![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
These notes got broken up by needing to take care of cats and not being explicitly sure when I was going to come back to them. Once again, they'll probably end up under the cut. As an aside, I'm really thinking about why I write some places and not others, because the sheer wordcount I produce is pretty huge, but it's divided among a bunch of different places, and I typically do my thinking in *.doc files that I don't really anticipate sharing. Like I said before, I've found myself having trouble writing there, but journalling seems to have this kind of mental structure attached to it that's decidedly non-formally academic, and so I'm pretty comfortable typing here where I've been held up the last few days in Word files or Notepad.
Anyhow.
Cyberpunk literature has something of a blindspot - and that has something to do with the position it's often written from. (Which I acknowledge is a passive-voice construction. I mean, literature is written - the people writing it come from a certain place.) Science fiction in general tends to be pretty white and pretty male, which - again - is a broad statement. Certainly we've got Samuel Delaney, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Melinda Lo - we can't and shouldn't ignore their contributions to the genre. When I say that sci fi tends to lean white and male, I mean it leans, not that there's a totality. Cyberpunk also tends to push away from the norms of the time, not writing explicit morality tales, but indicating a certain kind of anxiety about the direction that the west was heading in without suggesting that a Soviet-style command economy seemed like an easy solution.
However, okay - despite all of those important caveats - I'm largely discussing Gibson who is a white male and who does write from a white, male, technologically focused tradition. And, if you look at The Sprawl, or The Bridge, or Blue Ant, what you see is a discussion about the boundries of cultural and economic hegemonic practices - Gibson isn't writing about Empire so much as he's writing inside Empire.
I wonder how much I should address this caveat explicitly - I think it's better stated in my notes than formally. One writes from within the empire because one is within the empire. I don't view this as a moral failing anymore than writing from a position of privilage. It's a position within a power relationship that's bigger than choice. Choice is overstated, overplayed, and maybe under determined. Morality is over stated. Gibson's stories are about empire in the same way that our anxieties from within the empire as they relate to our own well-beings are about the subject of empire itself - they relate to it, but they're about - mostly - how empire affects us, not how we affect it. That said, Gibson's characters certainly do stick their hands in the sticky guts of the thing pretty often. Hm. Gibson's works have a lot of people who generally have no place and no chance dealing with the tick-tock of global machines fucking around with it - often sabotaging it. Those are ethical and maybe moral moments.
Um.
Right, so. I guess the point is something else, though. Just that Gibson does have a kind of sway over hearts and minds of the technocrats who read him and misunderstand him (whatever there is to misunderstand, which is admittedly not much, but people sure do manage). He writes from the position of a countercultural youth who, by dint of his writings being turned into the culture he was writing about, slowly moves from countercultural figure to enshrined subcultural-mainstream cultural figure. That can explain how his ability to write on the future is diminished - his paradigm has been integrated into culture proper. He's been aged out of his milieu.
Blue Ant's Bigend feels like a slightly different take on The Bridge's Colin Laney - the man who could instinctively grasp nodal points in history, kind of a scrambled, defective version of Hari Seldon - the guy who can use data to predict the future isn't a new idea, and Gibson tends to come back to it over and again - I don't know if it's an accident or deliberate. Gibson creates a kind of environmental structure - I don't know that's the right word for it, but - that's looking at community, time, and culture in specific ways. He's constructing community in a way the begins to move pass or through purely physical space. The internet is a place - a space - that's connected rhizomeatically to the physical world. That is, any one "place" - address - is available at any place in the world that has an internet connection. There's one kind of door that opens to anywhere online you know the "name" of. But while you're there, you're simultaniously here, and there's still a limit to the kind of presence you have online.
For Imperial cultures, this presents a question of unfettered access to but a flattening of. I'm working through Baudrillard's ideas, which I'm skeptical of. He's got this hyperbolic bullshittery quality to him that makes me feel that he doesn't get it - but at the same time, that kind of "balls in a twist" attitude is pretty much what I'm talking about. Gibson almost delights in it, I think - or he's fascinated, which is the same thing, when he's writing on it. So I'm not really suggesting that Gibson himself has a certain attitude about this that's relevant at all; I'm saying that he's writing on the attitudes of Empire. I do think, though, that this kind of pseudo-prophacy tends to be made true by fans of the possibilities that Gibson invokes. Like, Gibson write about stuff that's interesting, but not contructed morally as good or bad. Fans read it and go - I want that. When Gibson writes about communities and conceptions of time, fans bring it about. That's what happens when your fans are all technoliterati who see power as something you build and use, but that doesn't have a moral justification beyond - if we get enough power, then all of our problems go away. (Which is what I mean when I say that Gibson tends to be read poorly.)
Empire isn't the only perspective that exists, obviously. And these technological themes exist in other places. Gibson, after all, can't be the first person to write about community diasporas and conceptions of time, can he? Laney envisions time-place-action dynamics as dynamic and changeable, but Bigend views time as being more or less 'dead'. Static. If he can see a minute into the future, he has control over the future - not something changeable but something he can pre-react to and take advantage of.
Coupled with how Gibson tends to see the future, how he writes the concerns of a flattening global material culture, I feel that he's writing the anxiety of an imperial culture that's attempting to recreate itself and reinstate its influence using a newer, global technocratic model. An empire that hasn't left, but is trying to change shape, and that largely operates at the highest levels of power. It's strange to see Gibson's construction of the degraded empire still located geographically - Russia, US, UK, Japan, where the Japanese aren't really present except as merchandise and media.
Anyhow.
Cyberpunk literature has something of a blindspot - and that has something to do with the position it's often written from. (Which I acknowledge is a passive-voice construction. I mean, literature is written - the people writing it come from a certain place.) Science fiction in general tends to be pretty white and pretty male, which - again - is a broad statement. Certainly we've got Samuel Delaney, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Melinda Lo - we can't and shouldn't ignore their contributions to the genre. When I say that sci fi tends to lean white and male, I mean it leans, not that there's a totality. Cyberpunk also tends to push away from the norms of the time, not writing explicit morality tales, but indicating a certain kind of anxiety about the direction that the west was heading in without suggesting that a Soviet-style command economy seemed like an easy solution.
However, okay - despite all of those important caveats - I'm largely discussing Gibson who is a white male and who does write from a white, male, technologically focused tradition. And, if you look at The Sprawl, or The Bridge, or Blue Ant, what you see is a discussion about the boundries of cultural and economic hegemonic practices - Gibson isn't writing about Empire so much as he's writing inside Empire.
I wonder how much I should address this caveat explicitly - I think it's better stated in my notes than formally. One writes from within the empire because one is within the empire. I don't view this as a moral failing anymore than writing from a position of privilage. It's a position within a power relationship that's bigger than choice. Choice is overstated, overplayed, and maybe under determined. Morality is over stated. Gibson's stories are about empire in the same way that our anxieties from within the empire as they relate to our own well-beings are about the subject of empire itself - they relate to it, but they're about - mostly - how empire affects us, not how we affect it. That said, Gibson's characters certainly do stick their hands in the sticky guts of the thing pretty often. Hm. Gibson's works have a lot of people who generally have no place and no chance dealing with the tick-tock of global machines fucking around with it - often sabotaging it. Those are ethical and maybe moral moments.
Um.
Right, so. I guess the point is something else, though. Just that Gibson does have a kind of sway over hearts and minds of the technocrats who read him and misunderstand him (whatever there is to misunderstand, which is admittedly not much, but people sure do manage). He writes from the position of a countercultural youth who, by dint of his writings being turned into the culture he was writing about, slowly moves from countercultural figure to enshrined subcultural-mainstream cultural figure. That can explain how his ability to write on the future is diminished - his paradigm has been integrated into culture proper. He's been aged out of his milieu.
Blue Ant's Bigend feels like a slightly different take on The Bridge's Colin Laney - the man who could instinctively grasp nodal points in history, kind of a scrambled, defective version of Hari Seldon - the guy who can use data to predict the future isn't a new idea, and Gibson tends to come back to it over and again - I don't know if it's an accident or deliberate. Gibson creates a kind of environmental structure - I don't know that's the right word for it, but - that's looking at community, time, and culture in specific ways. He's constructing community in a way the begins to move pass or through purely physical space. The internet is a place - a space - that's connected rhizomeatically to the physical world. That is, any one "place" - address - is available at any place in the world that has an internet connection. There's one kind of door that opens to anywhere online you know the "name" of. But while you're there, you're simultaniously here, and there's still a limit to the kind of presence you have online.
For Imperial cultures, this presents a question of unfettered access to but a flattening of. I'm working through Baudrillard's ideas, which I'm skeptical of. He's got this hyperbolic bullshittery quality to him that makes me feel that he doesn't get it - but at the same time, that kind of "balls in a twist" attitude is pretty much what I'm talking about. Gibson almost delights in it, I think - or he's fascinated, which is the same thing, when he's writing on it. So I'm not really suggesting that Gibson himself has a certain attitude about this that's relevant at all; I'm saying that he's writing on the attitudes of Empire. I do think, though, that this kind of pseudo-prophacy tends to be made true by fans of the possibilities that Gibson invokes. Like, Gibson write about stuff that's interesting, but not contructed morally as good or bad. Fans read it and go - I want that. When Gibson writes about communities and conceptions of time, fans bring it about. That's what happens when your fans are all technoliterati who see power as something you build and use, but that doesn't have a moral justification beyond - if we get enough power, then all of our problems go away. (Which is what I mean when I say that Gibson tends to be read poorly.)
Empire isn't the only perspective that exists, obviously. And these technological themes exist in other places. Gibson, after all, can't be the first person to write about community diasporas and conceptions of time, can he? Laney envisions time-place-action dynamics as dynamic and changeable, but Bigend views time as being more or less 'dead'. Static. If he can see a minute into the future, he has control over the future - not something changeable but something he can pre-react to and take advantage of.
Coupled with how Gibson tends to see the future, how he writes the concerns of a flattening global material culture, I feel that he's writing the anxiety of an imperial culture that's attempting to recreate itself and reinstate its influence using a newer, global technocratic model. An empire that hasn't left, but is trying to change shape, and that largely operates at the highest levels of power. It's strange to see Gibson's construction of the degraded empire still located geographically - Russia, US, UK, Japan, where the Japanese aren't really present except as merchandise and media.