen tables), with Moritz I have had the liveliest, most thought-provoking day-long and night-long discussions about music, literature, art, thermodynamics, autopoiesis, constructivism, love, friendship, and society. He also taught me the merits of a healthy ‘f*** it’ attitude. Thank you for always believing in me. Moreover, I would like to thank my colleagues and friends Melanie Brück, Eleana Vaja, and Christopher Quadt for reading, re-reading, proofreading bits and pieces of my dissertation at various stages and more importantly for encouraging me to pursue my project in moments of doubt. Thank you, Timo Kaerlein for your boundless curiosity, supportive pragmatism and, of course, for making the final all-nighters of formatting fun. Thanks also go out to my friends Pauline Kosasih, Martin Weinreich, Karolin Kummer, Louise Shuttleworth, Florian Burr, Konstantin Butz, Björn Sonnenberg- Schrank, and Mirjam Kappes, who have all supported me in their own inimitable ways. And, finally, I am very grateful to my parents for caring more about whether I ate healthy, got enough sleep, and was happy rather than my academic achievements, which they at times observed with a certain bewilderment that expressed itself in head-shakes and shrugs. And yet without any familiarity with academic work, they 7 have not missed the opportunity to show me how proud they were of my enthusiasm, ambition, and accomplishments. 8 1. Introduction: From Prostheses to Processes This book aims to conceptualize figurations of disability in the work of contemporary U.S.-American writer William Gibson. By adopting a disability studies framework, I argue that Gibson’s narratives contain yet untapped potential to re-think non- normative bodies and minds thereby offering a new perspective on the author who is known for coining “cyberspace.” Over the course of twelve novels, and more than twenty short stories,1 Gibson’s specific literary style and concrete thematic interests have varied. Yet, from his short story collection Burning Chrome (1986) to his latest and first graphic novel Archangel (2017), Gibson’s oeuvre has always been concerned with the question of the materiality and embeddedness of an embodied human being. This is not to deny the author’s explorations of new, imaginary, or re-issued technologies, and particularly the unanticipated possibilities of their “misusage” as manifested in his famous claim that, “the street finds its own uses for things” (“Burning Chrome” 215). The specification of “things” in this iconic sentence indicates “the stuff [that is clinically used] to counter senile amnesia” and usually eludes attention by scholars (“Burning Chrome” 215). This widely unrecognized reference to a failing physiological functionality of the body and its medical treatment lends particular import to the purpose of this thesis, which is to re-read Gibson as a writer of the extraordinary body. In Gibson’s pioneering cyberpunk fiction, readers experience everything from simulated sensory perception technologies in “Fragments of a Hologram Rose” (1977), reflective mirrorshades in “Johnny Mnemonic” (1981), a whirring myoelectric arm prostheses in “Burning Chrome” (1982), and a corrosive exoskeleton in “The Winter Market” (1985) to the more traditional science fiction tropes of time travel, parallel universes, human cloning, and military quantum transfer technologies (The Peripheral, Archangel). Notably, all of the radical, futuristic technologies of Gibson’s fiction decisively relate to the human body. By presenting figures that are damaged, deformed, and dysfunctional as well as sutured, restored, prosthetisized and technologically enhanced, Gibson interrogates the body’s abilities, challenges its appearances, and confronts readers’ preconceptions of the normal body. In this sense Gibson is a naturalist rather than a futurist, an anthropologist of the present rather than an archeologist of the future. The overt corporeal exceptionalities of Gibson’s characters elude normative classifications. Instead of ossifying the characters’ relations as “special” at best, “deviant” at worst, Gibson opens up innovative ways to conceptualize extraordinary bodies. While all three trilogies equally draw attention to the extraordinary body, they do so in different ways. There is a distinct development in the representation of the manner and effect of corporeal extension from the Sprawl to the Bigend trilogy. In the Sprawl trilogy, prosthetic repair and rehabilitation are depicted as a common cultural practice, whereas in the Bigend trilogy the medical cure of the characters’ “deficiencies” for purposes of normative alignment is no longer a desired measure. I argue that this transition is not primarily related to a shift in genre, which does exist and will be classified as from technoromanticism to new realism, but instead that it is 1 Apart from the collected stories of Burning Chrome there are several uncollected (all commissioned) stories, among others “Tokyo Collage” (1988), “Tokyo Suite” (1988), “Hippy Hat Brain Parasite” (1983), “The Nazi Lawn Dwarf Murders” (unpublished), “Doing Television” (1990), slightly expanded and republished as “Darwin,” “Skinner’s Room” (1990), “Academy Leader” (1991), “Cyber-Claus” (1991), “Where the Holograms Go” (1993), “Thirteen Views of a Cardboard City” (1996), “Dougal Discarnate” (2010). 9 motivated by a changing attitude toward the “broken” body that seeks restoration. The socio-historical negotiation of bodies suffering from individual incapacities or social disadvantages is located in the field of disability studies. My analysis goes hand in hand with the denaturalization of disability as a stable category of inherent individual deficits, and draws on Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s terminology regarding the “extraordinary” body, which she refers to as a “paradigm of what culture calls deviant” (Extraordinary Bodies 6). A main concern of this book is to understand the formal qualities of Gibson’s writing with regard to the forms and functions of the disabled figure, and to further demonstrate how this literary style and underlying ideology changes in parallel with the advancement of cultural conceptions of disability. I distinguish two major shifts over the course of the novels, one on the level of genre and the other on the conceptual level.