Session 5b: New World Orders
Chair: Ana Boa-Ventura

Cyberpunks and Empire
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay
DePauw University, USA

The image of Empire developed in Hardt in Negri's well-known book is a science-fictional political myth of present, that owes a great deal to cyberpunk sf. I argue that the defining world-picture tacitly proposed in sf since the late 19th century has been one of a global technological regime. The sf narratives of this technoscientific imperium have been powerful mediators for national cultures as they have tried to make dramatic leaps from being nations to would-be global hegemons - much as the novel mediated the transition from pre-capitalist to bourgeois culture. I argue that Hardt and Negri's model is particularly influenced by cyberpunk, as is its vision of global communications-and-control network guided only by the ideal of intervention and distributed violence. The image of the imperial subject has much in common with the protagonists of the novels of Pat Cadigan, who depicts human minds as scenes of direct imperial/market interventions. The distributed power-centres of this Wired Empire are the new imperial cities familiar from Gibson's novels and tech noir films from Blade Runner to Ghost in the Shell. The notion that resistance in Empire is a matter of desertion (rather than sabotage) is also a theme associated with the characteristic drama of cyberpunk, in which the global network is understood to be too large to bring down, and can only be escaped from by descending into its belly or escaping into another domain: depicted on a cosmic scale in the drama of the Neuromancer trilogy, but in other important cyberpunk and c-punk influenced works as well. Finally, the improbable notion that the agent of transformation is "the multitude," which subverts imperial power by pragmatically withdrawing its co-operation, is a globalized version of the dictum at the heart of Neuromancer's cyberculture: the street finds its own uses for things.

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The Death of Human and the Birth of Post-Human Subjects in Philip K. Dick's Possible Worlds and in William Gibson's Cyberspace
Guiliano Bettanin
University of Padua, Italy

The work of Philip K. Dick is commonly acknowledged to be one of the major influences and sources of inspiration for cyberpunk, a science fiction current born in the 1980s and well represented by the novels of William Gibson.
Certainly Dick did not deal with many of the typical themes of cyberpunk, and was not in touch with cyberculture. Cyberculture was just beginning when Dick died in 1982 and it was Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984) that marked the rising influence of cyberculture on science fiction. Yet, Dick’s development of the theme of possible worlds and his investigation of related epistemological questions are very close in meaning to the idea of cyberspace and virtual reality. Gibson’s cyberspace, with its connections to computer science and communication theory, represents a new development of possible world theory and is largely focused on the same epistemological and ontological questions Dick faced head on in his oeuvre.
In this paper, I will discuss possible world theory in its own right (as developed in such thinkers as Jaako Hintikka, Saul A. Kripke and David Lewis) and in its connection with literary theory (see such theorists as Thomas Pavel, Umberto Eco, Lubomir Dolezel). Then I will proceed to trace the connecting line between the after-death and post-human worlds of Dick’s novels Ubik and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and the cyberspace of Gibson’s sprawl trilogy, Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive.
Dick’s two novels present so-called fake realities indistinguishable from the real world and ruled by altered former humans. Gibson’s cyberspace is peopled by disembodied human beings, post-human personality constructs and artificial intelligences. The works of both authors present scripts for contemporary postmodern, post-industrial, biotechnologically engineered reality and radically reconceptualize the age-old themes of death and life. The line of connection I will draw between these similar but yet different visions is based on the concepts of the death of human and the birth of post-human subjects. I will show how these concepts play a major proleptic role in both these authors’ fictional elaborations of possible world theory and other epistemological speculations.

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The Politics of Cyberpunk
Joshua Raulerson
University of Iowa, USA

When Bruce Sterling uses the word ‘cyberpunk’ in public, he has more than genre in mind. He is also talking about a near-utopian program for political and social change based in the discourses of cyberpunk fiction and (non-fictive) hacking. This paper undertakes a preliminary mapping of cyberpunk politics and the matrix of scientific, literary and technocultural currents from which it emerges, with primary emphasis on Sterling as the movement’s chief spokesman.
Sterling’s cyberpunk politics is a heady mix of anarcho-libertarian individualism, socialist-utopian communitarianism, punk attitude and geek know-how. I track these themes through Sterling and William Gibson, by way of explicating Sterling’s notion of bricolage as a social technology closely connected to the practice of hacking. I also explore Sterling’s intimate engagement with the chaos dynamics of Ilya Prigogine and the cybernetic social philosophy of Norbert Wiener, and find that the counter-entropic energies described by 20th-century mathematics serve to animate the overall cyberpunk critique of production and consumption, and, moreover, play a key role in Sterling’s vision of social progress. These readings foreground a look at recent events in the online subcultures of post-consumer mods, including the notorious Microsoft Xbox hack, which argue compellingly for the ‘real-world’ applicability of cyberpunk’s methods and agendas.
In context with critical voices including Dick Hebdige and David Porush, I demonstrate how Sterling’s nonfiction writing on hackers and his lectures to ‘cyberpunk activists’ articulate the basic precepts of cyberpunk politics. His short story “Green Days in Brunei” is at the centre of my fiction readings, which also include discussion of Sterling’s Shaper-Mechanist narratives from Schismatrix and Crystal Express, and Gibson’s San Francisco novels (Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow’s Parties).

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