The claim has been made that Neuromancer celebrates in a way previously unattested to in the annals of SF the existence of mind without body. While I am not wholly convinced of this, I think the secondary readings that we had this week offer a window to a reading that balances on the scales of class the consideration given by the novel to the possibility of thinking without feeling.
Both Huntington and Olsen observe cyberpunk’s particular investment in a social “fringe” or “underclass”: “Neorealists focus on the trials and tribulations of the spoiled homogeneous upper middle class; cyberpunks explore the heterogeneous fringes of our culture” (Olsen 148); “The class-generated structure of feeling that we seek to uncover reveals itself not in the concrete surface references but in the formal structure of the work” (Huntington 136). Here, Huntington is clearly referring to “newness” as a formal property of the text; Olsen would probably think that narrative disjunction is the more salient formal property. Both properties, in both these essays, have the effect of situating the reader on the outside of the social structure in a way that’s typically postmodern. (In fact, “newness” as Huntington describes it might be the same thing as “narrative disjunction”—which might be a better rebuttal to his claims, it seems to me, than the argument that “cyberspace” has become too familiar to be “new.”)
The book seems to advocate in favor of the mind without the body with respect (1) to the main character’s affinity for cyberspace (2) to the main character’s affinity for psychotropic drugs. Essentially, drugs and cyberspace seem to do exactly the same things for Case. Each of these examples is coded according to class.
To the first claim: In Neuromancer, drug use is equivalent to engagement in cyberspace is equivalent to the escape of the mind from the body. When Case describes his longing for cyberspace following his neurological maiming, it sounds exactly like drug withdrawal: “He’d cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bed slab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn’t there” (5). When Armitage arranges for Case’s inability to get high, he equates the one activity with the other: “‘Thanks but I was enjoying that dependency.’ ‘Good, because you have a new one’” (45). Conversely, when Case starts using the drug betaphenethylamine (which conveniently bypasses his new pancreas and liver), the effects of the drug are always described as an escape from the flesh to the mechanical: “His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished” (154); “The high wore away, the chromed skeleton corroding hourly, flesh growing solid, the drug-flesh replaced with the meat of his life” (155). The phrase “drug-flesh” clearly delineates the extent to which drug usage—like the engagement of cyberspace—is opposed to fleshly existence. (In Neuromancer, the act of singing on to cyberspace is called “jacking in”; the TV show Futurama has a pretty good reading of this phrase and activity, actually: Bender the robot becomes addicted to the illicit use of electricity, which is called “jacking on.”)
That these examples are coded socially is somewhat more difficult to demonstarate. Both the Huntington and Olsen articles, to the extent that each is interested in class, point out that part of the difficulty of seeing class difference in a text that is committed to some (in this case, I would argue, many) aspects of postmodern representation is that the social order tends to be meaningfully obscured. Thus, the only real instance in Neuromancer in which we get a glimpse of a social group that’s not clearly identifiable as “fringe”—as Huntington notes—is the Tessier-Ashpool aristocracy. They are, of course, users of many and varied drugs. The difference is that for them—and this is essentially all I have to aver in favor of my argument—is that drugs simply don’t work; 3Jane: “I find drug use in general to be boring” (228). Ashpool is surrounded by drugs, true; but he is miserable, whereas Case is genuinely fond of both his addictions.
In this case, the book’s advocacy of a total split between the mind and the body might be a sort of Marxian parody via an extreme limit of alienation. As in, the only way to beat American capitalism is to beat it at its own game. If you live only in your mind, can you still be alienated from your labor?