Week 2.1: Neuromancer

First off, I'd like to suggest to those not already doing it to consider scrape each others' posts off into some sort of RSS set-up (I'm using Google Reader to do just that) to make this whole enterprise easier to manage. Conversely, I'm pleased with my header image and wish you all would come and view it live. I digress.

Reading Gibson's Neuromancer for the first time, I'm struck by it as a compendium of ways-to-be-human (or less or more than human; or inhuman). It presents an encyclopedic version of all things we think of as blurring the boundary between the human and the technological. (I'm really into encyclopedias, largely because of the ways in which they attempt to represent totality without achieving it...eg Gibson gives snippets of many different types and levels of cybernetics to give the impression of covering the entire range.)

Armitage and Wintermute (or Neuromancer or whatever comes after them both) form the inverted poles of the human-technological divide and thus reveal it as far less of a divide than we might at first think. Armitage--whose name a quick internet search reveals is a mathematical term for a process that limits variables--is a nearly, fully human shell that houses a personality construct not all too distant from something Pavlovian. In contrast, the AI--even before its fully conscious--seems to have a full range of human behaviors, even if it has to appear in a range of forms.

As a final somewhat unrelated note, it seems that in the midst of all the body manipulation we haven't gotten outside of real gendered positions. It is Molly's body that is a focal point and that we spend most of our time tourist-ing around in. And it is Case that has the liberty to be without body. For all the heteroglossia aren't we still running around with a lot of binaries?