One cannot discuss all of these claims in detail. It's over in the 90s (Balsamo 1996), but the term cyberpunk is still useful (Landon 1991, Stivale 1998). It could only grow out of a 1980s punk sensibility (McCaffrey 1991). It has regressive politics and no social conscience (Csicsery-Ronay 1991), it's dystopian (Suvin 1991), it's pro-science (Ben-Tov 1995), it's the origin narrative of machine consciousness (Stone 1995), and it's the supreme literary expression of postmodernism/late capitalism (Jameson 1991). It is overtly sexist (Hollinger 1991), covertly feminist (Gordon 1991, Plant 1997), the final death blow to humanism (Ross 1991), and an elegy of mourning for the prior death of humanism (Braidotti 1997). It is the variety of responses themselves that are of interest, and a laundry list of critical stances conveys this: Cyberpunk has been called a Baudrillardian simulacrum (Hayles 1993), and a Deleuze-and-Guattarian machinic assemblage (Tamblyn 1997, Stivale 1998). Their reactions can be classified in rough terms, but nothing rides on these divisions. It is in the combination of conflicts and common themes among these perspectives that we can find outlines of a new liminal space, which I will refer to as a "world-shaped hole."Ĭritics of cyberpunk do not divide into a convenient number of categories. But commentary on cyberpunk converges around rather than on a common problematic. The critical perspectives on cyberpunk I review are not mistaken. This meta-analysis will reveal the outline for a philosophy at the limit of what Kathryn Pyne Addelson has called "archist" or bourgeois, principle-oriented ethics (150-53). Rather than digging deeper into these internecine wars of interpretation, I offer a meta-analysis of cyberpunk/criticism. Some critics conclude that cyberpunk must therefore speak to popular culture in a fresh and revealing manner, but cynics continue to insist that there is nothing new here. These contradictions do not map neatly onto disciplinary, political, or ideological differences, but often work across such boundaries, infusing them with an eccentric energy.
One seldom finds critical response to genre fictions so hotly contradictory. One of the strengths of cyberpunk is not that it explicitly argues for a new moral and political stance in reading/writing-it is quite jaded about moral pleading-but that the gaps it reveals raise the possibility of such arguments and shift the burden to readers/writers to make something of that possibility.Ĭyberpunk captures the critical imagination in a peculiar way.
Its reading strategy joins cyberpunk texts and criticism, and incorporates the notion of social and moral responsibility. This essay turns away from the now-tired questions of what cyberpunk is and what it can do, toward issues which such arguments conceal. Cyberpunk storms out of a breakdown of old gaps between the sciences and the humanities, and at the same time reveals new gaps at the intersubjective level, between individuals, as well as between readers and texts, theory and praxis, moral responsibility and cynical indifference. Cyberpunk animates the idea of cyberspace itself, and the metaphysical and epistemological confrontations which cyberspace facilitates, but that matter has been thoroughly examined elsewhere. 1, Spring 2000Ĭyberpunk fiction dwells in liminal space: between virtual and material realities, between the human and the technological, between mind and body, men and women, past, present and future.