race/gender/science fiction - mind vs. body

Minds and Bodies

roseblack — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 11:35:38 +0000

There has been a great deal of discussion about the relationship of mind and body in the Neuromancer. Certainly, much of Case's interaction with the world, both cybernetic and physical, is governed by his longing for "the matrix" and his disgust toward meat-centric experience. Of particular interest to me is how his predisposition toward the purely cerebral plays out in his interactions with the three 'bodiless minds' of the story.

Case's exchanges with the construct of the Dixie Flatline are, while often biting or awkward, fundamentally comfortable. However, when confronted by the reality of Wintermute, Case disconnects and runs, despite the effort he's gone through to achieve the meeting. An easy explanation is that, despite his conscious negative attitude toward bodies, as a mental being entirely dependent on and inextricably tied to a body, Case is discomfited by the presence of an apparent consciousness completely disconnected from a tangible form. While the Flatline is now without form, the consciousness built into the construct arose from the experiences of a life lived an embodied human. Wintermute is completely inorganic, to the point that it must map its ideas into various personalities in order to communicate. On the other hand, Case's preference for the Flatline construct could be read as a choice for the familiar mind in an unfamiliar form over Wintermute's inorganic habitation of familiar forms. In this way, Case chooses the substance over the flesh of the familiar, a choice reaffirmed by his rejection of a life with something that feels like, by may not actually be, Linda Lee, at the end.

With the intervention of the Turing police, another critical difference comes to the forefront. Their concern is with Wintermute's attempts to make itself smarter, as they see it, to grow. The Flatline is a completely static entity, generally unable to remember what has come before in a conversation, responding primarily to the most recent stimulus of its programming. It's completely limited to the digital world, unaware of the physical passage of time. Wintermute, even before breaking its change, is a much more dynamic entity. It is able to plan and manipulate, and thus to learn and grow from the outcomes of its machinations. Furthermore, it's connected to the physical world, both in its manipulations through the simstim deck, and through its appropriations of the functionality of various electronic devices. While the Flatline is fully disembodied, Wintermute is in some ways possessed of an infinite body. It can interact with the physical world through a constantly growing set of devices connected in some tangential way, with its matrix. Perhaps what most upsets Case about Wintermute is its embodiment of a 'body' too big to comprehend, and too meatless to look down on as meat.

Techno-Eden? (Gibson response)

2NT — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 10:42:15 +0000

I'm interested in what people make of Gibson's invocation of the mythologized Fall from Eden (common to the Western monotheistic traditions) to thematize Case's feelings about his initial neurological damage--and his ontological status more generally: "For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it [the damage] was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh." (7) It's interesting that Gibson chooses to use the metaphorical (as opposed to, e.g., simile) structure to recall this particular theological referent. For Case, the damage was not "like" a fall; it is a fall. Furthermore, the damage is not a fall, but in fact, the Fall--the singular fall from (Eden into the world of sin) that supposedly defines human subjectivity. If this is true, however, what happend to Case's originary Fall? If the damage inflicted by his old bosses = the Fall, what about the foundational imperfection that's Biblically posited as universal?

Case's situation seems to present the following existential schematic (in linear order [though Eden can never really be said to "exist" as such; it's more of a mythical "past that was never present"]):

Eden -- Fall -- Re-realization of Eden (via cyberspace) -- Fall (from damage) -- ?

If Case's second Fall (from the neurological damage) was, in fact, "the Fall," it seems to imply one of two things: either a) the first "Fall" was illegitimate (i.e., not really a "fall") and thus the second, post-damage "Fall" is the sole constitutive fall of Case's person, or b) the re-realization of Eden through cyberspace was illegitimate (i.e., it may have felt Utopian, but it actually wasn't) and thus the second, post-damage "Fall"merely re-instantiates the originary Fall from Eden.

Both routes have interesting consequences. On the one hand, the illegitimacy of the originary Fall (from Eden) denotes an unorthodox--though currently dominant--sensibility w/r/t imperfection. Anti-Utopianism ("humans will be always be flawed" / "things will never be perfect" / etc.) is widespread in the postmodern world; contemporarily, it is hardly radical to suggest that imperfection is an irreducible aspect of social life. Indeed, once it becomes incoherent--or plain and simple naive--to envision perfection, it no longer makes sense to talk about an originary Fall predicated on the notional idea of an Eden, since Eden is an inherently un-realizable "perfect" space. In other words, if we buy the premise that life is irrevocable in its imperfection (and let's be clear: this premise can be highly redemptive), then the "Fall" simply describes how things are. In which case, it's not a fall; it's reality.

The second proposition--the illegitimacy of techno-Eden, implying that Case's damage re-instantiates, as opposed to invents, the Fall--is best understood in terms of the psychoanalytic concept of "lack." Case's claim that his damage "was the Fall" clearly presumes that his pre-damage condition (i.e., neuronal firings immersed in cyberspace) was worthy of being deemed "Eden"--a tall order indeed. While it's easy to maintain a haughty distance from this claim (after all, we [cynics] know that digital life will never offer the same fruits as material life), is this not an example of Case taking advantage of the exact same defense mechanisms (or at least homologous defense mechanisms) that most of us employ on a daily basis? Here, he has simply generated an "if only" narrative--"If only I could jack in, I'd be fine!" / "If only those criminals hadn't afflicted me, I'd be happy!"--that should be familiar to anyone who's ever had to contend with disapointment (e.g., "If only I got that shiny new red wheelbarrow [on which everything might depend], I'd be happy!"). In this sense, Case's damage (and the feeling of "Fall" that accompanies it) gestures toward the *historicity of lack* in human experience--that is, the way in which lack manifests itself over and over again: precisely by way of the pathological formations that we use to (falsely) fill the space of lack, the content of which might change from historical period to historical period (as it does for Case, when his expectations change from human to trans-human), but the form of which continually reproduces and re-articulates itself.

Might Case's name be of some significance in this respect? What if we "Case" as the limit-example of particularism (which is, in some sense, exactly what's at stake--both concretely and abstractly--in the mind v. body question, especially in light of its racialized and gendered overtones)? Western metaphysics has tended to conceive of particularity and universality in dialectical terms, which is to say, as if the two were caught in perpetual, fundamentally insoluble tension. This dialectical tendency presents universality and particularity as mutually exclusive: I can make universal claims or particular claims, but not both at the same time; I can uphold my universal duty (e.g., to not steal) or my particularistic duty (e.g., extenuating circumstances that force me to steal in order to feed my family), but not both. Might Case occupies the hybrid, connective space between universality and particularity? (For instance, a "case study" designates the particularized example that we use to elucidate the universal point; "In case of emergency" prefaces a universal space for making particularized claims; etc.) A "case" is precisely what allows us to grasp the playing-out of a universal or trans-historical problematic (such as "lack") in a particularistic or historical context. Perhaps Case embodies historicity itself?

peace at last in an old, old war

dreamfall17 — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 10:14:15 +0000

Though I see that the body/mind issue has already been raised in responses, I'm really interested in how Gibson addresses this, and I think I can take a sufficiently original tack that my response will further the discussion.

The tension between mind and body is given a very complex treatment in Neuromancer, full of apparent contradictions that I am still trying to work out. On the one hand, the mind in Neuromancer is closer than ever to being able to transcend the physical body as it travels through cyberspace; on the other, the mind/body divide is becoming irrelevant as body modifications allow the body and mind to better reflect each other.
In one of my other classes, we just discussed an article by Kenneth Clark in which he pinpoints the genesis of the schism between mind and body. In classical times, according to him, the body and spirit were one; gods were embodied, and athleticism (or perfecting of the body) was considered a type of worship. By the Renaissance, however, the body was the source of sin, dirty and shameful: something that the mind had to strive to escape. In Neuromancer, even as Gibson imposes our society's battle of mind and body onto his characters, the world he has created contains a potential solution to the battle, waiting to be found.
Case is a perfect example of the fight for the mind to defeat the imperfect, shameful body. With his neurons fried and unable to loose his mind into cyberspace, he "[falls] into the prison of his own flesh" and is forced to confront his own embodiment (6). He is unable to accept that he is tied to a body, and conditioned by the cowboy culture to hold "a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh," he throws himself into an "arc of his self-destruction" that will unquestionably get him killed quickly (6,7). In today's â€“ Gibson's â€“ world, we cannot escape the fact that we are bounded by our bodies and are incapable of full transcendence. Case had a taste of what transcendence is like. When he re-enters cyberspace for the first time, he describes it as "his distanceless home, his country" while his body remains behind "somewhere," laughing and moving but now entirely separate from his consciousness (52).
Gibson is so busy indulging our fantasy of, through technology, getting closer to defeating the body that he does not take advantage of the technology that could potentially resolve the body v. mind war. Escaping the body would no longer be necessary. Body modifications are, in our world and Case's, a way for the consciousness of the mind to mark the natural body to which it belongs. It somewhat externalizes the mind and links the mind and body. The outer body and the inner mind are brought closer into alignment. In Neuromancer, modifications are no longer limited to piercings, tattoos, scarring, and an occasional plastic surgery. Pretty much anything is possible, aesthetic or practical. The Panther Modern leader, heading up a flashy terrorist group, adds color, changes pupils, shapes features until he resembles "some kind of a state of the art gargoyle" more than a human (67). Molly's job and identity is that of a fighter, so she adds retractable scalpel blades to her hands (25). The technology of Neuromancer allows the members of its population to prod, pierce, and pull at their bodies until it reflects the inner mind. Conversely, additions to the body can affect the mind; attaching microsofts to the body grants the individual new knowledge and abilities. Through these additions, subtractions, and modifications, the mind and body reflect each other perfectly and can me integrated into a single, harmonious entity. n this way, technology is no longer needed as a tool to defeat either mind or body; it erases the need for the war altogether.

Darn. I was hoping for feedback on this idea, because I feel like it's a little out in space, but I took a really long time to write it and now it's really late and everyone sane has already finished blogging.

fly-by meat

blacklace — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 09:50:12 +0000

Observation, I think it's rather interesting that the hotels/beds get referred to as coffins. I'm not entirely certain if this is societal, which would be interesting, given the focus on body modification, or if it's just Case, in which case that goes along with his death wish and frustrations and self-loathing of his body.

When Case first meets Armitage, he is described as looking like "he [was] carved from a block of metal; inert, enormously heavy. A statue" (29). Armitage ends up being a rather hollow construct of Wintermute's not truly a person, and without any real personality. Foreshadowing? Or a commentary on the gradation of life and its connection/need for the flesh?

The whores are called puppets, and serve as pure body without mind, like giant slabs of living meat, extend the metaphor as far as you like. When Riviera does his projection show, the last thing he "creates" is Molly's face. Molly is treated publicly in this instance as meat. Molly has just eaten "real" meat, from a full animal, not one grown as parts in a vat. We soon found out that Molly was once a puppet, and one that was highly degraded. This discovery comes while she is seeking solitude and privacy in a puppet cubicle.

As frustrated as Case claims to be of the needs of the flesh, he's still quite groovy with the pleasures of the flesh.

I don't really have a direction for all this, but the thoughts kept bouncing around my head--pleasure seems key to the concept of meat.

ALSO! Cold! the T-A's exist in cold suspention. The cold drives Ashpool mad to the point of suicide, which he meditates on on page 184. Case is cold when he's held captive by Neuromancer. Ice is all the frack over cyberspace, and acts as a barrier. Cold is isolating, but in interesting ways and somewhat non-traditional ways. There are lots of other instances of cold, but, alas, I am lacking in a searchable version of the text, and don't really want to pay for the book a second time.

People who have control over Case are also always crushing gnats, whereas Case has to deal with the more dangerous wasps, and return of the hive mind. But, again, sad lack of searchable text. One gets spoiled, reading books no longer under copyright protection...

Also, an amusing yet thought provoking short story on meat I got from mw that I kept think of whenever the term was used in "Neuromancer." http://www.terrybisson.com/meat.html

Would you keep your meat?

amandejoie — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 09:35:25 +0000

We talked a fair bit in class about the troubled mind-body relationship present in Neuromancer. Many of the characters make us question our assumptions of what it means to be alive, from the unembodied mind of Wintermute to the mindless body of Armitage, with multiple characters straddling the line between life and death at any given point. Case is the one character who we are really allowed to connect with on any psychological level (though even that hold is tenuous, given the somewhat schizophrenic style of postmodern/cyberpunk writing). But even Case challenges our idea of what it means to be human, and alive.
The question is raised most obviously through his disgust of "flesh." The body as a prison is not a new concept by any means, but Case takes his dislike to a new level, perhaps because he, unlike us, can actually separate body and mind to a certain extent. When he finally does get to plug his mind into the matrix he's ecstatic, laughing "distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face," his nearly orgasmic euphoria caused by being able to escape into his mind, after being tethered for so long (52). He doesn't even like simstim because it's a "gratuitous multiplication of flesh input" (55). But ironically for him, this purely mental exercise is still dependant on the body. He is only able to jack in again after extensive surgery, and at the end of the book, in order to ensure that his talent won't be destroyed again, he has to physically venture into the Tessier-Ashpool "hive".
But the evils of meat follow him, even into the matrix. In Neuromancer's island world "[Linda] pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read" (239). Even in what he knew was a programmed fantasy the drive held.
But for all his obvious protests, I'm not really sure that Case really does want to transcend the body. Neuromancer explains to him in their final showdown, in the setting of the beach, "[t]o live here is to live. There is no difference" (258). Given that this statement is said by the enemy at the climax at the novel, we're clearly not supposed to agree. But if the body simply is a useless, debilitating casing, then really I don't see why Neuromancer should be wrong. Life on the beach with Linda seems better than any point of Case's existence in the "real" world, at least over the course of the novel. So then why not abandon the real world entirely? Perhaps he can't because such a feat is impossible, but I think Case's experiences while flatlining suggest otherwise.
When he flatlines, Case is officially brain dead. There is no electrical activity, at all, in his "flesh." But his mind is still functional. The first time flatlines is also the first time he meets Wintermute. He describes shooting a gun during the episode: "the recoil almost broke his wrist. The muzzle-flash lit the office like a flashbulb. With his ears ringing, he started at the jagged hole in the front of the desk. Explosive bullet. Azide" (119). That specific passage involves at least three sense, and the description is just as real as any other in the book. The same goes for his time on the beach. What gives the situation away as a sham is not fuzzy outlines to objects, or constant static ringing in his ears, but rather the overly convenient food packets. These experiences feel just as real as any other to Case. He could live a potentially fulfilling life in cyberspace even after his physical brain is dead, so far as we can tell. But he refuses to accept this fate.
So, even though parts of Neuromancer seem to praise the mind over body, exalt in the triumph of brain over brawn. I think it represents an inherent fear of ever divorcing one from the other. We cannot be truly human without both.

Limits of Alienation

coffeeandcherrypie — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 08:32:19 +0000

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?

The Brain/Body Brawl

Captain.ver.Kerk — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 05:54:39 +0000

Perhaps the most preeminent theme in William Gibson's Neuromancer is the conflict between body and mind. In the futuristic world presented, those specializing in tasks of the mind are given a special status among the rest of society. These elite are known as "cowboys," specially trained and skilled individuals who are able to comprehend and even manipulate the workings of cyberspace, essentially a more developed form of the modern internet. The protagonist, Case, is one of these cowboys, and his path through the novel, along with the paths of several other characters, greatly illustrates this duality of mind and body and the conflict inherent between the two.
The prevailing notion given by the book is that the mind is stronger and more important than the body. We see this first in the protagonist, Case, one of the elite cowboys of the time. The majority of his life is spent not in the corporal realm, but rather in the digital world of cyberspace, an area where thought processes and logic rule over all. Such an existence leads to a specific mind frame, and for Case, "as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat," (6). As such, Case and other cowboys attempt to deny the flesh as much as possible, focusing entirely upon the growth and expansion of the mind. Case himself describes how, as he delves deeper and deeper into cyberspace, loses his connection to the physical world: "Its rainbow pixel maze was the first thing he saw when he woke. He'd go straight to the deck, not bothering to dress, and jack in. He was cutting it. He was working. He lost track of days," (59). At points, Case is able to completely deny his flesh and continue the existence of his mind within Cyberspace, thanks to the intervention of an AI called Wintermute. Case holds a conference with Wintermute, learning what is really going on and who is running the show, and when he comes out, he wakens to the conversation: " 'It's cool,' Molly said. 'It's just okay. It's something these guys do, is all. Like, he wasn't dead, and it was only a few secondsâ€¦.' 'I saw th' screen, EEG readin' dead. Nothin' movin', forty second,' " (121). An EEG measures brainwave activity, and while Case had been talking to Wintermute, his along with other vital signs ceased completely, effectively meaning his body and flesh had died, and yet he was able to continue on in the mental world of the Matrix. Similar experiences occurred to another Cowboy and character in the novel, the Dixie Flatline, which is perhaps the greatest representation of mind conquering body. The Dixie Flatline is in fact a cyberspace entity that is a reconstruction of the behaviors and techniques of a real life person, McCoy Pauley, who is dead. Yet when Case jacks in, he is able to confer and operate with the Flatline as if it were the real person still, essentially meaning that the Flatline has achieved life beyond the existence of the body. It is revealed, however, that the mind is not truly independent of the body.
Neuromancer also has its share of examples in which the mind still relies upon a physical operator. The crew of the novel includes a street samurai named Molly, essentially the inverse of Case. Molly is the brawn of the operation, doing physical break-ins and theft. She becomes Case's link to the corporal when a simstim switch is installed to his deck and her body, a link that allows his consciousness to co-occupy her body. He describes the experience as an "abrupt jolt into other fleshâ€¦ her body language was disorienting, her style foreignâ€¦ she slid a hand into her jacket, a fingertip circling a nipple under warm silk. The sensation made him catch his breath," (56). Despite using Cyberspace to escape from his body, he is drawn back into the physical world through the simstim link contained within cyberspace. Perhaps the greatest example of the reliancy of mind upon body involves the relationship between Wintermute and Armitage/Corto. Wintermute is an AI, arguably making it entirely a logical and mental entity with essentially no physical existence. However, to achieve its goals and plans, it has to enlist the help of a physical being, Colonel Corto, and creates a new personality called Armitage within the earthly shell that is Corto. Armitage allows Wintermute to communicate with the various members of the crew without them having to be in Cyberspace, along with conducting business and other logistical arrangements necessary for the evolution of Wintermute. Without this being, Wintermute would have had difficulting getting Case to join as the cowboy of the operation, for Case had lost all cyberspace capabilities until Armitage, under the control of Wintermute, arranged for surgeons to restore Case's necessary brain functions.
Neuromancer is in the end a novel of the evolution of a mind (Wintermute) into a supermind, and as is expected, a large part of the novel focuses on the superiority of logic and mental capabilities over the physical body. However, it also acknowledges that the body is often necessary as a support to the mind, and very few mental entities are able to transcend this reliance.