1. What's the Critique of Cyberpunk? American Studies 282 Rutgers University Prof. Cornelius Collins Spring 2011

2. Gender in Gibson

Rikki, Molly, Linda Lee

Dualism: "Meat" or mercenary

Signs of correction inMona Lisa Overdrive

Exceptions?

3Jane? Wintermute and Neuromancer asgenderless Ais?

But matrix figured as feminine: dark and secret

Gender assumptions unchanged

"Feminist power asthethreat of the future" (Rob Nixon)

3. Resistance is futile?

Resistance, accommodation, or complicity?

Fetishization of brands

4. "Embrace of technology" (Nixon) 5. Corporate power is not shaken 6. Heroes part of the system and profit by their mastery of it 7. Opposition as style: "borrowed authenticity from punk rock" 8. USA! USA! USA!

American individualism vs.Japanese corporatism

9. Nixon: "in a relentlessly capitalist future, American heroism can be rearticulated": entrepreneurial, ingenious, upwardly mobile 10. Outlaw ... cowboy ... maverick 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. "A Manifesto for Cyborgs"

Donna Haraway, 1985

16. Scholarly essay 17. Manifesto: a movement's declaration of principles

Compare Sterling's preface

18. Modern myth (& postmodern)

Haraway: Dream of alternative myth, "an imaginative resource"

19. Myths -- not pre-scientific, outdated explanations of the world, butdescriptions of cultural values 20. Modern culture's dualisms

feminine masculine

21. nature culture 22. private public 23. emotion rationality 24. savage civilized 25. other self 26. dark light 27. Beyond the boundaries

Haraway's 3 boundary breakdowns (193-95)

between human and animal

between animal-human (organism) and machine

between physical and nonphysical

28. We are all cyborgs now

"a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction" (191)

29. "We cannot go back ideologically or materially" (204) 30. Science fiction is reality

Science fiction is reality

Medicine: our bodies -- hybrid (191)

31. Work: our labor -- mobile, global (195) 32. War: our violence -- virtual (206) "The machine is us" (222) 33. Irony and subversion

Cyborg: "offspring" of militarism, patriarchy, and capitalism (193) Cyborg politics becomes struggle against perfect communication and code (218)

34. "Progress"?

No origin, no fall

35. No salvation, no apocalypse 36. Release from unity, teleology, escalation, domination, guilt, innocence (192, 199, 217) 37. Postmodernity

"the night dream of post industrial society" (195)

38. When capitialism's traditional mode of accumulation reaches its limit and shifts to a "more flexible" mode (David Harvey) 39. What is "late capitalism"?

Early capitalism: mercantile

40. High capitalism: industrial 41. Late capitalism: financial