Flatline_Constructs 2.3 Intensive Voyages and Cyberspace

In Neuromancer, Case’s body when out on the matrix is, in a sense, a body, which like Baudrillard’s body without image, is “connected up internally only - not to objects of perception (which is why it may be imprisoned in a ‘blank’ or void sensory world by simply disconnecting it from its own sensory nerve-endings without altering anything in the outside world)” (TE 121) but the Deleuze-Guattari theorization of the BwO allows us to rethink what is happening in this state of hypermodern catatonia. If Case’s body is “disconnected from its own sensory nerve-endings”, this is less because it has autistic ally imploded into interiority than because it has decoded the Freudian perceptual-consciousness system in order to access a set of (hy)perceptions belonging to a technical environment which is in no sense that of the organism. Case’s body out on the matrix can be placed alongside the examples of Bodies without Organs given by Deleuze-Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. Like the junkie body or the masochist body, it is a body in which the organs have been programmatically annulled. “The BwO: it is already under way the moment the body has had enough of its organs and wants to slough them off.” (TP 150) Cyberspace, like the junkie’s drugs or the masochist’s machinery, does not close up the organism unto itself; it opens up the body to a set of extra-organismic affects.

Travel in cyberspace, then, becomes less a question of floating detached from all (sensory) input than of what Deleuze-Guattari call “intensive voyage”. The components from which cyberspace is produced - the hardware and software of the cyberspace decks - are “in” space; but cyberspace “itself” could not be said to be. Where, then, is the “space” of cyberspace?[117] In an apparent paradox we shall explore again in Chapter 4, “the matrix’s illusion of infinite space”[118] is accessible by, or in, one brain. Yet this is not because the reality of cyberspace is something merely phenomenal. On the contrary, beyond the screens of representation, the matrix is (nothing but) a differential grid, data as a set of intensive quantities. “It’s not a place, it only feels like it is.” (MLO 188)

The often dizzying confusion of Neuromancer’s narrative arises in large part from its hypernaturalistic description of intensive voyages. Different “realities” can be accessed - intensively - while the body lies prone, in the same extensive space. The concept of intensive voyage allows us to deflect assumptions that cyberspace travel is merely a psychological illusion, a phenomenological or interior projection. In a move we shall explore more fully in the final chapter, it is crucial to cyberpunk that virtual or artificial zones are not alternatives to, but additions to, or folds in, the Real. All of which poses questions about Csisery-Ronay’s claims about hallucination and cyberpunk. As we shall see shortly, the process of technicization de-phenomenologizes hallucination by making it a matter of real (if no longer organic) perception; extra-organismic perception is packaged as technical (collectively accessible) hallucination. One of Gibson’s key technical innovations is a rendering of the resultant “body amnesia” in terms of a hypernaturalization - or “airbrushing”[119] - of the ostensibly radical Burroughs cut-up technique. In the Neuromancer trilogy, Gibson presents reality as a series of “options” to be flicked through at high speed (as if by TV remote control), giving diegetic motivation for a splicing of Burroughs/ Ballard “collage” with a Philip K. Dick-like picture of nested alternate realities. The climax of Neuromancer finds Case “flipping”/ “jacking”/ “switching” from a sensory stimulation link with razor girl partner Molly Millions to the matrix (where he is sucked into an embedded world [created by the AI Neuromancer]) to his own “primary body”, where electrodes allow him to make the connections. Movement around the matrix, or from the matrix into the outside world - is described as if it is being operated by a gaming console.

“He flipped.” (N 201)

“Hold on, [...] I’ll fastforward us.’” (N 205)

“Freefall.” (N 201)

“The walls blurred. Dizzying sensation of headlong movement, colors, whipping around corners and through narrow corridors.” (N 205)[120]

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[117] “Gentry was convinced that cyberspace that cyberspace had a shape, an overall total form. [...] Slick had once stimmed a Net/Knowledge sequence about what shape the universe was; Slick figured the universe was all there was, so how could it have been a shape? If it had a shape, then there had to be something for it to have a shape in, wasn’t there? And if that something was something, then wasn’t that part of the universe too? [...] Slick didn’t think cyberspace was anything like the universe anyway; it was just a way of representing data.” (MLO 83-84)

[118] Gibson, Burning Chrome, 205

[119] Gibson’s own description of his method. The “airbrushing” of the textual collage techniques pioneered by Burroughs and Ballard is part of a “controlled use of collage [...] That’s something I got from Burroughs’s work, and to a lesser extent from Ballard [...] I could see what Burroughs was doing with these random methods, and why [...] So I started snipping things out and slapping them down, but then I’d airbrush them a little to take the edges off.” McCaffery, Storming the Reality Studio, 281

[120] Larry McCaffery compares this technique to Dick.“Philip K. Dick was always writing about people like Virek who have so many ‘reality options,’ so many different reproductions and illusions, that’s it difficult to know what reality is more real - the one in their heads or the one that seems to exist outside.”McCaffery, Storming the Reality Studio, 273.

The Virek McCaffery refers to here is in fact another of Gibson’s examples of a body without image. Herr Virek is a massively wealthy plutocrat ,who is at once the image of ultra-modernity and of grotesque atavism. He survives cancer - “the cells of my body having opted for the quixotic pursuit of individual careers” (CZ 29) - only by means of the most up-to-date technology, a vat costing “a tenth of my annual income” (CZ 29). Virek’s capital begins to ape the dissolution of his organism, devolving from the centre in a financial equivalent of the disease that is destroying his body. “Aspects of my wealth have become autonomous, by degrees; at times they even war with one another. Rebellion in the fiscal extremities.” (CZ 26) Virek functions as a “logical focus” for a heterogeneous range of financial interests. “The death of a clan-member, even a founding member usually wouldn’t bring the clan, as a business entity, to a crisis-point. There’s always someone to step in, someone waiting [...] But when your Herr Virek dies, finally, when they run out of room to enlarge his vat, whatever, his business interests will lack a logical focus.” (CZ 145) The sheer fact of Virek’s vast wealth makes it impossible to conceive of him as a human individual. Virek is “the single wealthiest individual, period. As rich as some zaibatsu. But that’s the catch, really; is he an individual? In the sense that you are, or I am? No.” (CZ 144) As an example of the “paradox of wealth in a corporate age” (CZ 144) Virek’s body - no longer that of an organic individual but a hypercapital haecceity - is an image of what Jameson calls “the whole new decentred global network of the third stage of capital.” (PCLLC 37)