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FLATLINE CONSTRUCTS GOTHIC MATERIALISM AND CYBERNETIC THEORY-FICTION |
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3. XEROX AND XENOGENESIS: MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION AND GOTHIC PROPAGATION |
3.1 Let
Me Tell You About My Mother 3.3 Samuel
Butler and Surplus Value of Code 3.4 Nuptials
Against Nature: Sorcery and Propagation 3.5 The Wasp Factory: Neuromancer |
3.5 The Wasp Factory: Neuromancer
Like Blade Runner, Gibson’s Neuromancer is an exemplary
working-out, in fiction, of the themes of mechanical reproduction and Gothic
propagation. Indeed, the opposition between reproduction and replication could
be the central theme of the novel. It all comes together in the image
Wintermute remixes from Case’s dreams [238]:
The dream, the memory,
unreeled with the monotony of an unedited simstim tape. […]
He’d missed the first
wasp, when it built its paperfine gray house on the blistered part of the
windowframe, but soon the nest was a fist-sized lump of fiber, insects hurtling
out to hunt the alley below like miniature copters buzzing the rotting contents
of the dumpsters.
They’d
each had a dozen beers., the afternoon a wasp stung Marlene.
“Kill the fuckers”, she said,
her eyes dull with rage and the still heat of the room, “burn ‘em…” […]
In the alley, […] he approached the blackened
nest. It had broken open. Singed wasps wrenched and flipped on the asphalt.
He saw the thing the shell of gray paper had concealed.
Horror. The spiral factory, stepped terraces of the
hatching cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly, the staged process
from egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp. In his mind’s eye, a kind of time-lapse
photography took place revealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a
machine-gun, hideous in its perfection. Alien.
[…] He woke with the
impression of light fading, but the room was dark. Afterimages, retinal flares.
In the dream, just before he’d
drenched the nest with fuel, he’d seen the T-A logo of Tessier-Ashpool neatly
embossed onto its side, as though the wasps themselves had worked it there. (N
151-3)
Here is the key image of Neuromancer,
the decoded key to the novel: a diagram of the deterritorialization of
reproduction into machinic replication. Gibson’s description consistently
displaces the nature/ culture split, reinforcing the perception of anorganic
continuum (on the plane of consistency, where, Deleuze-Guattari insist, all
metaphor is abolished[239]). Biotics dissolves into a machinics
which it does not dialectially oppose, but cybernetically envelops: the wasps
are “copters”, issuing from a “spiral factory”, which is “a biological
equivalent” – not a metaphorical substitute for – “a machine-gun.” Moreover,
the whole scene is “not an imaginative reconstruction on Case’s part, but a
datastream from Wintermute” [240], calling not for (Freudian)
interpretation, but cybernetic decryption: a dream as “unedited simstim tape.”
It makes sense to Case only later; “[a]fter a single glimpse of the structure
of information 3Jane’s mother had evolved” he “understood why Wintermute had
chosen the nest to represent it.” (N 315)
If, initially, the wasp-hive image seems to refer only to the
Tessier-Ashpool family – whose patriarch, Tessier-Ashpool experiments with
various methods of extending organic life, burning out filial reproduction into
(Baudrillard’s) clonal metastasis – it is also an image of Wintermute, the AI
that escapes the family net. As Nick Land explains: “The wasp factory spits out
wasps just as the Tessier-Ashpools clone their offspring: 1Jane, 2Jane, 3Jane.
[…] [I]f Wintermute replication is territorialized to the molar reproduction of
a hive-organism, this is only at the cost of deterritorializing the hive along
a lone of post-organic becoming toward a break from the statistical series of
wasps – numbered bullets reiterating an identity – in the direction of
molecular involution, releasing a cloud or nebula of wasps: particles of
synergic mutation.” [241] The “wasp factory”, then, is a loaded
image: suggesting filial reproduction on the one hand – “the statistical series
of wasps” – and teeming and swarming on the other - “particles of synergic mutation.” Let’s consider the first
possibility now, through the (thoroughly Baudrillardian) person of Ashpool.
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Section 3.6 Capitalism and Isophrenia: Ashpool >>
[238] Which uncannily echoes Rachel’s implanted “memories” of the spider’s nest in Blade Runner, suggesting a connection – often made by Dick(see footnote 1, this chapter) and implicit in Deleuze-Guattari – between insects/ arachnids and machines: anempathic swarming as a diagram of (not metaphor for) anorganic multiplicity; as Nick Land insists, this “might be interpreted as a metaphor, was it not that upon the soft plateau or plane of consistency all signifying associations collapse into machinic functions.” (“Cybergothic”, 83) Note also Gibson’s description of Wintermute as a “cybernetic spider.” (N 315) We could also compare both Gibson’s wasps and Blade Runner’s spiders to the motif of the wasp’s nest in Stephen King’s The Shining (which functions as a diagram of the Overlook hotel’s swarming horror).
[239] For more analysis of which, see the next chapter.
[240] Nick Land, “Cybergothic”, 83
[241] Land, “Cybergothic”, 85. We might remember here
Deleuze-Guattari’s discussion of the anomalous, in which “each and every”
animal occupies the position of anomalous bordering, “as in a swarm of
mosquitoes, where ‘each individual moves randomly until it sees the rest [of
the swarm] in the same half-space; then it hurries to re-enter the group. Thus
stability is assured in catastrophe by a barrier.’”
(TP 245, The quotation (within the quotation) is from Rene Thom, Structural
Stability and Morphogenesis, trans. D. Fowler (Readin, Mass: Benjamin
Fowler, 1975), 319. The square brackets are Deleuze-Guattari’s.