technology is visceral / tech is viscera | te is vis / you = a view

I'll be coming back to this entry once I've gotten farther into the reading than Akira but I wanted to get some questions down while they're still fresh (hmm: diachronic, organic metaphor there).

Whatever it is that Case in Neuromancer does in that last moment before 3Jane brings the AI or AIs' design into being with a name, we read that he does it through, or empowered by, or whatever, full embrace of the wish for his own death. Death of course grants him a complete operational freedom uninhibited by fear of mortality. (...hopeless encounters sucessfully won...) That's the freedom of cyberspace, but the wish itself, as we read earlier in the novel (and Freud?), is the spooling out of much more ancient formulae.

So if one were to argue that Case is without agency, could it be that this isn't because the AI(s) is/are manipulating "Case," but that they're stimulating the meat, producing rage, harnessing the deathwish/nirvana principle— the wish for peace beyond the fleshy mortal state —that sends him out of his body into cyberspace (synchronic, inorganic/immaterial), into the living death, godly rule-breaking of flatline. (...but you were dead a thousand times...)

At this point I can't advance a solid delineation of organics/meat/flesh/body/tech/self/posthuman in Neuromancer. Actually, I'm not sure that any of this holds up. But the direction in which I'm drawn is back (or onward) to the flesh, to the meat as not the antiquated baseline that posthumanity gets us beyond, and not even as a mere parallel to tech. Instead, in drawing boundaries (or at least fields of transition) between the human and post- (a temporality implied here I hope we can find good evidence to explode), I see the flesh as something more alien, more radical than tech, because we ourselves have not produced it. (...grafted to machines your builders did not understand...). Tetsuo is a cataract of flesh in the end, personality crumbling as he spills over beyond body into a flood of meat.

While there is an alien aspect to the novel's AIs, as they pass the event horizon of human technology products and become fully realized, non-human, their own proprietary flesh, they are presented as stable, if enigmatic systems.

Meat is alien and unstable.



::

Is he wearing a GAP shirt?

"Fall into the GAP" --> the gap --> language --> logos/GAP logo credentializes the tree man as human. But the real growths seem to overwhelm any stabilizing symbols he can muster (even opposable thumbs); he appears as the nonhuman in a human suit; no— as starkly human meat in a subject suit?

While we're on the subject of subjects and words and logos, because I can't resist: check the GAP girl in the link above. Now she's what I'd call interpolatin'. And what's that swirly blue stuff? Water? Why does this sound familiar?

In the beginning was the Word … and the Word was God … And the earth was without form, and void; … And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. … there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground…