A New Currency Optimized
A New Currency Optimized
A New Currency Optimized
1
Davis, Roger. You Are What You Eat: Cannibalism, Autophagy and the Case of Armin Meiwes. Territories of
Evil. Amsterdam: Brill Academic Publishers, 2008.
2 Mueller, Monika. Kutzbach, Konstanze. The Abject of Desire : The Aestheticization of the Unaesthetic in
5 Haraway, Donna. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth
Century. Socialist Review 80. 1985. pp. 65108.
6
Baudrillard, Jean. Two Essays: Simulacra and Science Fiction/Ballards Crash. Science Fiction Studies #55,
18:3, 1991
7
Baudrillard, 1991. More on the relationship between Crash and Baudrillards theories of hyperreality will be
discussed later.
needle of the speedometer' (p. 130). For the narrator, sexual excitement can no longer be achieved
through humans orientation to one another, but through a humans orientation to surrounding
technology.
Ballards novel was written over a decade before the invention of the cyberpunk genre, an
event that is usually marked by the publishing of William Gibsons Neuromancer in 1984. Yet in 1973,
Ballard clearly anticipated many aspects of the cyberpunk genre, which focuses on futures in which
humans have achieved greater intimacy with their surrounding technology. Yet Ballard chose to set
Crash in the present of Ballards own time of writing. To further ground the novel in a contemporary
setting, the narrators name, James Ballard, is a direct reflection of the authors. According to
Ballard, the obsession with the automobile portrayed in the novel reflects being a human in the
1970s, and the marriage of the physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and technological
aspects of our lives. (Ballard, 1971) Ballard keenly recognized that the automobile had been
consistently sexualized since the 1920s, wherein the car became a renowned site of discreet sexual
encounters8, to the publicizing of mechophiles, or machine-fetishists throughout the latter half of
the twentieth century.9
Whereas in Crash, the principal cyborg belongs to a small group of fetishists, in Neuromancer,
the act of merging ones body with technology has become commonplace; practically every character
in the novel has a deliberately modified body. Neuromancer centers around Case, a console cowboy
who lives for the thrill of direct neural connection to cyberspace. A major theme, as in Crash, is the
systematic outdating of the human body, and the potential for the cyborg to become an object of
fetishization.
Alienation from ones body is a key theme throughout Neuromancer. The pejorative terms
meat and flesh are used as identifiers for the remnants of a natural humanity still left beneath the
technology, metal, and other modifiers that consist the cyborg, deliberately distancing Case from the
body they represent. In the community of console cowboys, the elite stance involved a certain
relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat (p. 12). His sexual desire for his untimely love,
Linda Lee, features as somewhat repulsive to him, as he refigures them as not his desires, but those
of the alien meat. Yet the transition into this post-body consciousness is incomplete, as the
temptations of flesh still hold power. Case inconsistently describes Linda Lee in this technical
fashion. He struggles to keep her features reduced to a code (p. 15), switching back to more
traditional modes of sexuality.
New lines of pain were starting to etch themselves permanently at the corners of her mouthThe
pattern might have represented microcircuits, or a city map a tangible wave of longing hit him, lust
and loneliness riding in on the wavelength of amphetamine. He remembered the smell of her skin in
the overheated darkness of a coffin near the port, her fingers locked across the small of his back.
All the meat, he thought, and all it wants. (p. 17)
The inconsistency of diction reflect the warring factions of the biological versus the
technological within the cyborg. Like Crash, the characters of Neuromancer more yearn for
transformation than have entirely achieved it. When painful, repressed memories of Linda come
back, Case code-switches, seemingly conflicted between the highly technical language of cyberspace,
and the identifiers of a natural humanity. The weight of memory came down, an entire body of
knowledge driven into his head like a microsoft into a socket. Gone. He smelled burning meat. (p.
8Ling, Peter. Sex and the Automobile. History Today; London. 39:11, 18-25, 1989.
9For a pop-study of this largely underground fetish, see Mark D. Griffiths Mechanophilia Exposed and
Explained. Psychology Today. Nov 17, 2016.
142) A similar conflict arises during his sexual encounter with an avatar of Linda, where flesh and
metal mix freely. The zipper hungHe broke it, some tiny metal part shooting off against the
walland then he was in her, effecting the transmission of the old message (p. 285). The use of old
message confirms the disdain of traditional sex as belonging to an earlier, outdated time.
This preference for the cyborg aspects of oneself was unique at the time (with the exception
of Crash), but has resurfaced in countless novels since, often as a satire of the alienation humans
experience through contact with modern technology. Iain M. Bankss The Algebraist is set around the
year 4034 AD, when humanity has been modified beyond current definitions of the species. When
travelling in space, humans may spend months, if not years, encased in shock gel which allows the
mind to function while the body remains cryogenically stable. When these characters emerge from
their casing, they are uncomfortably reminded of their awkward human form, and 'astonished at tiny
things like fingernails and the hairs on an arm...missing the richness of her in-pod, wired-up virtual
existence with the ability to dip in and out of entire high-definition sensoria of data...'10 Case
becomes alienated from his own human form the same way, as his body is made useless by his direct
neural connection to pleasure and adventure. When he disconnects, he is suddenly aware of each
tingling hair on his arms and chest (p. 14). When once, he gets a view of his own body through
Mollys eyes, he sees a white-faced, wasted figure, afloat in a loose fetal crouch... (p. 301). This
imagery proves the emergence of a new preference for the cyborg body over that of the increasingly
outdated, and disturbingly fleshy, human. To ask Ballard, the world of Neuromancer might constitute
the next step in the development of a new sexuality born from a perverse technology.11
10
Banks, Iain M. The Algebraist. London: Orbit, 2004. (p. 355)
11
Ballard, J.G. Crash. New York: Vintage, 1995 (p. 13)
12 In the earliest discovered work of human literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, the fear of death and quest for
14 Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava. Transhumanism as a Secularist Faith. Zygon; 47. 2012. pp. 710734.
15
Hardin, Michael. Postmodernism's desire for simulated death: Andy Warhol's car crashes , J. G. Ballard's
crash, and Don Delillo's white noise. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory. 13:1, 21-50, 2002.
16 Humanity+ Media. "Transhuman FAQ." H+magazine. 1999. http://hplusmagazine.com/transhumanist-faq/
17
Hardin, Michael, 2002.
Mapping the body onto technology is what creates immortality, the simulacra, because it screens
the human onto the technological...transforming the human into object. The image of an icon on
film, the impression of a person on the hood of a car. (Hardin, 2002)
While the main characters in the novel give their consent to death in this manner, James and
Vaughan find it suitable to apply their definition of what the cyborg can be to all of humanity. Like
cyborg zealots, they implicate anyone who can possibly be seen as a cyborg (the celebrity, the car
crash victim, the mutilated) into their grand scheme of death and sexual violence. It is only when the
full finality of death is threatenedsuch as when Vaughan attempts to kill James's wife Catherine,
and later, James himselfthat the moral complexity of death is considered, and the frayed remnants
of animal life appear beneath the cyborgs shell. The cyborgs in Crash are incomplete, representing a
primitive step along the way to the posthuman, and there is no afterlife in which pleasure can
continue after death. The banalization of death, then, leads to nothing apart from death, and there is
only the illusion of transcendence. In this sense, the transhuman experience of the novel
recapitulates the religious angle of death-acceptance.
In Neuromancer, the very nature of death has been redefined. No longer is death the apex of
finality but viewed with renewed interest and desire for its ability to simulate full disassociation from
the body. The novel opens on a suicidal Case, who is driven towards death as the closest possible
experience to 'the bodiless exultation of cyberspace' (p. 12). Even after he regains the ability to
access cyberspace, Case is still seduced by the potentialities of death to free him from the pain of
existence and remembrance. One character comments to Case on the 'lengths you will go to in order
to accomplish your own destruction' (p. 278). In this violent, turbulent world, death is unavoidable;
nearly every character experiences death in some fashion, and for console cowboys, it is the
inevitable risk of cyberspace. The finality of death, however, has been completely renegotiated. The
consciousness of Cases dead mentor Dixie Flatline (named for the number of times he has survived
flatlining while jacked into a computer complex) is made immortal in cyberspace against his will.
Case's lover, Linda Lee, dies quite early on, yet is virtually resuscitated several times, and Case even
has sex with her after her physical death.
As becomes clear in the text, the potential for immortality opens up the potential for
violence to the newly-disposable body. Resuscitation after death is not akin to admittance into
heaven, and rather dangerously scrambles notions of identity and consent. The dead are not brought
back to life of their own free will, but by someone with the power to utilize the bodies of the dead
for self-serving purposes. The reincarnation of the cyborg has surfaced as a global economy of re-
used body parts. Early in the novel, Case acknowledges that while he might technically die, his
heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with new yen for the clinic
tanks (p. 14). In other cases, vacant bodies may be taken over by incorporeal intelligences, who
speak through dead mouths in a sinister form of identity theft. This occurs numerous times
throughout Neuromancer, as the A.I. Wintermute moves from one vacant body to another, using
familiar visages to effectively manipulate Case. The most tragic case is that of Case's inscrutable boss
Armitage, whom is discovers to be the hollowed-out shell of a man, previously mentally damaged
after a military operation-gone-wrong. Out of the shreds of his former personality, Wintermute
constructed a new personality that the A.I. is able to control entirely.
Beyond utilizing dead bodies as vessels and subjecting unwilling consciousnesses to
reincarnation, the female bodies in Neuromancer are endlessly recycled for sexual ends. The character
of Molly, a classical femme fatale of the cyberpunk generation with mirror-shaded eyes and nail
daggers, is especially poignant in this regard. Mollys modifications both make her dangerous to
men, but simultaneously desirable. Molly has consented to her modifications, which in turn have
eliminated her ability to consent to all that her body is used for. Without consent, her body is shown
publicly engaging in sex acts with a character, Riviera, who has the ability to cause holographic
hallucinations in others. During this simulated sex, its clear that Riviera fetishizes Molly for the
cyborg aspects of her body, correctly visualizing these features while wantonly distorting her flesh
(p. 168). Later, we learn that Molly has previously been a meat puppet in an industry of
unconscious women rented out as prostitutes. Molly describes the experience as renting the goods,
is all. You arent in, when its all happening (p. 177), yet as she becomes more heavily modded,
further distancing herself from the fleshly aspects of herself, worktime [starts] bleeding in, and she
begins to remember the nonconsensual sex acts that she is taking part in.
The sexual violence resulting from the fetishizing of technology and banalizing of death is
obvious even upon cursory glance in Crash, but it manifests differently than in Gibsons novel. After
Jamess first experience of a car crash, he begins to see everything as a machine. The violent event
that has partially merged his body with technology allows James to see in minute detail the
performativity in every aspect of society: the sexual affairs of his wife as ritualized mating, the
mock-grief after an accident as a mere stylization of a gesture (p. 32). Technology represents the
exciting and new in this tired theatre, as the only type of drama that appears unrehearsed (p. 19). In
the confused gestalt that constitutes the newly cyborg being, ideas of consent and human agency are
outdated. Humans are no longer of primary importance, nor primarily alive; technology is. During
an interaction with a nurse at the hospital, James wonders how he could bring her to life - by
ramming one of these massive steel plugs into a socket at the base of her spine? (p. 36). Only after
merging with technology can one be considered alive, in the newly modern sense, especially if this
results from very lack of consent inherent in car crash experiences. This lack of human agency in the
face of technology proves sexually exciting to those within Vaughans inner circle, such as in the
case of an instrument panel forced on to a drivers crotch (p. 12).
Postmodernist scholar Jean Baudrillard was especially intrigued by Crash as a perfect fictional
summary of his philosophies of simulacra and simulation. Ballards setting is an embrace of the
hyperreality of modernity, in which the world of human creation has superseded any semblance of a
natural, animal world. To Baudrillard, Crash embraces the hyperreality of both society and the
human body, fetishizing a body with neither organs nor organ pleasures, entirely dominated by gash
marks, excisions, and technical scarsall under the gleaming sign of a sexuality that is without
referentiality and without limits.18 Science fiction about the cyborg reveals future avenues for these
violent potentials, but perhaps is even more useful in showcasing how technology has already
penetrated our lives, leading us far from typical behavioral and sexual modes. The level of violence
in Crash or Neuromancer is not the experience of current users of technology. But in extrapolating on
the potential for violence to arise from contemporary trends of technology usage, these novels
expose humanity as already a cyborg entity: a product of both biology and technology.
18
Baudrillard, Jean. Two Essays: Simulacra and Science Fiction/Ballards Crash. Science Fiction Studies #55,
18:3, 1991
Works Cited:
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BBC News. German cannibal tells of regret. BBC News Channel. 23 November 2003.
Baudrillard, Jean. Two Essays: Simulacra and Science Fiction/Ballards Crash. Science Fiction Studies #55, 18:3, 1991
Davis, Roger. You Are What You Eat: Cannibalism, Autophagy and the Case of Armin Meiwes. Territories of Evil.
Amsterdam: Brill Academic Publishers, 2008.
Goldstein, Toby. J.G. Ballard: Visionary of the Apocalypse. Heavy Metal. April, 1982.
Haraway, Donna. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth
Century. Socialist Review; 80. 1985. pp. 65108.
Hardin, Michael. Postmodernism's desire for simulated death: Andy Warhol's car crashes , J. G. Ballard's crash, and
Don DeLillos white noise. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory. 13:1, 21-50, 2002.
Hopkins, Patrick D. Transcending the Animal: How Transhumanism and Religion Are and Are Not Alike.
Journal of Evolution and Technology; 14:2. 2005. pp. 1328.
Ling, Peter. Sex and the Automobile. History Today; London. 39:11, 1989. pp. 18-25.
McCaffrey, Anne. The Ship Who Sang. New York: Ballantine, 1969.
Mueller, Monika. Kutzbach, Konstanze. The Abject of Desire : The Aestheticization of the Unaesthetic in Contemporary Literature
and Culture. Amsterdam: Brill Academic Publishers, 2007.
Smith, Cordwainer. The Lady Who Sailed The Soul. The Best of Cordwainer Smith. New York: Ballantine, 1975. (Story
originally published 1960)
Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava. Transhumanism as a Secularist Faith. Zygon; 47. 2012. pp. 710734.