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Cyber-Punk: The Final Solution
By Mark Downham.
==WE'RE ON AN EXPRESS-ELEVATOR TO HELL. GOING DOWN! IN CYBER-SPACE
NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM==
CYBERNET'ICS, n. Study of system of control and communications in animals and
electrically operated devices such as calculating machines. [ f. Gk Kubernetes
Steersman, -ics] ('The Concise Oxford Dictionary')
= METROPHAGE: A VIRTUAL TECHNOLOGY VIRUS STALKING UNDERGROUND
RESISTANCE CULTURE "PLEASE TAKE A LOOK AT THIS MAP, SIR! THE SITUATION
IS QUITE OUT OF HAND" : THE HUMAN LEAGUE - THE CIRCUS OF DEATH. "IN A
SOCIETY INUNDATED WITH FICTIONS OF EVERY KIND, PANIC IS NECESSARY."
= HARDWIRED IN THE METROPHAGE
= Cyber-Punk is pure blag. It is essentially some techniko-street types cutting together a
science-fiction/critical theory crossover - with fictions of every kind - in the post Situationist techno-cultural fragmentation, the new architecture of entropy. A wall of
words. The humming of language. Taking an eye-ball locked into the infinite televisual
surface-static knockdowns of the virtual and hardwired technologies of the dominant
Metrophage. Like the Videodrome itself is just waiting there; all huge and self datachatter in the semiotic information power web; while you feel Nietzschean and your credit
line is good for the new DNA and micro soft implants - still nothing gives, but then that is
dialectics =
= THE ARCHITECTURE OF ENTROPY
= Images and impression. Some cautionary tales. Cyber-Punk is an industrial myth of the
near future, a new techno-surreal fiction. Cyber-Punk is probably some sort of new
situationist theory, although I don't really feel like going for a fix; the shifting uncertainties
are so beautiful, so much the architectures of entropy. Cyber-Punk is a mass of
questions flung fast-forward on the big wipe-out, the ultimate chemical edge - coming
straight down at you like a thousand howling screaming tons of heavy metal, that's going
to jack-off your skull-case as a matter of first impressions. Cyber-Punk isn't mean, it isn't
superlatives, it's total, it is truly critical. Cyber-Punk is potentially a scrambled mass of
referential fictions stolen from the near future in search of an operational strategy for the
living of life, my life, your life, life, which in itself is increasingly experiencing slippage into
the virtual technologies of the near future. There you go superimposing Bruce
Sterling/William Gibson over Guy Debord/J.G. Ballard and you're slipping again everything is spinning, isn't it wild out here at the edge of theory. The real is leaking into
representation and the feedback is a white-noise of new mediations indexing themselves
into the spectacular sub-strata in the interzone - oh so errogenous - where the real and
the irreal exchange meanings =
= TELEVISIONS, SAND-DUNES AND THE CONTOURS OF YOUR FACE
= Max Headroom was Cyber-Punk. All smiles, napalm teeth and 'no comprendez' - he's
so brittle when it's torture hour. All hail Max Headroom, the first post- bourgeois individual
of black-lined aestheticized Liberalism, who actually vanishes, skids like Max Renn into
the Spectacle, the Videodrome, the simulacra of the information system - call it the
Schizmatrix, the call of the West. Max Headroom - call him Tom Vague, whose face can
be digitalized and fractalized by computer-imaging, has organic - atomic structure
translated into a cathode-ray - photonic double - is a final statement. Pure pirate vid- disc
beaming out of lower-eastside N.Y.C. and streaming hot out of Brazil on satellite
bounceback, it's all in the signal, even the physiological - chemical changes. Max
Headroom/Max Renn /Tom Vague is living out a panic- conspiracy in television as the
real world and whose moods are perfectly post- modern because they attenuate between
the horror of kitsch, waking up to menace, dread and the circuit up-side to that well-worn
wild euphoria between the ecstasy of catastrophe and the terror of the simulacra, the
double. Where is this? Oh we're in the fractal zones, they've just been thought up by a
new recombinant mix of entropy/catastrophe theory and there is Karen Eliot with her face
pressed against the window - what are those guys doing in there? Max Renn. Paging
Max Renn! Mr. Renn?...... I.... going under again. Come on Mr. Renn, the Videodrome
waits for you. You are Max Renn..... aren't you? So much cross-talk coming through the
wires - it's a question of new psychologies =
= CODES AND FICTIONS FROM THE MOON
= Cyber-Punk attempts to de-mythologize the established cultural codes, in order to
decipher concealed strategies of domination, desire, will, power, and the will to power.
Cue dry ice, smoke, Leni Riefenstahl. Cyber-Punk allows new genuine symbols of our
culture to speak. In essense, our increasingly cyborg [cybernetic organism] relationships
with our own artefacts, technologies, hardwired abstractions are realized, reified,
idealised, materialised in the more intense level of ideation and practice that constitutes
Cyber-Punk. Cyber-Punk is a radical interrogation of the virtual technologies at work in
contemporary society =
= S.I.T.U.A.T.I.O.N.I.S.T. VS. C.Y.B.E.R.P.U.N.K.
= Situationist Cyber-Punk flicks aside the general form of Marxist analysis [dialectical
contradictions between forces and relations of production and their irreconcilability] and
suggests that the classical definition of productive forces is too restrictive and expands
the radical analysis of Guy Debord further into the whole murky field of significations,
transmissions, communications, materializations, reifications - programming phenomena.
Cyber-Punk achieves a velocity which ruptures the very critique attempting to describe
and analyse changes in virtual and hard-wired technologies purely in terms of material
production =
= TOM VAGUE, HELICOPTERS AND THE SHATTERED REVOLVING DOOR
The brief handed out by Tom Vague for this issue, by one of his many agents currently
operating the 'Get London Swinging Again' crash programme; was that the aim of this
issue was to be oblique, but then that is the architecture of entropy. The more information
derived from Cyber-Punk concerning the near future, the more operational strategies of
resistance, growth patterns, in response to the accelerating accelerations of the virtual
technologies of the Videodrome. There is no typical Cyber-Punk, Tom Vague is a fiction,
although the general project does have central themes, tenets and topics. I guess I'd
better say it is an eighties milieu - nineties, post-2001 would equally do - a fix on anything
- it is a product of the interzone between hard technologies/sciences and nihiloromanticist surreality. It's precursors are Michael Moorcock, Langdon Jones, Harlan
Ellison, Samuel Delaney, Norman Spinrad, Brian Aldiss, John Varley, Phillip K. Dick,
Alfred Bester, the strange pulsing entropies of Thomas Pynchon, the panic-theory of
Baudrillard, the Situationist International, Larry Niven, the Anarchists never interested
me, Roger Zelazney, H.G. Wells, the 'programming phenomena' control-data buzz of
Guy Debord and the seminal genius of J.G. Ballard =
= WEASELING IN THE DATA NET
= Cyber-Punk has a strong garage-band aesthetic. Pure Mexican - Central American
radio. It grapples with the raw core of the near future. Its myths. Its ideas. Its coming
practices. It is a pop culture which is theorizing itself into a more cohesive and selfdetermined existence. Cyber-Punk began as a loose generational nexus of writers
swapping letters, manuscripts - ideas. Now Cyber-Punk is expanding into the inevitable
empire state human. Skidding over fantastic new streams of situationist theory, high
technologies, street or blag culture and the furious reflections of a spiritually vacant,
vagrant intellectual underground, strung out like a line of wreckage from Vague to
Compendium, on the exact nature of the control data chatter =
= A STRANGE AND TERRIBLE SEA CHANGE
= Cyber-Punk is about being realistic, relentlessly honest and taking it head- on when the
cutting edge comes down and the blood really starts to run and it get slippery underfoot.
Cyber-Punk is getting into the challenging complexities and contradictions of working
with new video techniques, new virtual-technologies, of working for the Videodrome through the very operational strategies of resistance which oppose it. It is new neurochemistries, new psychologies, new hacking programmes, the pirating of new
electronics, the sort of street tech of hip-hop - very hip, but don't just hop to it when the
money starts ringing - for whom the bells toll. Cyber-Punk is the literary incarnation of
this colliding of fictional worlds, between the high-octane five star fantasies of the multinationals and the junk-cult feral scams of the street guerillas living off their products, but
fantastically mutating them =
= THE DRAINED LAGOONS OF HER MIND
= In Cyber-Punk, as science fiction genre, one of the immediate traits is visionary
intensity and imaginative concentration, a new level of intensified ideation. Cyber-Punk
gorges detail - it uses carefully constructed intricacy and readily extrapolates into daily
life. It goes for crammed or condensed prose: rapid, dizzying, skidding bursts of novel
information, sensory overload, a special brilliant feeling that makes you crisp at the
edges - submerging the reader in the equivalent of a titanic sonic blast of information,
great gulfs of linguistic intensity as the vassopressin hits =
= Cyber-Punk crunches together neuro- and physical chemistry, genetic biology,
structural linguistics, cybernetics, bio-technology and cyborg engineering into a fantastic
series of fictions =
= WHAT EXACTLY IS HE TRYING TO SELL?
= Cyber-Punk makes clear that information is a name for the content of what is
exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it and make our adjustments felt upon it to live effectively is to live with adequate information, the fictions of Cyber-Punk =
= CROSS A STAKHANOVITE WITH A SADIST AND HE'LL EMIGRATE TO SOUTH
AFRICA =
= TEACH IT PHENOMENOLOGY, DOLITTLE
= Cyber-Punk is probably negentropic, given the necessary contradictions waiting on the
peripheries for the next dialectic interphase-cum-change - pure feedback. Systems feed
energies into each other. Feedback exists between systems that are not in themselves
closed but rather open and contingent upon other systems. There are no truly entropic or
closed systems in Cyber-Punk as there are in Situationist theory; all processes impinge
upon and are affected by other processes in some way. A system is closed when entropy,
virtual technologies, the Videodrome, gas or electricity bills dominate the feedback
process, that is when the measure of energy lost is greater than measure of the energy
gained. It used to feel like that deep- reading Situationist texts. A candle is a good
example. Attrition =
= IGUANAS, GENETICS AND THE ZEITGEIST
= The phenomena of Cyber-Punk, it's fictions, are realized in it's interpretations of
mechanistics and biologies which are negentropic, their sub-systems feed energies/new
operational strategies of resistance into each other. Computers changed everything.
We've been building our secrets into their software for years. We can collapse the
commercial banking systems of the West. We can play the Visigoth and freeze the Soviet
intercontinental ballistic missiles in their secret silos. We can bring news production at
Wapping to a halt. We can shut down the safety systems on a nuclear reactor. We can
re-orbit spy satellites. All possibilities. We already have tomorrow - it's today we want =
= THE LANDSCAPE IS CODED INTO DIALECTICAL BLOCKS
= The differentials between the sciences and the humanities: the gulf between literary
culture, the formal structures of art and politics and the culture of science, the world of
engineering and industry - it's all converging. Cyber-Punk instinctively understands that
technical culture is moving very fast. 95% of the Left in total are already thirty years
behind and still receding. The advances of sciences are deeply radical - potentially
revolutionary even, if utilized appropriately. They are surging into culture at large; they
are invasive, the spectacle has transmitted into the virtual technologies of the
Videodrome. THERE IS NO SEMIOLOGY OF SILENCE AFTER GUY DEBORD, WAKE
UP! WE ARE ALREADY IN THE SPECTACLE ENHANCED. Traditional institutions,
positions, practices have become completely discredited or metamorphosed into a Sgt.
Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club type of moral joke known as the Socialist Workers Party.
Cyber-Punk comes from the realm where the computer-hacker has locked into the postart political culture and it's discontents. Agitprop has been superseded by visceral
technologies. Cyber-Punk explores interzones, especially those between the multinationals and street cultures - the street always finds its own use for things, call them
technological artifacts or the virtual technologies/transmissions of the Videodrome =
= THE TARGE VEHICLE
= Certain central themes spring up repeatedly in Cyber-Punk. Firstly the theme of body
invasion, the target vehicle: prosthetic limbs, implanted circuitry, cosmetic surgery, cyberspace, DNA, genetic alteration. Secondly, the real hard-edge of mind invasion: braincomputer interfaces, artificial intelligences, neurochemistry - all the techniques radically
redefining the nature of humanity, the nature of the self =
= CROSSING OVER INTO CAMBODIA
= Cyber-Punk engages the whole notion of the Spectacle - the Videodrome, the satellite
media net, the multinational corporation - they are the stuff of Cyber-Punk and
continually reappear in its fictions. For the spiritually vacant, everything has been said
before, eveything is fiction. Cyber-Punk, marked by its use of surreal-visionary intensity,
takes ideas, psychologies, experiences and pushes them past their limits to new
thresholds, to the point of virtual disintegration. Cyber-Punk writers use an almost
unblinking critical objectivity, a zero-point objective analysis taken from science and shot
into literature for the more amusingly twisted aspects of short sharp shock value =
= THE PERSISTENCE OF THE BEACH
= For Cyber-Punk, the computer is much more than an object; it is also an icon and a
metaphor that suggests new ways of thinking about ourselves and our new
environments, new ways of constructing images of what it means to be human =
= THE DEPARTURE INTO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
= Cyber-Punk is a pop-cultural fascination with Cybernetic systems including a vast array
of machines and apparatuses that exhibit computational power. Turing and Von
Neumann were just describing topological surfaces. Such systems contain a dynamic,
even if wasted, quotient of intelligence. Telephone networks, communication satellites,
radar systems, programmable lazer video- discs, robots, biogenetically engineered cells,
you think this isn't happening - that's what they want you to think, rocket guidance
systems, videotex networks - all exhibit a capacity to process information and execute
actions. They are all cyber- cybernetic in that they are self regulating mechanisms or
systems within predefined limits and in relation to predefined tasks. Cyber-Punk uses the
computer and artificial intelligence to symbolize the entire spectrum of networks, systems
and devices that exemplify cybernetic or automated but intelligent behaviour =
= THE COMMAND MODULE
= Cyber-Punk explores the irony of the process of adopting new ways of seeing, that
consequently propose new forms of social organization, that become paradoxical or
contradictory - in that this very process of transformation spawns new practices, new
levels of intensified visionary surreality - which are themselves engendered and
substantially recuperated by the existing form of social organization - which they contain
the potential to overcome. Our sense of reality is being adjusted by new means of
electronic computation and digital communication - these technological changes
introduce new forms of culture. In Cyber-Punk, one lists the problems of the imaginary
other, for being human is defined in relation to cybernetic systems - computers, biogenetically engineered, eco-systems, expert systems, robots, androids and cyborgs - all
the metaphors change - everything is style - everything slips into the virtual =
= RELIGION X GENETICS = POLITICS
= Cyber-Punks not only understand that cybernetics is a conveyance of information
theory and cognitive psychology, but that these are the dominant phenomenologies of a
virtual society. For instance, the problem of tracking anti-aircraft weapons against
extremely fast targets [and no-one moves faster than a workerist trying to dodge the
critique] has led to research into, and the development of, intelligent mechanisms
capable of predicting future states faster than the unaugmented human brain can do - or
that was until they started messing around with cyborg interfaces. Never strike where
your opponent is, but strike at the space which they will occupy in the future. [This
tactical strategy gave the Specto-Situationists the edge they needed, Guy Debord uses it
repeatedly with devastating effect in 'Society of the Spectacle.'] No-one should forget the
nihilistic synergism between the development of cybernetics and miliitary requirements,
because waiting in the wings are the multi-nationals =
= THE DYING ALGEBRA OF THE SKY
= The U.S. Airforce uncovered a critical flaw in the creation of ultra-sonic jet fighters - the
inadequacies of the body reflexes of pilots. The unaugmented human body cannot
absorb or respond to the information environment of jet fighters moving at hyper-speeds.
So the designers created heads for fighter pilots. The U.S. Airforce is experimenting with
compensating for the inability of human vision to match the speed and intensity of the
information environment of jet-fighters; pilots will be equipped with virtual heads: special
helmets which block out normal ocular vision and, by means of a video- screen projected
on the inside of the mask/visor, feed the pilot, at a slowed down and selective pace,
specific, strategic information about the aerial environment, altitude, presence of other
aircraft, speed, and target range. A system of perspective - virtual vision for those
advanced outsiders of teleonomic society rocketing across the dying algebra of the sky
into the retinal fictions of Cyber-Punk =
= THE ECLIPSE OF THE SPECTACLE: RHIZOMES AND VAGUE
= The pervasive imagery of programming phenomena are now enveloping us - a
sensorily expanded data-chatter, image-flick world of digitized life and languages
mediated by video display screens - the formation of a discipline shifting inevitably
towards cyber-space. Cyber-space as described by William Gibson in 'Neuromancer'
was prefigured in Nicola Tesla's 1901 plan for a world system of totally inter-connected,
planetary communications. He believed he could engineer a globe unified by the
universal registration of time and fully traversed by flows of language, images and money
- all reduced to an undifferentiated flux of electrical energy. Tesla had a primordial
understanding of the totalizing logic of the Metrophage and it's evolutionary stages Leviathan, Capital, Spectacle, Videodrome, the Gesellschaften out in Cyberspace,
complete with ambiguous paracletal artificial intelligence - television has emerged as the
key component of a world system =
= THE SKIN AREA
= We are all implicated in the practise of giving a conceptual solidity and unity to the
evasive and seemingly ubiquitous entity that is television - well, I've used several
identities - very simply, 'the monsters we create welcome us aboard.' Just look at us, we
maintain an illusory coherence around what is a shifting coalescence of powers,
dominions, thrones, objects, effects and relations. Even though all that is subsumed by
television, the society of the spectacle enhanced, has historical specifity, technological
under- pinnings, and links/rhizomes into multiple economies, we and I mean all semiotic,
media, phenomenological and situationist/critical theorists have mystified it and situated
it beyond the grasp of critical analysis, while at the same time endowing it with a despotic
identity of social processes. The Videodrome has always been an aggregate of bodies,
institutions, transmissions, ultimately programming phenomena in perpetual
transformation. Cyber-Punk is the only active theory seriously identifying and subverting
the conjunctions it forges, the circulations it controls and the accelerating mutations it is
undergoing. Pure Tornado moan.
= THE FINAL VIOLENCE
= At Porton Down, they make the most deadly bacteriological germ-warfare in the world.
Drop a test-tube at Porton Down. We will have unleashed upon ourselves the final
violence. The same is true of the Metrophage. The convergence of television,
telecommunications, computers is creating an ideology of technological determinism and
pre-fabricated futures, which mirror the present Spectacle. A transmission of dead souls.
But the Spectacle and its metamorphoses are more than Frankenstein meets MTV, the
technological changes are also leaking into other zones: cultural, economic, geo-political,
psycho-geo-graphic. Cyber-Punk understands the final violence, the corpses, the
nihilistic urban dead-zones, the Metrophage itself and is no longer merely isolating
properties deemed to be intrinsic to a self-stabilizing semiotic system, which can be read
as a super- structural transmission through which power is exercised - Cyber-Punk is
hammering away against a system of appearances that is so thoroughly of the
social/material that its operations are indistinguishable from those of the entire
hegemonic order. They are the hegemonic order =
= A CRASH COURSE IN EXONERATION
= The fictions of Cyber-Punk suggest that the Spectacle as television is a global tracery
of linkages that seemingly produce truth. But the thing about television, like any other
spectacular power, threshold or dominion and its genocidal deployment, is that its
unreasoning, endless surfaces conceal barely visible alcoves, striations, folds, gulfs,
where things get really strange. In Cyber-Punk theory, the Spectacle is a circuit of power
that can be uniform and seamless as a macrophenomenon, but that is broken, diversified
and never fully controllable in its local usage. They're always looking for the ultimate in
mind control, but it's got ideas of its own and now its growing huge. We are the
Spectacle. Our relationships and spiritual vacuum in the social are the Spectacle. Our
iconographies are the Spectacle. Our atrocities are the Spectacle. Walter E. Kurtz really
took his orders from the Spectacle. From us. From you. From the collective human ID
and it really made a mess of him =
= A DYING STARMAN FINDS THE NTH ROOT OF WONDERFUL
= Adomo and Horkheimer admired the Spectacle for its ruthless unity, Trotsky gazed at
the ice-pick and saw the Spectacle, a totalizing power, collective human nature, which
even in its more primitive forms is uniform and whole in every part. How they
underestimated Leviathan, those rationalists, and now the collective human ID is leaking
heavily into the post-modern again. The Cyber-Punks, like the Frankfurt 'talking shop' of
Marcuse, Adomo, Althusser and company, know that the Spectacle is an inescapable
reified voracious semiotic web that absorbs and commodifies everything with a logic that,
for humanity is slipping into rhizometic fascism. Religion x genetics = politics. It is all
deep psyche-ritual. Everything. All a search for a spiritual absolute =
= Baudrillard takes the Guy Debord/J.G. Ballard fascination with 'the virtual
commodifications or crystallization of organic life towards extinction' further, towards
narrating a technological triumph of the inanimate - a negative eschatology - the nullity of
all opposition, the dissolution of history, the neutralization of difference and the erazure of
any possible configuration of alternate actuality. At this cold super-dense core is the
absolute domination of digitized memory - storage banks, not even dimly fathomable
through the acqueous screens of video display terminals. But it is in these very silent
seas that Cyber-Punk dives and delves, through electronic eddys, currents, flows
towards the nature of the catastrophe, the final fractal zone. The failure of most
Situationists is a failure to understand the nature of the catastrophe and flow with the
crisis. Panic can be an incredible energiser. A prigognic carthexis =
= THE NOBLE NEUROTIC
= Philip K. Dick was influential on Cyber-Punk, in that his novel 'A Scanner Darkly'
touched on what is crucial in Baudrillard's disintegration into neurosis: 'Biological life
goes on, everything else is dead. A reflex, machine-like, like some insect repeating
doomed patterns over and over. A single pattern. The failed codes of an escape
combination. But how can you truly escape yourself?' =
= LET'S GET OUT OF TIME
= For Baudrillard and his approach to Cyber-Punk theory, television - call it the Spectacle
by any other name - is a paradigm of failed escape combinations, of implosive effects, of
remembered codes that make you forget yourself to pieces: the Videodrome collapses
any distinction between receiver and sender, between the medium and the real. Like
Mallarme's Herodinde, and virtually all theorists, caught up in a sterile closed circuit with
her mirror, Baudrillard's subject is locked into an uninterrupted interface with the videoscreen in a universe of fascination. The materiality of both receiver and television
apparatus dissolves, along with the multiple and contradictory layers of institutional
texture, such as the economic imperatives of the multi-nationals. Cyber-Punk both
involves itself in this project and carries out a radical critique of the processes involved,
with a view to transformatory change =
= THIRTY SECONDS OVER TOKYO
= Technological miniaturization is a one-way ride, a symptom of a global system moving
towards domination and universal circulation. In Cyber-Punk, geographical frontiers no
longer exist and in their place are being manufactured vast micro- electronic territories.
Information, structured by automatic data processing, becomes a new kind of raw
material for the industrial myths of the near future. The convergence of home computer,
television and telephone lines are the nexus of a new virtual social machinery, which
testifies to the spectacular consumption of the commodity and the addictions =
= SHOCK THE MONKEY AND WATCH THE MONKEY GET HURT
= For Debord, who was necessary for Cyber-Punk to have a sense of critical- theoretical
praxis, the auratic - virtual presence of the commodity was bound up with the illusion of
its utter tangibility. But now there has been the gradual displacement of aura from images
of possible objects to digitized flows of data, to the glow of the VDT and the post-libidinal
promise of access embodied there. Cyber-Punk is possibly a supersession of the
process explored by Guy Debord, in which the seeming self- sufficiency of the
commodity was a congealment of the forces that were essentially mobile and dynamic.
Now, however, with pure flux itself a commodity, a spectacular-cum-contemplative/
addictive/ hypnotic identity-fulfillment relation to objects is undermined and supplanted by
the new forms of virtuality, the Videodrome itself =
= A HEAVY MAGNUM, SOME BLOOD AND A SENSE OF LOSS
= There is no more opposition in the Cyber-Punk territories between the abstractions of
money and the apparent materiality of commodities; money and what it can buy are now
fundamentally of the same substance. There is a growing dissolution of any language of
the market, desire, hysterical violence and berserker visionary states, into binarized zenpulses of photonic interfacing that extrapolates the fictive unity of representation, the
virtual into the material. Figurative images lose their transparence and are consumed as
simply one more code =
= CORROSION, SEMTEX AND SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
= Cyber-Space is yet another development of five centuries of space-simulating
techniques - you'd be amazed who we have managed to replace with their own double.
Reproductive virtual technologies move ever onwards with new parameters of mimetic
fidelity - call it holography, high resolution television, cloning, the serial Karen Eliot and
my memory of the partially incinerated paper-skin face of the female soviet MIG 31
fighter-pilot in the casualty unit - smiling - as I hand her the semtex and absolution. There
is an immense drift of the image, electronic continents, towards pure surface, endless
skidding. In Cyber-Punk whatever drifts across the retinal socket, the screen or the home
computer is part of the same homogeneity =
= FROM STOKE NEWINGTON TO BAADER-MEINHOF
= Through the 1960's television collaborated with automobile in sustaining the dominant
imagery of spectacular representation: in the virtual annexation or all spaces and the
liquidation of any specific signs that had occupied them. The television screen and car
windshield reconciled visual experience with the velocities and discontinuities of the
market place. As windows they seemed to open on to a visual pyramid of extensive
space in which autonomous movement might be possible - instead they have both
become apertures that frame the subject's transit through streams of disjunct objects and
affects, across disintegrating and hyper- abundant surfaces. Television has gone further
and has grafted itself into other networks. Now the screens of the home computer and
word processor have succeeded the automobile as core products, in an on- going
relocation and hierarchization of productive forces. Video-games are the beginning of
wholly revolutionary links with VDT's and the cameras pan as Baader - Meinhof stagger
through the video-arcade blindfold quoting Karl Marx, but those links are altogether
different from the prothesis of body and automobile =
= DISSOLUTION AND COMMUNION: FICTIONS OF EVERY KIND
= A planetary data-communications network has been physically implanted into the
decaying, digressive terrain of the automobile-based city. One of the key roles of the
expanding electronic grid is to articulate a new social and geopolitical stratification based
on the immediacy of access to transmitted data. The aim of Cyber-Punk is to create a
state of temporary grid-lock in order to insert certain secrets of its own. Cyber-Punk, as
Philip K. Dick's novels and films of David Cronenberg, deals with the near-future world
congested with the coming technologies of everyday life and pushes the thresholds to
the point where the psychoses rip through and the Metrophage gets ugly... =
= THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION
= Cyber-Punk was essentially initiated by J.G. Ballard in 'The Artrocity Exhibition'. Ballard
details the collapse of a landscape through which lines of deterritorialisation have
proceeded to absolute tolerances. Ballard explores fractured zones in which sheer
contiguity replaces syntax and which extend only in terms of the ceaseless conjugation
of bodies, architecture and images that briefly abort, then detach to make new
connections. Ballard's landscape, the city inter-penetrated by image/events of carcrashes, astronauts and war crimes, demands an unrelenting and unremitting effort of
decipherment, made virtually impossible by the equivalence of everything glutting the
field =
= THE WEAPONS RANGE
= A fully saturated spectacular space neutralizes the interpretive delirium of paranoia at
the very moment of inciting it. For Ballard, empirical and quantitative practices become
the flip-side of psychosis and its loss of identities. The simulation of coherence for
Ballard results from the blank accumulation of clinical data, laboratory recording
techniques and the objective observations of scientific research. J.G. Ballard is a
language in himself which only J.G. Ballard can fully access =
= MULTINATIONALS: THOMAS PYNCHON'S FLYING CIRCUS
= Thomas Pynchon in 'Gravity's Rainbow' explores the obliteration of outdated territories,
languages, filiations, of any boundaries or form that has impeded the installation of
cybernetics - the theory of messages and their control is here inter-meshed with the
hegemony of what Pynchon calls the mega- cartel, the zaibatsu, the multinationals =
= UNDERSTAND SOMETHING. ALL FRINGE SOCIO-POLITICAL GROUPS ARE
WEBBED TOGETHER, PULL ONE THREAD AND EVERYTHING COMES APART =
= THE COMING OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
= Ballard's work is an attempt to grasp the contradiction of representational analysis of
the future directly. These inundated near-futures transform our own present into the
determinate past of something yet to come =
= BLADE RUNNER: CYBER-PUNK GOES FILM-NOIR
= 'Blade Runner' as a Cyber-Punk film emphasizes the continuity between the
contemporary world and that of a film dealing with the near future; not by insisting on the
invariability or a permanence of society's characteristics and values, but by following and
continuing the development of lines of force already at work. 'Blade Runner' is about Tom
Vague. Everything is ultimately speaking of Tom Vague. Just who is Tom Vague? He's
you and he is spinning, revolving and dialectically free-associating; waiting for a
message of some sort or another. 'Blade Runner' takes as its object the city a tactical
mapping system - a living video-close for a fictional Cyber-Punk over- lay. In its
essentials, 'Blade Runner' is gazing back at Raymond Chandler and the Private Eye
genre - all very film- noir. You know, Tom Vague in the back seat and you're all wrapped
up in bandages again and the nurse leans over, all needles and clinical zen, and pumps
you full of strange drugs - and just maybe you'll never come down this time and reaching
the door handle takes an eternity. The thriller of the 1940's has a particular affinity for
urban imagery, since it's filmed from a perspective that skims, skids, skips over the city, a
perspective that is immanent to its multifoliate currents =
= SYMBOLISMS, AIRSTRIPS AND MASS PRODUCTION
= These psychogeographic perspectives belong to a hero on the run [call it a heroine call it anything, it's going to get much more twisted] or at very least, on an irrepressible
slide. Like madmen and mystics, the latest Tom Vague, they descend into the malestrom
of our collective desires and longings, our collective unconscious, and follow the logic of
the landscape in which they find themselves. Incapable of mastering the situation, the
Cyber-Punk tag renounces repairing it and attempts instead to join the flow of events, to
follow its twists and turns; crossing over into Cambodia towards Kurtz, he jumped into
the furnace where they keep the scary monsters and supercreeps and went a few rounds
with the collective human ID and its demand for a sacrifice. Kurtz, did you really laugh at
Nagasaki? Two types of images predominate in Cyber-Punk film-noir: first there are
images of crowds and of Tom Vague /Deckard/Willard cutting through them - laminar
flows of people on wide boulevards, minor turbulences susceptible to sudden explosion
and rapid coagulation capable of paralysing a city - grid-lock - where there are no longer
spaces set aside/apart for gatherings. The movement of crowds sweeps in like control
data, while they re-run documentaries of refugees, and mix the most heterogeneous
groups, sometimes homogenizing them, sometimes provoking clashes. Then there are
also images of derelict spaces, spaces that have lost their original purpose which clutter
Cyber-Punk fiction and Situationist psychogeographic theory: obsolete furniture and
buildings [clocks, warehouses, mazes of alleyways, humanity's fallout] and zones which
are not subject to any law - either urban planning or the dominant psychologies =
= ASHES TO ASHES, DUST TO DUST...
= When used by Cyber-Punk, the structure of film-noir is able to:
[1] Develop images of urban crowds, panic, a set of escape combinations, from a
skimming point of view.
[2] Complicate, contradict, dialectically free-associate, reverse the relationships between
centre and periphery. A deserted centre, occupied only by visionaries, and a quiet life on
the periphery create an image parallel to that of the urban exodus that has affected large
western cities for more than a decade [3] Denote spaces and objects whose original purpose has been lost, due not to
obsolescence but rather, to an over-investment [of MEANING, VALUE SYSTEMS,
PRAXIS] brought about by constant recycling - vehicles, shops, texts and constructed
from the most diverse elements, superimposing futuristic and archaic strata =
= THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TERRORISM AND THE GLOBAL
MEDIA/VIDEODROME IS SIMPLE. FORCES LOCKED IN MUTUALLY
ANATAGONISTIC ROLES SECRETLY ABET EACH OTHER =
= AN IMMENSE HALF-SUBMERGED CITY
= 'Blade Runner''s first task is to subjectivise heterogeneous crowds, as they are seen
through Deckard's/Willard's/Renn's eyes - yet another hero - who is immanent to their
movements and the savant cipher to their movements, the narrative use of derelict
spaces and the proliferation of patchworked, overinvested objects. The city, made up of
these elements, is furthermore bound together by a deluge, a pouring rain - another
element. Cyber-Punk stole from film-noir - and by the ubiquitous BLAG - a street
language - a patois of Vague - speak, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Anglic used by the in- mixture of various groups that make up the metroplis population =
= KOYAANISQATSI
= As for Deckard, he initially appears as the equivalent of the private detective with the
voice-over of film-noir - very existential, nihilistic and almost apocalyptic - as both a
sensitive, messianic - failed messianic - possibly pathological spirit repelled by the state
of the world and even while cradling his gun, shouting love at the heart of the world.
Contradictions. The Cyber-Punk tag has to clear a path through a deliberately
theoretically confused atmosphere of this fictive metropolis and distinguish the real from
the irreal even in the most indiscernible cases. At the heart of the city this quest is
hindered by the lack of an horizon, everything is Tom Vague, making ambivalent clues
and unpredictable danger-cum-behavioural response patterns ever present. The CyberPunk cipher therfore must take one step at a time, [pure chess - it always comes down to
games, because they always contain the idea of terror], yet allow herself to be swept into
the multiple currents that cross the city and beckon at random. The investigation, the
inquisition of forms, is no longer the central point, instead, the skidding, the drifting, the
wandering the city, the vertigo of the city, the panic become the phenomenologicaldialectical focus, as everything starts slipping =
= DATAPANIK IN THE YEAR ZERO: THE 19th PROLETARIAN ASSAULT ON THE
GLOBAL ELECTRONIC ECONOMY
= 'Blade Runner' crosses the threshold beyond which the hunter lets himself be
captivated by the prey he should be capturing and by the very hunting ground on which
the prey is completely at home. In 'Blade Runner', the disguised villains whose multiple
identities must be unravelled are no longer intellectuals salavaged by Tom Vague from
oblivion or oh so femme fatales but replicants, androids made indistinguishable from
humans through the wonders of fictive genetic DNA montage shuffling - to hell with this,
let's have a car chase and some assassins, fast music and pheronomes. At the end of
their four- year lifespan replicants are retired. Produced for service in the off-world
colonies in the division of labour, they have been outlawed on Earth since four of them
rebelled - and the job of Deckard, the Blade Runner [Bounty hunter], is to find and
eliminate them. Deckard is not really a private eye, even if he looks and sounds like one that's nothing, virtually the whole of the left sound situationist nowadays, when talking
about the media - he is an ex-policeman specialized in replicant hunting. He has indeed
left the police - just as a private eyes are former cops who either were fired for
insubordination or who resigned out of disgust - he allows himself to be re- enlisted
because, as his boss points out, outside of the police he is "little people", no one. The
fear of identity loss =
= SOME COMMENTS OF SYNTHETICS
= The use of secret agents by the police, who can merge with the locale they monitor
and where they maintain a loose or at least flexible relationship with the police hierarchy,
is a recurrent theme in contemporary western cinema and London at large. These agents
correspond to a new police strategy made necessary by the complexity and obsessions
specific to the Metropolis - THE METROPHAGE. They must be capable of adapting
themselves unnoticed to a specific milieu. The only truly unpenetrated situation has been
the british situationist web of cells, contacts, individuals, Cyber-Punks, workerists - It is
clearly not enough to say these agents must appear as marginal in a society where all
margins can be recuperated by the mainstream of the Spectacle and where any socialprofessional category is susceptible to marginalization - where the movement from the
fringes to the centre is, like the approach to the Castle in Kafka by endless de-tours but
also by unexpected shortcuts and waiting in the High Castle is Tyrell/Kurtz =
= STALINISM IS LONG OBSESSIVE STREAMS OF CLAUSES - POSSIBLY SOME
FORM OF CONFESSIONAL CANT =
= AN URBAN SOUND-SWEEP
= The hierarchy in 'Blade Runner''s japanese Los Angeles, is even concretized in the
pyramidal forms of the immense skyscrapers resembling Aztec structures. Who's
sacrificing who? The projector vehicles with their ads for the colonies, the face of Tom
Vague, do not merely cover the facades with images, but in doing so, they re-define
them. No longer surfaces of seperation, they become potential screens, the
Videodrome? And yet, as soon as there is no longer an image projected on it, it tends to
crumble, to collapse - leaving behind dilapidated buildings, fossil spaces. Such is the
new double status of the facade: sometimes polished, auratic and homogenized by an
image, it becomes a vertical plane on which all depth is reduced to mere surface, and
sometimes it is perforated, permitting the unfolding on an horizontal plane of a field of
unlimited depth but with no horizon. The co-existence of these two states creates many
of the Cyber-Punk urbanisms in the film - from a projector vehicle above a
neighbourhood in ruins to a videophone booth covered with cracks and graffiti =
= I AM NOT TYRELL, AT LEAST NOT IN THE SENSE YOU MEAN
= At the summit sits Doctor Tyrell, president of the Tyrell Corporation, the corporate that
makes the replicants. Interestingly, the production process does not take place in large
factories nor in hi-tech laboratories, but in workshops, black labs scattered throughout
the city. Tyrell is waiting for Roy. He's coming, Tyrell. Dont you hear that soul - biting
tornado moan - he's got plans for you, Tyrell. Goodbye Tyrell. Poor Roy. All rage,
confusion, bloody murder and remorse - oh so sensitive, such depth for a killing
machine. How do emotions feel Roy? Yes! Conscience is the key! That's what it is to be
Kurtz, human. It is the judgment of conscience that defeats us... = = ROY BATTY: A
VERY HUMAN INQUISITION = "Here's Roy! 'Blade Runner' is really about Roy
Batty/Rutger Hauer/ method actors in general. Deckard sees his face on the VDT and
knows he's looking at the final technology. An iron fist that is impossibly lifting the fascist
jackboot off the face of liberal humanity, in fact it is being shredded. Deckard has a
relationship with all the replicants and the relationship is strange, elusive, multi-levelled,
a meeting of Raymond Chandler with William Blake. But with Roy Batty it is everything, it
is full of speed and furious, hysterically violent, wild, berserk, dialectical, pure tornado
moan, so crazy that Roy just has to howl with emotional desolation, hyper- primitive and
really dynamic. The relationship is not homosexual although homosexual apologists will
inevitably appeal to homo-erotica. It's more. Savage ritual always is. Sexuality is not an
ultimate. Neither is violence. The spiritual affirmation of life, ragged, red, raging and
pumping out of control, coming at you like the worst thing in the world is an ultimate - I
mean ask Tom Vague, he knows all the big secrets =
= HIGH BIO-TECHNOLOGY
= Helter Skelter! The Replicants are dangerous but fascinating, frightening but beautiful,
often but not totally and intractably alien; they gradually emerge as the film's true
emotional centre - and Roy who is gigantic, huge, existential, dying, embodies a love that
can kill. Roy Batty uses a near- quotation from Blake to introduce himself:
= 'Fiery the angel fell; deep thunder rolled = Around their shore, burning with the fires of
Orc.' = ['AMERICA: A PROPHECY']
= Roy Batty is a Blakean visionary, driven to acts of incredibly hulking Nietzschean
greatness, because he embodies the world's pain. "Quite an experience to live in fear,
that's what it is to be a slave." But Roy is not just another skin-job, he's what every
Amerikan militarist fantasizes about, the sound of the end of the world. Culture is
disintegrating around Roy and he just ignores the post-modern culture - collapse, the
values - panic and goes to meet Deckard. Roy lapses into vague homo-erotica when he
speaks to Deckard - "You'd better get it up, because if you don't, I'm going to have to kill
you." - Roy is savage, dying undulation - pure here and now rather than only slightly now
and then =
= THE STATE OF HUMANITY/ TORNADO MOAN/ DESOLATION
= Roy's murder of Tyrell is the most meaningful statement in the whole of Cyber-Punk "IT IS A FEARFUL THING TO MEET YOUR MAKER" - It is the way he kills Tyrell. The
whole film pivots on his expressions just after he kills Tyrell as he goes to meet Deckard
at the end of the river. Roy/ Kurtz and Deckard/ Willard/ Hopper mirror-image each other.
Roy has to force Deckard back to humanity, morality, mortality - hence the querulously
ironic, "Are'nt you the good man?" - here all language breaks up, everything crashes, all
the certainties break down. Roy is meant to be Aryan, oh but he's more and that's the
real twist. He's murdered Sebastian and Tyrell ruthlessly - as if coming to grips with a
fantastic new logic, but as he descends in the lift he feels a growing sense of humanity the moral inquisition, conscience. Roy is straight out of liberal Anglo-Western fantasy,
angel-perfect and yet monstrously homocidal in dark stalinist - fascistic - liberal democratic hues as he contemplates a humanity which makes him exterminate ruthlessly
with a self- destructing desolate compassion - a love that can kill. Roy lets Deckard
smash him with a steel pipe, half smiles and reproachfully says - "That hurt!" - then goes
after Deckard towards the final summation of historical event. Deckard is good, the best
any human suppressing his humanity could be - in fact he edges into super-human
overdrive when Roy's hunting him - pure lust for life. Roy's got Deckard all worked out,
he actually forces him beyond his limits, watches him nearly die, then suddenly saves his
life - Why did you do that, Roy? Life knows its own, Roy. There is no middle-ground,
sainthood or brutishness - probably a mixture =
= COMPUTERS MELT OTHER MACHINES, FUSING THEM TOGETHER - TELEVISION
- TELEPHONE - TELEX - TAPE-RECORDER - VCR - LAZER-DISK - BROADCAST
TOWER LINKED TO MICRO-WAVE DISH TO SATELLITE - PHONE-LINE - CABLE - TV
- FIBRE-OPTIC CORDS - THE HUGENESS, THE HUMMING, A TORRENT OF PURE
LIGHT. A SEMIOTIC WEB, A GLOBAL NERVOUS SYSTEM THINKING FOR ITSELF =
= WILLIAM GIBSON/ NEUROMANCER/ MICROCHIPS/ IBM
= 'Neuromancer' is a Cyber-Punk science-fiction novel, definitive in style and content.
Yanked from a japanese slum, where he's been trying to repair his damaged nervous
system and re-enter cyber-space as a cowboy and steal data from the great glowing
subjective geometrics that represent corporate hotcores, CASE soon finds himself way
out of his depth in Turkey, in the Sprawl [the long-predicted Boston-Atlanta Eastern seaboard Megalopolis] and in Lagrane halostats out in corporation- dominated interplanetary
space. CASE has been hired to penetrate the adamantine ICE [Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics] that incase the weird Lagrange-based Tessier-Ashpool
corporation whose two AI's [Artificial Inteligences], Wintermute and Neuromancer play
paradoxes and generate programming phenomena saturated industrial myth of the near
future =
= An equally interesting use of data-buzz is explored in Michael Stanwick's 'Vacuum
Flowers' - it has the usual over-complex endless power-game among the gesellschaften
or the corporate interests and kicks the hell out of humanism. Bruce Sterling's
'Schismatrix' is frankly the most complicated of the Cyber-Punk fictions - they are all
worth reading just for the fictive quality of the language =
== Case met his first Modern two days after he'd screened the Hosaka's precis. The
Moderns, he'd decided, were a contemporary version of the Big Scientists of his own late
teens. There as a kind of ghostly teenage DNA at work in the Sprawl, something that
carried the coded precepts of various short-lived sub- cults and replicated them at odd
intervals. The Panther Moderns were a softhead variation on the Scientists. If the
technology had been available, the Big Scientists would all have had sockets stuffed with
micro-softs. It was the style that mattered and the style was the same. The Moderns
were mercenaries, practical jokers, nihilistic techno-fetishists ==
== The one who showed up at the loft door with a box of diskettes from the Finn was a
soft-voiced boy called Angelo. His face was a simple graft grown on collagen and shark
cartilege polysaacharideas, smooth and hideous. It was one of the nastiest pieces of
elective surgery Case had ever seen. When Angelo smiled, revealing the razor-sharp
canines of some large animal, Case was actually relieved. Toothbud transplants. He'd
seen them before ==
== "You can't let the little pricks generation-gap you," Molly said. Case nodded... ==
==CYBER-PUNK IS A REFERENTIAL ANALYSIS ON
POWER=IDENTITY=PSYCHOLOGIES=FUTURES= CYBER-PUNK IS PURE BLAG ==
== 'NEUROMANCER' IS ESSENTIALLY SYNTHESISING IMAGES OF POP CULTURE,
APPLIED TO THE NEAR FUTURE==