The Cyber Sublime

The Cyber Sublime:

The Search for the Sublime in William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash

By Edward O’Brien B.A (hons.)

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Abstract

This dissertation project attempts to establish the presence of the sublime aesthetic philosophy in the science fiction novels Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson and Snow Crash (1992) by Neal Stephenson.

The project will begin by establishing the existing arguments for the sublime as a key to understanding the ‘sense of wonder’ in science fiction as set out by Cornel Robu in his article “Key to Science Fiction: The Sublime (1988).

After this is established, we will go on to look at evidence of the sublime in the two fore mentioned works, which are examples of post modern science fiction, paying close attention to the motifs of the city, cyberspace and cyborgs.

Finally, we hope to answer the question of whether the sublime is present in the sub genre of science fiction, cyberpunk, and in particular, Neuromancer and Snow Crash. We will identify the bearing this has on the argument for the presence of the sublime in SF.

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Contents:

Title

Abstract

Contents

Introduction: Establishing the Sublime in Science Fiction

1.Cyberpunk Cities and the Postmodern Sublime

2.Cyberspace: Terrifying Infinity

3.Why Cyborgs are Sublime

4. Leaving the ‘Meat’ Behind: Transcendence and the Post-human

Epilogue

Bibliography

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36

45

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54

The following abbreviations appear in the text:

N: Neuromancer (1984)S: Snow Crash (1992)

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Introduction

Establishing the Sublime in Science Fiction

“...And I have feltA presence that disturbs me with joyOf elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,And the blue sky and, in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impelsAll thinking things, all objects of thought,

And rolls through all things.” William Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey” (1798)

The above excerpt from the poem “Tintern Abbey” by William Wordsworth featured in a book

review of Paul Anderson’s Tau Zero, by Peter Nichollsi, who used the poem in an attempt to define

“‘sense of wonder’, that old critical phrase...familiar to all SF fans”ii, which is arguably one of the

denominating characteristics of science fiction. Nicholls’ review (as well as the lines from “Tintern

Abbey”) is cited again in an article by Cornel Robu entitled “The “Sense of Wonder” is “a Sense

Sublime””iii, where Robu notes that

“...there is a general widespread consensus, shared not only by scholars, but also by writers

and fans (which is very unusual!)...concerning the specific kind of aesthetic pleasure that

only SF can offer: it is the famous “sense of wonder”...”iv

He continues to credit Nicholls as the “first to notice”v that the “sense of wonder is essentially an

emotion of the sublime and is the same things as “a sense sublime” ,which Wordsworth spoke about

in 1798 in his well known poem”vi , though acknowledges that the term ““sense of wonder” is a

more “diffuse, more softened, and a critically more pliable expression of the same old concept” of

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the aesthetic theory of the sublimevii. Robu asserts that the sublime may well be the “long-sought

common denominator of SF”viii and key in defining the identity of the genre.

The 1994 article was Robu’s second in which he links science fiction and the theory of ‘the

sublime’. His first article, published in 1988, in Science Fiction Foundation and titled “A Key to

Science Fiction: The Sublime”, lays the foundations for his argument that SF generates the emotions

linked with this aesthetic concept and can be evaluated on those grounds:

“I maintain...that science fiction, at its highest, is an art of the sublime, it is the particular

reification of the sublime in twentieth-century art, and the pleasure that we find in SF is a

specific aesthetic pleasure, that “pleasure in pain” which, except for the tragic, only the

sublime can offer...On what grounds do I state that SF in art of the sublime and that this

aesthetic concept may serve as a perfect theoretical key for the understanding,

interpretation and evaluation of SF? On the grounds offered by the two factors in SF: science

and fiction.”

The ‘pleasure in pain’ that Robu refers to is taken from the essential philosophical works on the

sublime; The Analytic of the Sublime in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement and Edmund Burke’s

A Philosophical enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Kant describes the

sublime in this sense as “a pleasure that is only possible through the mediation of displeasure.” ix

Burke, who’s Enquiry preceded Kant, offers a similar treatise:

“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the idea of pain, and danger, that is to say whatever

is in any sort terrible or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner

analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime...the idea of pain are much more powerful

than these which enter on the part of pleasure”x

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This feeling of ‘pleasure in pain’, or the sublime, results from the feeling of terror or danger whereby

the human mind becomes overwhelmed by something which appears incalculable and leads to lofty

emotion. This represents the idea of the sublime as that which is beyond the comprehension of

human senses and will lead to a ‘delightful horror’, the ‘pleasure in pain’. Robu, in his article uses

these excerpts from Burke and Kant to argue that the “anchoring into science,” of science fiction

leads to the

“...assimilation and appropriation of the image of the universe, as it results from the

incessantly developing twentieth- century sciences, [ensuring] for SF, unlimited resources to figure

infinity...”xi

As, according to Burke, infinity is another source of the sublime: “Infinity has a tendency to

fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror which is the most genuine effect and truest test of the

sublime.”xii What Robu argues is that the science in science fiction guarantees credibility,

creating a realistic illusion where the reader is able to ‘think the infinite’xiii – creating the feeling of

the sublime, that aesthetic emotion which comes with the overwhelming of the human mind. He

asserts- “In science fiction science enforces the sublime.” xiv

When “A Key to Science Fiction: The Sublime” was published by foundation in 1988, it was

met with great enthusiasm.xv However, as Darren Jorgensen states in his own article, “The Sublime

Cognition of Science Fiction Narratives”, Robu concentrates on the relationship between the sublime

and SF because of “their common wish to figure infinity and represent the overwhelmingly great”

and that the error he makes is to “compare the two because they look alike, to demonstrate the

lineage between SF and the sublime through their common interest in the vast cosmos.”xvi Though I

would suggest that there is a comparison to be made because of ‘their common interest’ in the

infinite cosmos, Jorgensen does not give Robu enough credit for establishing this link. In the space of

an article Robu succeeds in presenting the argument that SF creates a feeling of the sublime and also

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explains further links between science, SF and the sublime. Robu quotes the philosopher Nicolai

Hartmann:

“First of all sublimity exists in the various phenomena of nature...For the scientist, many

other things may be sublime: the internal structure of the atom or the subtle movements

within the cell nucleus”xvii

This sublime is the result of scientific equipment enabling man to witness the infinitely small. It is the

same as Kant’s mathematical sublime- the thought of infinity which causes an elevated feeling by

gazing at the stars through a telescope, as we are faced, initially with a sight we find

incomprehensible:

“...the sublime is that in comparison with which everything else is small. Here we easily see

that nothing can be given in nature, however great it is judged by us to be, which could not if

considered in another relation be reduced to the infinitely small; and conversely there is

nothing so small which does not admit by extension of our imagination to the greatness of a

world, if compared with smaller standards. Telescopes have furnished us with abundant

material for making the first remark, microscopes for the second.”xviii

Jorgensen uses both H.G Well’s “The Star” (1897) and War of the Worlds (1898) as examples

of the mathematical sublime, though Well’s himself “never acknowledged the influence of the

sublime, he did make use of optical technologies and alterations of scale.”xix Both at the beginning

and end of War of the Worlds, we are shown the image of eyes looking into telescopic lenses and

then in “The Star”, whose cataclysmic approach is recorded by astronomical observatories. Not only

do these adhere to the rules of the mathematically sublime but also to Burke’s notion of terror: the

observation of something terrifying and powerful leads to pleasure accompanied by pain, when the

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human senses are incapable of calculating infinite limitations. This feeling is best summarised in Kant

here:

“The feeling of the sublime is a feeling of displeasure that arises from the imaginations

inadequacy, in an aesthetic estimation of magnitude, for an estimation by reason, but is at the same

time also a pleasure, aroused by this very judgement of the inadequacy...”xx

The instances of the naturally sublime are a key feature of many SF texts, particularly those

of the late nineteenth-century, which are explained by the influence on the genre by the gothic

romances of the same era. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, hailed by many as the first science fiction

novel, is abound with instances of the sublime, particularly in the imagery of the scenes where Victor

travels to the Alps, sees Mont Blanc in its “awful majesty”xxi and encounters “sublime and

magnificent scenes”xxii.

“I remembered the effect that the tremendous and ever-moving glacier had produced upon

my mind when I first saw it. It had filled me with sublime ecstasy that gave wings to the

soul...The sight of the awful and majestic in nature had indeed always the effect of

solemnizing my mind...It is a scene terrifically desolate.”xxiii

The paragraphs pay direct homage to the pleasure in pain and delightful terror found in Burke’s

sublime:

“If the pain and terror are so modified as not to be actually noxious; if the pain is not carried

to violence, and the terror is not conversant about the present destruction of the person, as

these emotions clear the parts of a troublesome encumbrance, they are capable of

producing delight; not pleasure, but a sort of delightful horror; a sort of tranquillity tinged

with terror.”xxiv

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Here we see the ‘awful and majestic’ to which Victor Frankenstein refers to and its ability to

establish a feeling of solemnity coupled with terror. It is no surprise that the writers of the Romantic

period would often pay homage to the Alps, which became the favoured image of the sublime in

many of their works. It was Shelley’s husband who two years prior to Frankenstein had used the

mountain as a symbol of the sublime in “Mont Blanc”xxv (“And when I gaze on thee/ I seem as in a

trance sublime and strange). The effect of those properties on a subject Kant called the dynamic

sublime (rather than mathematic).

These instances remain examples of natural sources of the sublime, but what of the

artificial? Science fiction, particularly in the modern and post-modern era, deals with topics ranging

from artificial intelligences, robots and cyborgs to time travel, parallel universes and spaceships.

Many of the major motifs of SF deal with that which operates outside of natural phenomenon. Robu

does hint at the idea of a (post) modern sublime by suggesting that “in the face of the artificial

intelligence of the machine...man is in the same situation was when confronted with the temporal or

spatial infinities”xxvi, suggesting that the machine is an artificial infinite which may have devastating

potential should it, like nature, break free from our control. Failing to escape from the notion of

sublime as a result of infinity in the Kantian sense, Robu falls short of recognising that technology

can lead to different kinds of horror and delight from alternate sources of the sublime. As we alter

our own realities with increasing levels of technology in the post modern age, the way we encounter

phenomena also changes. Darren Jorgensen quotes from Istvan Csicsery- Ronay Jr.:

“With the Americans love of technological control, the sublime comes to mean the spectacle

of nature being subjugated. Where nature presented a defining obstacle to the imagination

in the classical sublime, for the Americans it presented a small, and even smaller one...”xxvii

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This does not mean that Kant and Burke are no longer useful. Instead it means that as the post

modern era emerged, the sublime changed- and so the theories of Kant and Burke (and others),

were adapted to figure in the new, technological aesthetic. A recent and formative work is Joseph

Tabbi’s Postmodern Sublime, where he writes that “the emergence of science and technology has

put flight to former metaphysical, religious and political certainties” and that now “literature and

science...are considered to be alternative constructions or “discourse systems””xxviii in attempts to

figure reality.

If the sublime is indeed the key to science fiction as Robu suggests, then it must still be

evident in some form, in post modern SF texts. Istvan Csicsery- Ronay gives cyberpunk, a sub-genre

of science fiction, as the best example of the post modern in literature:

“As a label, “cyberpunk” is perfection. It suggests the apotheosis of postmodernism. One the

hand, pure negation: of manners, history, philosophy, politics, body, will, affect, anything

mediated by cultural memory; on the other , pure attitude: all is power, and “subculture”,

and the grace of Hip negotiating the splatter of consciousness as t slams against the hard-

tech future, the techno-future of artificial immanence, where all that was once nature is

simulated and elaborated by technical means...The oxymoronic conceit in cyberpunk is so

slick and global it fuses the high and the low, the complex and the simple, the governor and

the savage, the techno-sublime and rock and roll slime.”xxix

The cybernetic futures where the narratives take place in this genre provide the perfect backdrop for

what Csicsery-Ronay Calls the “techno-sublime”. The term “cyberpunk” itself came into use after the

publication of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) which is seen as the definitive novel for defining

the subgenre. Scientific technologies shapes the world in which Neuromancer is set, particularly

those of human augmentation (cyborgs) and virtual reality, which are the reason for the ‘Neuro-’

part of the works title- the latter part , “romancer”, pays homage to the Romantic era, as the novel

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figures many gothic motifs. The sublime must be able to be found here then, both in its original

aesthetic concept and technological, postmodern forms. For this reason, the rest of the project will

examine the text of Neuromancer and other cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash (1992) by Neil

Stephenson, to evaluate this case for the sublime in post modern SF.

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i Nicholls, Peter. Reviews of Tau Zero (1970) by Poul Anderson and Ringworld (1970) by Larry Niven. In: Foundation: the International Review of Science Fiction. Vol. 2 (June 1972) p. 45-52.ii Nicholls, Peter. See op. cit.iii Robu, Cornel. “The “Sense of Wonder” is “a Sense Sublime”. In: Science Fiction Research Association Review. No. 211 (May/ June 1994). p. 43-64iv Robu, Cornel, see op. cit., p. 43v Robu also credits Damon Knight and Alexei Panshin as having grasped the link between the “sense of wonder” and the sublime.vi Robu, Cornel. See op. cit., p. 42vii Robu, Cornel. See op. cit., p. 52viii Robu, Cornel. See op. cit., p. 42ix Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment, First Book: The Analytic of the Sublime, No. 42, p.109 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952). All following references to Kant’s Critique of Judgement are taken from this edition.x Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) p. 36. All following references to Burke’s ‘Enquiry’ are taken from this editionxi Robu, Cornel. “A Key to Science Fiction: The Sublime”, In: Foundation: the International Review of Science Fiction. Vol. 42 (Spring 1988), p. 24xii Burke, Edmund. See op. cit., p 67.xiii Robu, Cornel. See op. cit., p. 21xiv Robu, Cornel. See op. cit., p. 25xv Jorgensen, Darren. “The Sublime Cognition of Science Fiction Narratives” In: Foundation: the International Review of Science Fiction. Vol. 35 No. 98, (Autumn 2006), p. 116xvi Jorgensen, Darren. See op. cit., p 117xvii Hartmann, Nicolai. Asthetik (Walter de Gruyter: Berlin, 1953) p. 365 in Robu, Cornel. See op. cit., p 23xviii Kant, Immanuel. See op. cit., p 97.xix Jorgensen, Darren. See op. cit., p 118xx Kant, Immanuel. See op. cit., p 114xxi Shelly, Mary. Frankenstein (Broadview: Ontario, 1999) p. 124xxii Shelly, Mary. See op. cit., p. 121xxiii Shelly, Mary. See op. cit., p. 123xxiv Burke, Edmund. See op. cit., p. 123xxv Thurber, Bart. “Towards a Technological Sublime” in The intersection of science fiction and philosophy: critical studies edited by Robert E. Myers, p. 215xxvi Robu, Cornel. See op. cit., p. 28 Csicsery- Ronay Jr., Istvan. "The Posthuman Sublime" Metal and Flesh/chair et metal no. 4 (February 2002)In: Jorgensen, Darren. See op. cit., p. 121xxvii

xxviii Tabbi, Joseph. Preface to Postmodern Sublime (Cornell University Press: New York, 1996)xxix Csicsery-Ronay Jr. “Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism” in Storming the Reality Studio: a casebook of cyberpunk and postmodern science fiction (Duke University Press, 1991) p. 182

I. Cyberpunk cities And the postmodern sublime

“Take the westward bound express to 49th Avenue, cross over to a redline elevator and go a thousand levels to Plaza Terminal. Carry on south from there and you’’ find it between 568th Avenue and 422nd Street.”

(J.G Ballard, Concentration City)

If cyberpunk is the “apotheosis of the postmodern”, as according to Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., then future

cities play an important role establishing this fact. The small segment from Ballard’s Concentration City

identifies the postmodern city as a place of almost infinite proportions; it represents more than the busy,

overpopulated, and modernist ‘Manhattan’ motif - it is the new technologically enabled urban space and it

is sublime. The cities where the characters of Snow Crash and Neuromancer apply their trade are equally

sublime. They represent the progress of technology and the embodiment of postmodern capitalism, both

of which come to embody the sublime elements of the futuristic city in science fiction. In Gibson’s novel,

the city of Freeside with its walls of neon signs and strips of huge hotels is so large that if you “turned right,

off Desiderata and followed Jules Verne long enough, you’d find yourself approaching Desiderata from the

left” (N, 180).

“The city is without centre and without beginning; a technological sprawl to the limits of infinity…

The urban territory is marked by an infinity of space; a multiplicity of surfaces; time is displaces

within a field of inaction and, ultimately, inertia as the city, the universe, circles back on itself in a

closed feedback loop…the city—state has become the cybernetic state”

The city’s transformation into a technological embodiment of the infinite and the sublime marks the point

where the postmodern begins to blur the boundaries of nature and the artificial. It becomes ‘uncanny’- that

is, the city remains a familiar image, but the ‘inertia’ described by Bukatman forces us into submitting to it.

“…The city is constructed along all the axis of three dimensional spaces: In hotels…the lobby is

usually located on the fourth or fifth floor, rather on a street level. It becomes increasingly common

to find oneself suspended in a massive space, rather than trapped at its bottom; this refusal of

directionality thus extends to a denial of gravity.”

When Case is visiting a hotel, he steps out from the elevator onto a “combination of lobby and lawn”,

some way up the actual building of the hotel. That the lawn and lobby are no longer on the ground floor, as

we would expect, we are reminded that the Ninsei hotel, and the city, are of a far greater scale than what

we are used to, throwing us into a ‘massive space’, instilling emotions of the sublime.

The ‘uncanny’ is a close relative of the sublime and is a prominent feature of Gothic fiction. "For

Freud, the uncanny derives its terror not from something external, alien, or unknown but--on the contrary--

from something strangely familiar which defeats our efforts to separate ourselves from it". As the Gothic

blends into science fiction (and in the case of cyberpunk, the postmodern) is influences our understanding

of how the city comes to represent a sublime space.

“The uncanny can be interpreted as the representation of anxiety at the heart of the modern

world, with is conflicting feelings of technophilia and technophobia. It points to the shock effect of

the multiplicity of signs and the spaces the self is exposed to in its everyday travels through the

highly industrial, technicised landscape of modernity.”

The city becomes a place where the dualities of pleasure and pain can be felt. In Neuromancer, inhabitants

of Chiba city are bombarded with bright signs and neon holograms. Case lives in Tokyo, which he refers to

as the ‘Sprawl’- its name suggestive of it being an overwhelmingly crowded place. In the Sprawl is Chiba,

“Synonymous with implants, nerve-splicing and micro-bionics, Chiba was a magnet for the Sprawl’s techno

criminal subcultures.” (N, 13) Neo-Tokyo is the new ‘Manhattan’, a melting pot for cultures and subcultures

which s “could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly" (N, 58). Zylinksa expands

on why the city should be considered a source of the sublime:

“Where better to explore this uncanniess of modernity than in the busy metropolis, with its almost

irresolvable clashes between wealth and poverty, technicity and nature, and art and commerce? Its

everyday familiarity can always reveal what is concealed and kept out of sight and therefore seems

a fitting image for our analyses of the murky landscapes of the sublime and its ethical

mappings. ..The multiplicity of minimal events simultaneously occurring in the cityspace creates an

opportunity for the first condition of the sublime: wonder. However this multiplicity can also lead

to the feeling of saturation and excess, exacerbating the conflict between the desire for immersion

and connectivity and loss of the self.”

The threat of the loss of self is more than apparent to Case. Exploring the city leads to experiences of

delight in its vastness, surrounded by technology, but at the same time threatens us with total assimilation

and worse: annihilation. This threat is particular for those involved in any business ‘kept out of sight’, as

“Night city was like an experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one

thumb permanently on the fast forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace” (N, 14). The

idea of pleasure and pain is then closely associated with experiences in Ninsei. Scott Bukatman arrives at

this conclusion about the city: that “A remarkably consistent imagining/ imaging of the city has emerged,

characterized in the first place by its boundlessness. The city is both micro- and macro-cosm.”.

Another key feature of Gibson’s future is that the boundaries of the real and artificial become

blurred. The first sentence of Neuromancer alludes to an overlapping of the cybernetic and natural: “The

sky above the port was a color of television, tuned to a dead channel” (N, 9); the view of Chiba city filled

with “bright ghosts burning through a blue haze of cigarette smoke, holograms of Wizard’s castle, Tank War

Europa, the New York Skyline” (N, 15). The real metropolitan cityscape is reconstructed as though it were a

holographic illusion, and the sky as a white noise of television screens. Postmodern theorist Jean

Baudrillard considers that the psychological dimensions of objects are now blurred- that the landscape all

around unfolds as a television screen. The cityspace is becoming a simulation, created by the technological

hyperreality of which it is comprised. Case is aware of this and takes great pleasure from experiencing the

city as artificial:

“Because on some weird and very approximate way, it was like a run in the matrix…It was possible

to see Ninsei as a field of data…Then you could throw yourself into a high speed drift and skid,

totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all around you the dance of biz, information,

interacting data, made flesh in the mazes of the black market.” (N, 26)

This is the “city of cyberspace, urbanism imploded”. The boundaries of cyberspace and city are broken

down as are the physical properties which make the physical and virtual different. We can also recognize

connections to the sentiments regarding American technological progress.

“Technology, whether figured in the exaggerated modalities of the sublime or the cooler

pragmatism of an elite technocracy, defines the American relation to manifest destiny and the

commitment to an ideology of progress and modernity."

And in the postmodern era, as in the nineteenth century, this progress is met with a degree of ambivalence

and anxiety. As much as the works of the Gothic authors including Poe, Hawthorne and Shelley focused on

the paranoia associated with emerging technologies, so do the novels Gibson and Stephenson tackle the

negative feelings towards emerging technology in the postmodern age. This is the pleasure in pain of the

sublime, which is parallel to the benefits technology can offer weighed against the loss of human control

over the machine.

“In short, a desire for the extension of power that technologies permit is accompanied by the

concomitant fear of a loss of power and the weakening of human control in the Machine, Nuclear

and information Ages.”

We become faced with a terrifying uncertainty about our own humanity and it is “natural to expect that as

technology is able more and more to construct the world in its own image (that is- to create simulacra to

replace “the real”)…there will be an increasing sense of pessimism’” and emergence of the belief that we

will become controlled by technology, rather than it by us. This is an aspect of the sublime which is

prevalent in postmodern works of fiction especially those which regard reality as a recent construct of

science and technology. The sublime found in Kant and Burke which they identify in nature has been

replaced by technological processes. . Cyberpunk is then “for many of us, the supreme literary expression if

not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself” and that “the exceptional dynamism of capitalism

could be said…to have produced a corporate culture that is in itself sublime.” Jean Francois Lyotard

suggests that “there is something of the sublime in the capitalist economy…an economy regulated by an

idea: infinite wealth and power”.

The universe of Snow Crash is based on the capitalist exchange of data, where the United States

has been divided into Franchises run by a group of competing powerful figureheads: Mr. Lee’s Greater

Hong Kong, Uncle Enzo’s CosaNostra Pizza, Narcolumbia and Reverend Wayne’s Pearly Gates. Hiro

Protagonist works as a freelance hacker who trades in information using the Metaverse, a virtual reality, a

product itself of technological capitalism. The idea of infinite wealth and capital is represented by the

‘Library’ where Hiro who amongst “millions of other CIC stringers” who are also “uploading millions of

other fragments at the same time” (SC, 21), deposits his information in order to sell it to the highest bidder.

Case, the hacker in Neuromancer, who sees the data “made flesh in the mazes of the black

market,” is also trapped in the cycle of technology and capitalism, as the matrix is rooted in high tech

consumerism, becoming the abstract space of corporate capital. Baudrillard calls the capital market a form

of ecstasy; an “ecstatic form of the circulation of goods”. On the other hand; that information will replace

the real, that the technology that capitalism enables will engulf us, turning everything into an infinite,

unthinkably complex amount of 1’s and 0’s, is the horrific, gothic, and terrible side of this pleasure/pain

duality. There is something of the Romantic, Burkian sublime in this anxiety associated with technology.

“In political, economic and technological terms, national, capitalist and electronic revolutions

promise massive global transformations which repeat revolutionary and romantic gestures while at

the same tune threatening the human subject and the modernity sustaining it with as epochal and

inhuman a spectre as Burke imagined at the end of the eighteenth century.”

The technological and capitalist elements of the sublime appear in Neuromancer, when the first description

of the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, is given to us in terms of data:

“Programme a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel

on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate

of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up

your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin

to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year old industrial parks

ringing the old core of Atlanta.” (N, 57)

This is the rendering of the exterior into the interior of cyberspace in what Frederic Jameson calls the

“bewildering world space of corporate capitalism”.

“A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human

system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and

constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…” (N, 67)

And in return the matrix and Metaverse- the virtual worlds, become phenomenal and are endowed with

the aesthetics of the city. Inside the matrix Case encounters a security system, known as a Kuang Grade

Mark Eleven ICE:

“Headlong motion through walls of emerald green, milky jade, the sensation of speed beyond

anything he’d known before n cyberspace…The Tessier- Ashpool ice shattered, peeling away from

the Chinese programmes thrust, a worrying impression of solid fluidity as though the shards of a

broken mirror bent and elongated as they fell…Kuang twisted and banked above the horizonless

fields of the Tessier-Ashpool cores, endless neon cityscape, complexity that cut the eye, jewel

bright, sharp as razors.” (N, 302)

The image is all too familiar. It is that of the city outside of the virtual world and its form is just as sublime

and endless; its totality incomprehensible. Scott Bukatman poses the question of whether this is an

extension of the dislocating power of the urban sprawl or whether the image of the city ground the forms

of the datascape because of its familiarity. His answer is that cyberspace accentuates the bodiless vertigo of

the city, permitting “the existence of an all-powerful and controlling gaze”. The cybercity is more than a

hyperreality; it blurs the boundaries of the real and imaginary, changing perspectives of dimension, space,

light and dark. If we compare Bukatman’s answer with the idea of the sublime as that which we view in awe

and wonder, a ‘totalizing gaze’, then the evidence for the cybercity as the embodiment of postmodern

technological sublime is apparent.

Bukatman, Scott. “The Cybernetic (City) State. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. Vol. 2 No. 2, p. 50 Morris, David. “Gothic Sublimity”, New Literary History (Winter 1985) cited in “A Glossary of Gothic Literary Terms” (http://georgiasouthern.edu) Zylinksa, Joanna. On Cyborgs, Spiders and Being Scared (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001) p. 162 Zylinksa, Joanna. See op. cit., p 163 Bukatman, Scott. See op. cit., p. 49 Baudrillard, Jean. Ecstasy of Communication(Paris: Semiotext(e), 1993) p.13 Bukatman, Scott. See op. cit., p. 48 Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity (London: Duke University Press, 1993) p. 3 Bukatman, Scott, See op. cit., p5. Csicsery-Ronay Jr. “Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism” in Storming the Reality Studio: a casebook of cyberpunk and postmodern science fiction Ed. Larry McCaffrey (Duke University Press, 1991) p. 190 Tabbi, Joseph. The Postmodern Sublime (London: Cornell University Press, 1996) p. ix Jameson, Frederic. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”. In: McCaffrey, p. 219. Tabbi, Joseph. See op. cit., p. 11 Lyotard, Jean Francois. The Inhuman: reflections on time (California: Stanford University Press, 1991) p. 105 Tabbi, Joseph. See op. cit., p 211 Baudrillard, Jean, p. 23 Botting, Fred. “Virtual Romanticism” in Romanticism and Postmodernism (Ed.) Edward Larissey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) p. 99 Jameson, Frederic. See op. cit., p 219 Bukatman, Scott. See op. cit., p. 151

II. Cyberspace: Terrifying Infinity

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every

nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts...A graphic representation of the data

abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of

light arranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights,

receding...”

William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

This is William Gibson’s description of ‘cyberspace’- the ‘matrix’. Here, the protagonist of

Neuromancer, Case, spends his time fleeting between limitless shafts of data which appear to him as

streams of colour amidst fields of black infinity. Cyberspace is certainly the embodiment of the late-

capitalism information universe articulated as a virtual construct. The experiences of Case inside of the

matrix are a fantastic source of the sublime, as the undefined, limitless construct fuels the sense of wonder

felt by the reader. It fits seamlessly alongside Burke’s theory:

“Infinity has a tendency to fill the mind with that sort of delightful horror, which is the most

genuine effect and truest test of the sublime” (67)

Cyberspace is so vast that we are completely unable to perceive its boundaries. The human brain cannot

fathom its dimensions. Obviously, the artificial nature of the matrix means that any rules applying to our

physical reality are somewhat reconfigured, but the essence of the sublime aesthetic remains the same; the

same kind of infinity is being represented.

In our own everyday experiences, cyberspace exists through the connections of our computers to

vast networks across the globe; the internet, the world wide web- our own infinite representation of data

and information. Just like hacker Case, we remain physically seated in front of our computers when we

negotiate it. In Larry McCaffrey’s interview, Gibson comments that “Everyone I know who works with

computers seems to develop a belief that there is a space/place behind the computer screen someplace

that you can’t see but you know is there.”

However for Case the hacker, who “jacked into a custom cyberspace deck” (N, 12), cyberspace

becomes a three dimensional world, “inserted into the terminal space as a pure totalizing gaze. The

boundaries of the screen are eradicated, and the cyberscopic field becomes fully phenomenal, susceptible

to human vision and action.” This is made possible by the technology and neurological modifications

enabled by the capitalist postmodern age. They allow Case to interact with the matrix as if it were a

physical space, with “dimension and depth, shape and substance,” which is “open to his exploration.

The matrix is comprised of vivid aesthetics: huge geometric shapes and bright clusters of data litter

its landscape and Case is able to gaze upon them just as the character of Victor Frankenstein, or a romantic

poet, may observe the Alpine mountain range. And in the same sense, he is then able to explore and

interact with it:

“He punched himself through and found an infinite blue space ranged with colour coded spheres

strung on a tight grid of pale blue neon. In the nonspace of the matrix, the interior of a given data

construct possessed unlimited subjective dimension...He began to glide through the spheres as if

he was on invisible tracks” (N, 81)

In a collection of essays, aptly titled “Romanticism and the Postmodern”, Fred Botting’s essay “Virtual

Romanticism” reiterates this point:

“The matrix is sublime: in its play of light and dark, imaginative possibility and shadowy powers, the

infinity of data takes the form of a cityscape with its awesome towers of ICE and immense spires of

gleaming data. This awesome and aestheticized realm overcomes the Romantic antithesis of

country and city in a virtual dimension which allows the subject- the console cowboy- to wander

freely as any poet.”

Gibson’s use of light and dark further instil us with feelings of the sublime. The juxtaposition of

black against bright colours increases the ambiguity of the darkness of the matrix. In Burke’s Enquiry he

identifies both darkness and light as sources of the sublime. The sublime effect of darkness is caused by the

physical strain the iris undergoes in trying to adjust to the lack of light which is followed by the reaction of

the brain, which registers this as a painful and uncomfortable experience. Blackness, similarly, confuses the

senses because we cannot discern the boundaries of an object whose dimensions we cannot define.

Wintermute, a god-like artificial intelligence is described in chapter 9 of Neuromancer:

“Wintermute was a simple cube of white light, that very simplicity suggesting extreme complexity”

(N, 140)

We can apply this sentence to what Burke tells us about light and darkness:

“Light ought to be examined, and with it, its opposite, darkness. Darkness is more productive of the

sublime but...extreme light, by which it’s very excess, is converted into a species of darkness.

Extreme light obliterates all objects...This is not the only instance wherein the opposite extremes

operate equally in favour of the sublime.”

The link between the romantic aesthetic and the technological sublime are evident. Staying close to

Robu’s idea of science fiction enforcing the sublime, the infinity and obscurity of Gibson’s cyberspace is

reminiscent of those concepts laid out by Kant and Burke, though has certain obvious different

connotations. Voller points this out in his essay:

“In Gibson’s postmodern futureworld, infinity’s relocation- its interiorization, its manifestation as

cyberspace both within human mind and within machines- is perhaps the most dramatic sign

marking sublimity’s evolutionary path.”

Cyberspace embodies a revival of the romantic aesthetic as well as reminding of us of its gothic heritage

but is “accessed not on mountain tops but through technology, the source and locus of cyberspace,

Gibson’s analogy of the infinite and the eternal.”

Computer generated reality the ‘Metaverse’, which features in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, also

displays instances of the sublime in many ways similar to those we see in the matrix. Technological science

once again enables the user to enter into a world where the physical phenomenon they are subject to in

reality, are then recreated in a virtual reality. The escapades of the console cowboy Case as he travels

through the data constructs of the matrix are quite dissimilar to the interaction of those in the socially

orientated, virtual environment of the Metaverse. The body of this interaction takes place in Stephenson’s

conception ‘the Street’ where members of the public can log in, create avatars in whatever likeness they

choose and ‘build’ their own extensions and private domains, branching off from the Street. They meet to

interact, exchange information, attend huge events or parade their avatars up and down. Scott Bukatman

notes that this idea “seems to spring form Benedikt’s description of cyberspace:”

“Cyberspace: a new universe, a parallel universe created and sustained by the world’s computers

and communication lines. A world in which the global traffic of knowledge takes on form: sights,

sounds, presences never seen on the surface of the earth blossoming in a vast electronic night.”

The vast ‘electronic night’ is reminiscent of the scenes of the dark cyberscapes of the matrix and certainly

lends the idea of the sublime and infinite to the Metaverse. An example of the Metaverse before the Street

was “just a necklace of streetlights around a big black ball in space” (SC, 24) is shared with us by the

appropriately named, Hiro Protagonist:

“When Hiro first saw this place, ten years ago, the monorail hadn’t been written yet; he and his

buddies had to write a car and motorcycle software in order to get around, they would take their

software out and race it in the black desert of the electronic night.” (SC, 25)

The black desert refers to the blank spaces before users place their own buildings on acquired space on the

Street. The black desert is also an image which brings us back to Burke and the sublime properties of

infinity, vastness, and blackness itself. Hiro gives us further insight into the nature of the Street:

“It does not really exist. But right now, millions of people are walking up and down it...The street

seems to be a grand boulevard going all the way around the equator of a black sphere with a

radius of a bit more than ten thousand kilometres. That makes it 65,536 km around, which is

considerably bigger than Earth.” (SC, 23)

Though not infinite, the Street and the Metaverse stretch the limits of the readers (and probably some of

its fictional inhabitants) imaginations, leading to the collapse of our ability to comprehend it in totality. The

estimated size or magnitude of an object, in this case, the Metaverse is a crucial point in figuring Kant’s

mathematical sublime

“...since in the estimation of magnitude we have to take into account both merely the multiplicity

(number of units) but also the magnitude of the unit (the measure), and as the magnitude of his

unit in turn always requires something else as its measure, and the computation of the magnitude

of phenomena is, in all cases, utterly incapable of affording us any absolute conception of

magnitude.”

In the case of estimation of magnitude, an object can only be called great and incite the sublime by

comparison to the standard to which it is compared- in this example, the Metaverse in comparison to the

earth. However, Kant applies this to empirical observations made by the eye alone, rather than

mathematical ruling. The sublime is not eradicated, rather refigured here in science fiction, so that the

reader may experience its delights in trying to establish the size of the Metaverse.

Looking back to Kant’s sublime, where we are unable to grasp the totality of a given object, the

Metaverse appears to us as a great source of both pleasure and pain. The buildings “stretch off into the

distance, disappearing over the curve of the globe” (SC, 24) whilst the sky and floor are both black like the

nonspace in the matrix.

“The feeling is one of on and on, of being lost. The imagery appropriate to this variety of sublime is

usually characterized by featureless horizontality or extension: the wasteland motif of Romantic

and modernist literature.”

Our inability to discern the boundaries of the formless is a constant source of the sublime in both Snow

Crash and Neuromancer; and as in Gibson’s matrix, there are certain areas of the Metaverse where there

are giant structure as well as these seemingly endless black wastelands. Similarly, some are geometric

shapes, but in the Metaverse these can be interpretations of objects in the real world or like in the matrix,

representations of data. Hiro travels to part of the Metaverse owned by fibre-optics monopolist Bob Rife:

“Rifeland is a vast, brightly lit space occupied by elementary shapes done up in primary

colours...cubes, spheres, tetrahedrons, polyhedrons, connected with a web of cylinders and lines

and helices...This is a model of system. The shapes probably represent computers, or central nodes

in Rife's worldwide network...There’s an extremely complicated tangle of fine red lines, millions of

them, running back and forth between thousands of small red balls.” (SC, 408)

The collections of giant coloured shapes, like those of the matrix, are an important part of the virtual

landscape and are fully phenomenal: Hiro is able to climb over them, touch them and cut through them.

The size of the shapes further enforces the sublime elements of cyberspace in these novels and though

these objects may be simple aesthetically, they are complex in nature. Kant, in pointing out the difference

between the sublime and the beautiful, reasons that “The sublime must always be great; the beautiful can

also be small. The sublime must be simple; the beautiful can be adorned and ornamented.” The objects

found in Rifeland, to the eye, are certainly both great and simple. Kant continues:

“A great height is just as sublime as great depth, except that the latter is accompanied with a

sensation of shuddering, the former with one of wonder...The sight of an Egyptian pyramid...moves

one far more than one can imagine from all the descriptions; but its design is simple and noble.”

The “Black Sun” building where much of the business in the Metaverse is conducted is in fact a large black

pyramid “as big as a couple of football fields laid side by side”. The depiction seems to fulfil all the

requirements of the sublime.

In Snow Crash, the fact that ‘buildings’ exist in virtual reality draws us back to the old idea of the

sublime elements of architecture, particularly that of the Romantic period. The Romantic writers often used

the imagery of the Gothic ruin or church as sublime. The awe and pleasure derived from great buildings

such as churches and cathedrals are drawn from Burke who notes that “height and length [and depth] are

among the primary sources of the sublime,” and “to the sublime in building, greatness of dimension seems

requisite.” Take the example of an amphitheatre in the Metaverse:

“Off to his right, about a kilometre away from The Black Sun is a deep hole in the Manhattan

skyline. It is an open plaza about a mile wide, a park of sorts where avatars can gather for concerts

and conventions and festivals. Most of it is occupied by a deep dish amphitheatre that is capable of

seating close to a million avatars at once.” (SC, 405)

The quantities expressed only boggle the mind of the reader further. Outside of fiction, stadiums that hold

near one hundred thousand are considered to be of giant proportions. To imagine one which would hold

ten times that number seems to us unimaginable. The light display at the amphitheatre is equally sublime

and so “gigantic that no one sees more than 10 percent of it: you could spend a year watching it and keep

seeing new things.” (SC, 427):

“It is a mile high structure of two and three dimensional images, interlocked in space and time...but

in time it begins to simplify itself and narrow into a single bright column of light...The column of

light begins to flow up and down and resolve itself into a human form. Actually, it is four human

forms...Each of them is carrying something long and slender in their hands; a pair of tubes...They

raise their arms above their and unroll the four scrolls, turning each of them into a flat television

screen the size of a football field.” (SC, 427)

The giant figures and screens in the massive amphitheatre are incredibly large; they impose power through

their height and magnificence, dwarfing those present. A screen so large that only ten percent of it can be

seen at any one time ties in perfectly with the Kantian sublime. The physical constraints that limit

construction and buildings in the real universe are completely negated in the Metaverse. Because such

immense structures and images can be designed, the Metaverse becomes the perfect environment for

sublime aesthetics to drive the senses to feel lofty emotions associated with the concept.

That fact the physical body remains in the real world when a character jacks into cyberspace leads

to an important connection between the sublime and the experiences of characters in virtual reality. Any

user in cyberspace takes on the role of both spectator and participator: what they see is the result of a

technologically enabled medium- “cyberspace”, but they are able to completely interact and be influenced

by the events and experiences in this other world. When they encounter anything which could be

considered a source of danger or pain, and consequently sublime; they are relatively safe from any real

harm. Why this is important for establishing the emotions linked with the sublime is explained by Burke:

“...as pain is stronger in its operation than pleasure, so death is in general a much more affecting

idea than pain; because there are very few pains, however exquisite, which are not preferred to

death; nay, what generally makes pain itself, if I may say so, more painful, is, that it is considered as

an emissary of this king of terrors. When pleasure or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of

giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications,

they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience.”

This is crucial in explaining why cyberspace is essentially a domain of the sublime. The user experiences

terror and delight with relative safety; the computer screen acts as a barrier or a safeguard between actual

danger and dangerous virtual encounters. Hiro Protagonist, who owns two samurai swords and boasts

being “the best swordfighter in the world” (SC, 17) hones his skills inside of the Metaverse. Occasionally he

will be challenged to a swordfight. In Chapter 12, inside of The Black Sun, he is attacked several times by a

Nipponese businessman; Hiro defeats the challenger, cutting off both his legs and forearms and then his

head, leaving dismembered body parts strewn across the floor (SC, 85).

“It reminds all The Black Sun’s patrons that they are living in a fantasy world...When Hiro wrote The

Black Sun’s sword fighting algorithms...he discovered there was no good way to handle the

aftermath. Avatars are not supposed to die...The creators of the Metaverse had not been morbid

enough to foresee a demand for this kind of thing. But the whole point of a sword fight is to cut

someone up and kill them...So the first thing that happens when someone loses a sword fight is

that his computer gets disconnected from the global network that is the Metaverse...It is the

closest simulation of death that the Metaverse can offer.” (SC, 95)

For the same reasons, Hiro is not threatened by actual death when he travels by motorbike at “something

like fifty-thousand miles an hour” (SC, 411) whizzing in and out of traffic and buildings.

The comparable situation in Gibson’s matrix is the idea of simstim. Rather than being inserted into

an entire simulated Metaverse style environment, the mind of the user is enabled to experience the full

sensory stimulation of another person.

“Cowboys didn't get into simstim, he thought, because it was basically a meat toy. He knew that

the trodes he used and the little plastic tiara dangling from a simstim deck were basically the same,

and that the cyberspace matrix was basically a drastic simplification of the human sensorium, at

least in terms of presentation, but the simstim itself struck him as a gratuitous multiplication of

flesh input. The commercial stuff was edited, of course, so that if Tally Isham got a headache in the

course of a segment, you didn't feel it.” (N, 71)

Case uses simstim to tap-in to his partner Molly’s mind and experience what she feels, sees , hears and

smells, whilst she remains totally in her control of her own actions.

“The abrupt jolt into other flesh. Matrix gone, a wave of sound and colour…She was moving

through a crowded street, past stalls vending discount software, prices feltpenned on sheets of

plastic, fragments of music from countless speakers. Smells of urine, free monomers, perfume,

patties of frying krill. For a few frightened seconds he fought helplessly to control her body. Then

he willed himself into passivity, became the passenger behind her eyes.” (N, 72)

Simstim becomes the ultimate form of voyeurism as the senses of the passenger are bombarded by the

equivalent senses of the host. In particular, as Molly’s profession as a mercenary-come-assassin, this leads

to Case witnessing some grotesque scenes, as well as experiencing any pain which she feels. When Molly is

injured in combat like during her raid on the Sense/Net forum, Case is subjected to pain. He “flipped into

the agony of broken bone” whilst Molly is inside the building, recovering, Case in the loft is groaning in

pain, caked in sweat (N, 85). The final scene of the fight inside the building really exemplifies the delightful

horror that simstim creates:

“Case had seen panic before, but never in an enclosed area. The Sense/Net employees, spilling out

of the elevators, had surged for the street doors, only to meet the foam barricades of the Tacticals

and the sandbag-guns of the BAMA Rapids...Beyond the shattered wreckage of the main street

doors, bodies were piled three deep on the barricades. The hollow thumping of the riot guns

provided a constant background of the sound that the crowd made as it surged back and forth

across the lobby’s marble floor. Case had never heard anything like that sound.” (N, 86)

The awful scenes, viewed by Case from a safe distance, would invoke for him feelings of the sublime. The

key concept is ‘viewing’ for there is a difference between engaging in battle and witnessing it from afar.

One instance poses a real threat of death whilst the other does not.

The virtual reality or cyberspace featured in Snow Crash and Neuromancer is like a playground for

the imagination, which is more often than not excited by the idea of the infinite, the bright colours,

supersonic speed and gigantic structures. It is a paradise of the sublime; the postmodern equivalent of the

Alpine mountain ranges which hackers and console cowboys explore instead of Romantic authors and

poets. Fully phenomenal but also without the restraint of physics, cyberspace is more than real and so

there the sublime is reconfigured into a new cyber-sublime, which, if we able to experience outside of

science fiction, would be sure to overwhelm us entirely. The duality of pain and pleasure is of course ever

present. The experience nonetheless remains delightfully horrific.

Bukatman, Scott. “The Cybernetic (City) State. Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. Vol. 2 No. 2, p. 50 Morris, David. “Gothic Sublimity”, New Literary History (Winter 1985) cited in “A Glossary of Gothic Literary Terms” (http://georgiasouthern.edu) Zylinksa, Joanna. On Cyborgs, Spiders and Being Scared (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001) p. 162 Zylinksa, Joanna. See op. cit., p 163 Bukatman, Scott. See op. cit., p. 49 Baudrillard, Jean. Ecstasy of Communication(Paris: Semiotext(e), 1993) p.13 Bukatman, Scott. See op. cit., p. 48 Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity (London: Duke University Press, 1993) p. 3 Bukatman, Scott, See op. cit., p5. Csicsery-Ronay Jr. “Cyberpunk and Neuromanticism” in Storming the Reality Studio: a casebook of cyberpunk and postmodern science fiction Ed. Larry McCaffrey (Duke University Press, 1991) p. 190 Tabbi, Joseph. The Postmodern Sublime (London: Cornell University Press, 1996) p. ix Jameson, Frederic. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”. In: McCaffrey, p. 219. Tabbi, Joseph. See op. cit., p. 11 Lyotard, Jean Francois. The Inhuman: reflections on time (California: Stanford University Press, 1991) p. 105 Tabbi, Joseph. See op. cit., p 211 Baudrillard, Jean, p. 23 Botting, Fred. “Virtual Romanticism” in Romanticism and Postmodernism (Ed.) Edward Larissey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) p. 99 Jameson, Frederic. See op. cit., p 219 Bukatman, Scott. See op. cit., p. 151

III. Why Cyborgs are Sublime

“She wore mirrored glasses...She shook her head. He realized that the glasses were surgically inset, sealing her sockets. The silver lenses seemed to grow from smooth pale skin above her cheekbones.”

(William Gibson, Neuromancer)

Mirrorshades have become one of, if not the most widely recognised motifs of the cyberpunk

genre. They represent not only the merge of human and machine, the real and artificial, but also the dark

infinity of cyberspace. The eyes are considered to be the window into the soul, but the opaque

mirrorshades offer nothing but endless shadowy depth, reminiscent of the Burkian sense of the sublime.

The “Silver Lenses” described above are one of many artificial augmentations made to the body of

Molly, the “razor girl” in Neuromancer, who like so many other inhabitants of the Sprawl, is part human and

part machine- a cyborg; the product of the capitalist techno-environment and its subsequent

transformation of nature and the human body. Australian artists Stelarc, whose works concentrate on the

subject of futurism argues that “the body becomes the landscape of machines; machines are no longer in

the human horizon but within the human body itself.” In the same way in which the modern metropolis has

been transformed into the postmodern cybercity, so too does the human become a landscape transformed

by technology.

“Technobiology has left the human body practically unguarded against the numinous nature of the

machine...In Gibson’s texts, the technological colonisation of the outer space has led to the

colonisation of the inner human space. Computers do not stand on the periphery of human

existence, they fuse with it [and]...the bodies of the characters are subjected to techno-

computerised organ implantation.”

It is not only cyborgs who undergo technological adaptations. The cybernauts who enter the virtual realities

of Neuromancer can only do so via a direct neural connection between their brains and the computer. The

connection is made possible by a series of nodes and electrodes which slotted into sockets behind the ear

which allow for the transmition of data. Specifically, Case uses “Sendai dematrodes” (N, 68) which he

patches in with a “thin ribbon of fibreoptics” (N, 71). The body enters into an intimate relationship with the

computer data, not only via the use of technology but by becoming one with it. The computer becomes

phenomenal through its reconstitution through the human cyborg, just as the human requires the

computer to enter the phenomenal virtual realities.

The mirrorshades and Sendai cybernetic equipment are objects which to us, seem incredibly complicated.

The modifications made are in some cases microscopic. Case is forced to work for an ex Special Forces

operative called Armitage because of the microscopic membranes of neurotoxin which are implanted in his

body (N, 88); the drug lord, Wage is equipped with eyes which are “vat grown Nikon transplants”, inserted

via careful surgery (N, 33) and in other inhabitants, the use ‘microsofts’- minute computer chips containing

data which are treated like a fashion accessory, the same way as body piercings are today.

“Her destination was one of the dubious software rental complexes that lined Memory Lane... The

clientele were young, few of them out of their teens. They all seemed to have carbon sockets

planted behind the left ear, but she didn't focus on them. The counters that fronted the booths

displayed hundreds of slivers of microsoft, angular fragments of colored silicon mounted under

oblong transparent bubbles on squares of white cardboard ... Behind the counter a boy with a

shaven head stared vacantly into space, a dozen spikes of microsoft protruding from the socket

behind his ear.

"Larry, you in, man?" She positioned herself in front of him. The boy's eyes focused. He sat up in his

chair and pried a bright magenta splinter from his socket with a dirty thumbnail.” (N, 73)

Kant reminds us that the infinitely small can be enlarged via the microscope into the scale of an entire

world. The components of microchips are the latest stage of electronic miniaturization and through

scientific technologies, we are now able to see objects millions and millions times smaller than we would

have been able to have seen even a decade ago. For Kant and Burke, writing before the advent of

microchip, the infinitely small had already been identified as a source of the sublime:

“...as the great extreme of dimension is sublime, so the last extreme of littleness is in some

measure sublime likewise; when we attend to the infinite divisibility of matter, when we pursue

animal life into these excessively small yet organized beings, that escape the nicest inquisition of

the sense, when we push our discoveries yet downward, and consider those creatures so many

degrees yet smaller, and the diminishing scale of existence, in tracing which the imagination is lost

as well at the sense, we become amazed and confounded at he wonders of minuteness”

Burkes description of the sublime in ‘littleness’, when put in a postmodern context, further reinforces the

idea that the natural sublime is now the technological sublime. If we do pursue animal life, it is via

increasingly capable sciences, but we are more likely to pursue development of even smaller technology.

The examination of small ‘organized beings’ instead becomes the fascination with the mathematical

exactness of the microprocessor, whose components remain as obscure and sublime as the smallest

creature in nature.

Men and machines are not the only binary oppositions to be broken down by the image of the

cyborg; the boundaries of gender also become obscured. Jenny Wolmark remarks that “on one hand the

[cyborg] is a product of the masculine technologies” whilst at the same time, refusing to “sustain the very

dualisms that structure existing relations of power and control within science and technology.” The

‘console-cowboys’ of Snow Crash and Neuromancer remain ‘male’, engendered in cyberspace, whereas the

women, excluded from the virtual worlds, are more often than not depicted as cyborgs. It is also no

coincidence that the name of the enabling technology- the ‘matrix’, derives its name from the Latin for

‘mother’ and then ‘womb’. This may be because “anxieties about technology are frequently displaced onto

the figure of the woman”. Andreas Huyssen suggests that this is routed in male anxieties of increased

industrialisation in the eighteenth century, which were then displaced onto women:

“The fears and perceptual anxieties emanating from ever more powerful machines are recast and

reconstructed in terms of the male fear of female sexuality, reflecting, in the Freudian account, the

male’s castration anxiety. This projection was relatively easy to make; although women had

traditionally been seen as standing in a closer relationship to nature than man, nature itself, since

the 18th century, had come to be interpreted as a gigantic machine. Woman, nature, machine had

become a mesh of significations which all had one thing in common: otherness; by their very

existence they raised fears and threatened male authority and control.”

Y.T, the female courier in Snow Crash is fitted with a vagina dentata and Molly, who remains outside of

cyberspace, engages in bloody combat- a role normally ascribed to the male hero, subverting the existing

ideology of gender bases society.

What relationship does this have to the sublime? Burke considers the sublime as “overwhelming

and implicitly masculine”, and is “contrasted with its passive female counterpart”. The female cyborg, with

its artificial adornments, often used to increase its physical power, represents the “overcoming of the

gendered body...an intrinsic queerness-even uncanniness”, and as the cyborg becomes more machine and

less human, so the gender boundaries are broken down. Molly remains the best example, whose image is a

confusion of female physique, cybernetic implants and masculine traits:

“She shook her head. He realised that the glasses were surgically inset, sealing her sockets. The

silver lenses seemed to grow from smooth pale skin above her cheekbones, framed by dark hair cut

in a rough shag. The fingers curled around the fletcher were slender...the nails looked artificial. “I

do hurt people sometimes, Case. I guess it’s just the way I’m wired.” She wore tight black

gloveleather jeans and a bulky black jacket...She held out her hands, palms up...and with a barely

audible click, ten double edged, four centimetre scalpel blades slid from their housings beneath the

burgundy nails.” (N, 36-37)

Her “slender” fingers, “burgundy nails” and “pale skin” are all characteristically female and appear

juxtaposed against her masculine dress and lifestyle. The mirrorshades and fingertip blades remind the

reader of the blur between organic and artificial.

Lyotard argues that the sublime “allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing

contents.” As the cyborg comes to represent that which cannot be otherwise represented, we are in danger

of losing sight of human identity all together; the fore mentioned characters already establish their identity

through alternate means of existence.

This is not the only fear associated with cyborgs, as Tatiani Rapatzikou summaries:

“With the emergence of the cyborg, the human body finds itself caught between two antithetical

poles: fascination due to its technological perfectibility and revulsion from the strangeness of its

form. The anxieties arising from the vulnerability of the body in the context of electric technology

cause it to enter a cultural vicious circle, where the pleasure of technological process is subsumed

by fears concerning its future evolution.”

This fits perfectly alongside the theory of the sublime; the pleasure and pain in objects we cannot

understand and the fear generated by them. Once again the relationship between the Romantic and

cyberpunk becomes clear. The human senses recoil in horror as technology threatens to overcome human

nature. Frankenstein’s monster can be seen as the Romantic embodiment of the cyborg; a new species

made up of separate human components and brought to life via a scientific process. Victor Frankenstein

regards his creation as both beautiful and disgusting. Readers of Neuromancer are then equally forced into

conflicting opinions regarding the aesthetics of the cyborg, both attracted by the enabling technology and

frightened by appearance of the implants themselves, More often than not the augmentations are

designed to intimidate and even harm; the razor-tipped fingers of Molly are but one example. Elsewhere in

the novel, Case meets one of the Panther Moderns, a group of “mercenaries, practical jokers [and] nihilistic

technofetishists”, Angelo.

“His face was a simple graft grown on a collagen and shark-cartilage polysaccharides, 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 that before.” (N, 76-77)

The examples of Molly and Angelo represent the oppositions of delight and horror associated with the

cyborg. The relative comfort with which Case views them also suggests that the artificial and organic are

now fused together to the point where they become normal. In the postmodern context this represents the

fear associated with the loss of self in the machine age. So far the dual oppositions of human and machine,

male and female, organic and mechanical can all be related to the sublime ideas of pleasure and pain and a

specific emotion of horrific delight. Technological progress and information age capitalism which these

augmentations are enabled by and rely on is a signal of the movement towards the technological sublime,

and can be compared to the paranoia of nineteenth century romanticism, as Joseph Tabbi suggests:

“One could hardly find a better contemporary occasion for the sublime than the excessive

production of technology itself. Its crisscrossing networks of computers, transportation systems,

and communications media, successors to the omnipotent “nature” of nineteenth century

romanticism, have come to represent a magnitude that at once attracts and repels the

imagination...It is in this realm of excess and signification at the boundaries of discourse, the point

at which meaning is overwhelmed and entropy threatens to take over, that the technological

sublime begins to function in literature.”

And is the threat of technology which embodies the anxiety surrounding the post-human era. The human

body is transformed via mechanical modifications to the point where it may be assimilated into the artificial

completely. The same can be said for nature and the city, as discussed in previous chapters. However, it is

still embraced by several characters in the fiction of Gibson and Stephenson, whose use of technology

becomes a way of transcendening nature and the human mind, leaving the constraints of the physical

world, and body, behind.

Stelarc. ‘Parasite Visions: Alternate, Intimate and involuntary Experiences’, Art and Design: Sci-Fi Aesthetics (Ed.) Rachel Armstrong (1997) cited in Zylinska (2001). p. 170 Rapatzikou, Tatiani. Gothic Motifs in the Fiction of William Gibson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004) p. 117 Kant, Immanuel (1952) p. 97 Burke, Edmund. (2008) p. 66 Wolmark, Jenny. Cybersexualities: A reader on feminist theory, cyborgs and cyberspace (Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press, 1999) p. 1 Wolmark, Jenny. See op. cit. Huyssen, Andreas. “The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis” New German Critique 24:5 (1986) p. 226 cited in Zylinska (2001) p. 129 Shaw, Phillip. The Sublime: A New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2006) p. 10 Zylinska, Joanna. (2001) p 130 Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A report on knowledge. Trans Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986) p. 81 Rapatzikou, Tatiani. See op. cit., p 112Tabbi, Joseph. The Postmodern Sublime (New York: Cornell University Press, 1995) p. 16-17

IV. Leaving the ‘Meat’ Behind: Transcendence and the Post-human.

“Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theatre, no more illusions,

when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of

information and communication, We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but in the ecstasy of

communication.”

(Jean Baudrillard, Ecstasy of Communication)

The struggle of transcending the limits of the mind is a key concept of the sublime. Joseph Addison writes

that “the mind of man naturally hates everything that looks like a restraint upon it, and is apt to fancy itself

under a sort of confinement.” Addison’s major claim is that our encounter with the sublime involves a

released from these confinements- a feeling of transcendence. The sublime is linked with of our capacity to

comprehend the limits of our senses and in turn, grasp what lies beyond them. We have already

established that the feeling of the sublime in cyberpunk stems from our encounters with virtual

phenomenon and artificial elements of the late capitalist universe, as well as the remnants of the natural,

aesthetic values of the real world.

As far back as Longinus it was ascertained that the sublime was a spiritual principle, that we “demand that

which transcends the human.” In Neuromancer, particularly, transcendence is ascertained through the

minds release from the body into cyberspace or from additional modifications to the human body and

mind.

“How does one transcend one’s human limitations? Through religion? Meditation? Community

action? These have been ruled out apparently by Gibson’s society, which is too fast, too brutal, and

fragmented for these methods. In Gibson’s world, the preferred, method of transcendence is

through technology”

Technology becomes a type of religion; spiritual, the only hope for salvation. As in the previous chapters

these technologies take various forms; electronic connections to computers, artificial body modifications,

cyborg augmentations, microchips containing a wealth of data. One argument is that this signals the

beginning of dehumanization; another is that this is the embodiment of the post-human era and the

integration of man into machine, rather than the domination of machine over man. We are “balanced

against the exhilaration of potential technological transcendence is the anxiety and disorientation produced

by the self/ body in danger of being absorbed into its own technology.”

In Snow Crash, one character in particular technology offers the only form of transcendence. For Ng, whose

body hardly exists at all in a physical sense, computer systems and artificial components are all that keep

him alive and place him on the borderline between man and total incorporation into the machine.

“Ng isn’t there. Or maybe he is. Where the driver’s seat ought to be, there is a sort of neoprene

pouch about the size of a garbage can suspended from the ceiling by a web of straps, shock cords,

tubes, wires, fibre optic cables and hydraulic lines. It is swathed in so much stuff that it is hard to

make out its actual outlines.

At the top of this pouch, Y.T can see a patch of skin with some black hair around it...Everything else

[is] encased in enormous goggle/mask/headphone/feeding tube unit. Below this where you’d

expect to see arms, huge bundles of wire, fiber optics and tubes run up out of the floor and are

seemingly plugged into Ng’s shoulder sockets. There is a similar arrangment where his legs are

supposed to be...The entire thing is swathed in a one piece overall...constantly bulging and

throbbing as if alive.

“Thank you, all my needs are taken care of.” Ng says.” (SC, 211)

Ng is certainly post human. He is in fact, more machine than human, more artificial than a cyborg. Whether

this offers any form of the transcendence seems unlikely. However the artificial, post human body offers a

type of immortality almost; relying on technology, the user, like Ng, has all its needs taken care of and

needs not worry about the trappings of the fragile human body. Bruce Sterling argues that cyberpunk is

“posthumanist SF based on the belief that the “technological deconstruction of the human condition leads

not to futureshocked zombies but to hopeful machines”.

For the computer hacker, Case, however the body remains the final boundary between the mind

and transcendence. He calls the body “meat” and those outside of cyberspace “meat puppets”, suggesting

that the easily manipulated body is something that humans could do without. Removal from cyberspace

back into the physical realm is unbearable:

“For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he’d

frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain contempt for the flesh. The

body was meat. Case fell into a prison of his own flesh.” (N, 12)

This is the human demand for transcendence which we see in the sublime and in the cyberpunk world only

technology can offer it. That technology in particular is cyberspace where, Bukatman argues, “The

disembodied consciousness leaps and dances with unparalleled freedom...in which the mind is freed from

bodily limitations.” The mind is directly fed into the computer, and a new body is created in cyberspace.

This body however is just an illusion, taking whatever form it wishes. The multiple avatar designs in the

Metaverse are an example of the body in cyberspace acting as simply an aesthetic function by which to

recognise one another.

Once in cyberspace, the user can travel at great speeds, has access to infinite data and is able to code and

create phenomenal objects. Hiro Protagonist, the hacker in Snow Crash, is able to create and understand

the building blocks of the virtual universe. With their knowledge of cyberspace, hackers become more like

gods. Porush describes the cybernauts as metaphysical, “electronic angels, freed from the laws of physics”

and that cyberspace in Gibson emphasizes the “bodiless exultation” they are given in metaspace.

The virtual body is of course not subject to the same needs as the human body: it does not drink,

eat, sleep and most importantly, does not age, decay or die. Transcending these boundaries however brings

us back to the dualities of the sublime. The loss of self and the separation of body and mind as it is

inscribed into technology, lead to the fear of loss of identity and self in a similar way to the cyborg creation.

Michael Heim’s assessment of virtual reality references the relationship between cyberspace and the

sublime:

“The ultimate VR experience is a philosophical experience, probably an experience of the sublime

or the awesome...the final point of a virtual world is to dissolve the constraints of the anchored

world so that we can lift anchor- not to drift aimlessly without point, but that we can explore

anchorage in ever new places”

Cyberspace, like cyborgs, can be seen to transcend the body’s flaws allowing the cybernauts to explore new

modes of existence. Without the literary invention of the matrix, Case and others would be trapped in the

body.

These experiences allow for the opportunity for Case to encounter a technological ‘god’-

Wintermute. Wintermute is a powerful artificial intelligence- it’s very presence inviting the emotions of fear

and amazement presented by Burke as being sublime. Wintermute’s description is also sublime,

represented as no more than “a cube of white light, that very simplicity suggesting extreme complexity...it’s

wall seething with faint internal shadows as though a thousand dancers whirled beneath a vast sheet of

plastic glass.” (N, 115-116) Wintermute is perhaps an analogy for a sublime god.

As the human is translated into the infinity of cyberspace, science fiction becomes the cognitive

tool to extrapolate on the posthuman experience. Technology, in Neuromancer and Snow Crash threatens

to overtake humanity and unite us with machines. The anxiety that we will lose identity further reinforces

the idea of the sublime. However it is only through technology that Case and the characters of science

fiction, and perhaps one day, eve ourselves will hope to achieve the sublime feeling of transcendence,

when the mind is able to surpass its own sense of confinement.

Addison, Joseph. Collected Works (London: Bell and Sons, 1890) p 397 cited in Crowther (1989) p. 1 Longinus. The Sublime (Cambridge, 1907) p. 36 cited in Weiskel (1976) Grant, Glenn. “Transcendence through Detournement in William Gibson’s Neuromancer”. Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 17 (1990) p. 43 Csicsery-Ronay Jr. (1992) p 246 Hollinger, Veronica “Cybernetic Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and Postmodernism” in McCaffrey (1991) p. 206 Bukatman, Scott. (1993) 208-209 Porush, David. “Hacking the Brainstem” in Virtual Realities and their Discontents (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996) p. 108 Heim, Michael. Cited in Cavallaro, Dani, Cyberpunk and Cyberculture (New Jersey: Athlone Press, 2000) p. 35

Epilogue

Beginning with Robu’s article, “A Key to Science Fiction: the Sublime”, then establishing the link

between the Romantic and science fiction and ending with post humanist cyberpunk, we have followed the

story of science fiction into the postmodern and seen the theories of the sublime change along with it and

applied in a technological context.

The sublime has been established as that which is synonymous with the ‘sense of wonder’, awe,

fear, pleasure and pain and opposing dualities of male and female, the artificial and real, organic and

mechanic. The universes of Neuromancer and Snow Crash have provided the perfect backdrop for

examination of the sublime in a postmodern context, yielding interesting theories about the cyber city,

virtual reality, cyborgs and transcendence. It has established that the Romantic sublime still exists in

postmodern SF, both in its original form and in a new technological reading.

The city has become the embodiment of the information era. In Neuromancer it is described in

terms of data and the characters often slip between the real and virtual worlds, comparing the outer space

of the city to the inner space of virtual reality. This is where the boundaries of real and artificial begin to

break down and the fear that this will result in total assimilation stems from. Both city and datascape are

infinitely large and threaten to swallow us whole, but without them as the base for the exchange of capital

and information then the technology such as cyberspace would have nothing to be compared to. The city

would be featureless and much less of a source of the sublime

The cyberscape however presents a similar idea of the sublime, as the phenomenal city is

transferred to an equally phenomenal virtual construct. The cyber city is far more vast and obscure and

because of its artificial nature, allows for increased size and magnitude of the elements which comprise it.

Cyberspace is of course marked by a terrible infinity with embodies the sublime. It is a boundless

playground for the imagination, pleasurable yet also awe inspiring. The technology of cyberspace is also a

source of the sublime. The nature of the virtual experience means that we are always a spectator, slightly

removed from any real danger, meaning that when we encounter anything threatening, the fear connected

with the sublime is allowed to take hold.

The persistent fear is always the loss of identity and self in place of the machine. Cyborgs become

the ultimate contradiction in cyberpunk. They are enabled by the fabulous new technologies and we delight

in their perfectibility yet at the same time we are disgusted by their grotesque appearance and scared by

their animal-like augmentations. They represent the anxiety associated with the technological era that

eventually we will be unable to discern where artificial ends and organic begins. They are a great source of

sublime in the science fiction of Gibson who uses them to great effect by situating them inside the

sprawling urban centres which already encompass the new technological sublime.

Ultimately this new technology, whilst both pleasurable and painful, remains the best opportunity

for the characters of science fiction to attain the sublime feelings associated with transcendence. The

sublime is defined by our desire to understand that which eludes us and the free the mind from the body in

order to transcend its limitations. If there is any technology which affords us this experience it is virtual

reality. The mind is literally separated from the body and inserted into a fully phenomenal environment

where we can play god, if we know how.

When looking back at Robu’s argument for the sublime as key to science fiction, the evidence for

the sublime in post modern SF and its relation to the Romantic and Gothic fictions it descends from means

we can further bolsters Robu’s argument: that the key to SF may well be the sublime. It is not a question of

whether the sublime is present of whether it drives narratives; but is of what form the sublime takes.

Though the Romantic sublime is our starting point, it quickly becomes clear that in cyberpunk, the

apotheosis of postmodernism and late capitalism, that the sublime is reconfigured: in postmodern science

fiction it is now the technological sublime, in cyberpunk- the cyber sublime.

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