the minnesota review n.s. 43-44 (1995)Tom MoylanGlobal Economy, Local Texts: Utopian/Dystopian Tensions in William Gibson's Cyberpunk TrilogyIIn 1990, in his speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations, George Bush invoked the utopian figure of the millennium as he called for a new world order, an order of peace and prosperity that would remove the darkness of the Cold War.1 In 1980, Ronald Reagan invoked another utopian figure: the "city on the hill" that recalled the dream of a New World that would inspire everyone with its harmony and enterprise. However, in the years between Reagan's imagery rooted in the local history of the Americas and Bush's image that envelopes the globe, neither humanity nor the environment has benefitted from these utopian gestures. Indeed, and increasingly, since the beginning of the 1990's-with the emergence of the U.S. as the singular world superpower and with continued economic, political, cultural, and ecological devastation-the world historical situation has become ever more dystopian. What both presidents celebrated in their official utopian tropes was not the betterment of humanity and the earth, but the triumph of planetary capital. Engaged in a massive restructuring since the end of the postwar boom in the 1970s and helped by the rise to power of the Reagan, Thatcher, and Kohl administrations in the 1980s, the forces of global capital have generally succeeded in shifting from an industrial-based system of production and consumption (fordism) to an information-based system that operates through more flexible methods of exploitation, accumulation, and control (postfordism or, as a recent commentator has put it, sonyism). Multinational corporations based in and supported by powerful nation-states have transformed themselves into truly transnational corporations able to reduce the role of the nation-state to the limited function of providing national and, in the case of the U.S., global security. Under the utopian flags of free choice and free market, planetary capital now manages workers and consumers through a "casino economy" with a world-wide division of labor in a world-market of goods and services. At the same time, it has abandoned entire geographical regions and masses of people since they are no longer, or not yet, needed for the economic machine.2 In the United States, in particular, fortunes were made in the 1980s by individuals and corporations who took full advantage of the deregulated economy unleashed by the Reagan Revolution. Through non-productive mergers (achieved by hostile takeovers and leveraged buy outs) and through computer-driven speculation that favored the quick returns of junk bonds over the long-term benefits of re-industrialization, the number of millionaires grew and corporate wealth rose, while the overall well-being of the society declined. Under the gun of privatization, government services (including economic, health and safety, and environmental regulation; social entitlements; and infrastructure development) were cut back; and yet, in a hypocritical exercise of military Keynesianism and old boy networking, the administration increased the military budget by lowering taxes and raising the national debt. As a result, we now face a more fragile natural and social environment, an unstable world economy (despite the extensive restructuring), a weakened national government (unwilling to exercise its own capacity for popular service), an increasingly subordinated population of women and people of color (facing increasing official and popular terrorism), a declining middle-class (seen more clearly in the current recession as managers as well as skilled workers are laid off), a reduced and impoverished work force (deprived of the power of its own organizations), and a growing number of dispossessed who have been denied the benefits of meaningful work and nurturing social services. In this sweep-of economic restructuring, political realignment, and right-wing ascendancy-that dominated the 1980s and set in motion the forces that now configure the present dystopian world of the 1990s, cultural productions that did more than affirm the emerging postfordist, posthumanist, postmodernist milieu were few and far between. In science fiction, cutting-edge feminist and ecological works continued to hold their oppositional ground, but all too often the energies of sf writers were deflected-by the false promises of the new times and by the shrinking opportunities for publication and distribution-into production of either repetitive series of standardized fantasies (that departed from the powerful moment of feminist fantasy of the 1970s) or versions of "hard science" sf that reveled in technological extrapolation and military adventure without significantly addressing the larger contradictions of the social system.3 It was in this impoverished context in the mid-1980s that the work of William Gibson and other writers who eventually branded their work "cyberpunk" (the use of the term is itself an example of the prevailing entrepreneurial spirit) generated a near-future science fiction that appeared to be capable of cognitively mapping the conditions of the emerging global order.4 Many readers and critics welcomed the cyberpunk phenomenon-and its associated movements in film (e.g., Bladerunner), music (e.g., Sonic Youth), and performance art (e.g., Survival Research Laboratories). Yet, after the first surges of readerly pleasure, some began to locate its shortcomings and compromises. Peter Fitting acknowledged that cyberpunk traced the "triumph of instrumental reason" ("Hacking" 8) in the "non-natural" society of the spectacle, but he just as quickly noted the absence of a "contestatory option" that questioned and opposed the transnational matrix. Invoking Raymond Williams, Darko Suvin readily observed that "a viable collective and public utopianism is not within the horizon of the cyberpunk structure of feeling" (46). And, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay accused cyberpunk of acting in bad faith as it playfully presented the bleak experience of postmodernity at the same time that it left the reader caught within it. Others-such as Jean Gomoll, Veronica Hollinger, Andrew Ross, and Samuel Delany in "Some Real Mothers"-argued that cyberpunk was largely written and read by white, heterosexual, upwardly mobile (largely suburban) males and noted that it suffered from an insufficient self-reflexivity regarding questions of gender and power-becoming, as one critic put it, "the vanguard white male art of the age" (Csicsery-Ronay 267). But one of the strongest indictments of cyberpunk can be found in the 1987 self-criticism made by Bruce Sterling-perhaps the most effective and enterprising cyberpunk writer-editor-promoter-when he noted that its "truly dangerous element is incipient Nietzschean philosophical fascism: the belief in the Overman, and the worship of the will-to-power" (quoted Hollinger 206).5 Some of cyberpunk's difficulties have their roots in a deep textual fault: this was best described by Fred Pfeil when he noted that the cyberpunk writers had the mise en scene right, but they had the story wrong.6 That is, while the imagery developed in the alternative futures of cyberpunk settings symptomatically captures the 1980s ambience of privilege and poverty, the plots and characters of most cyberpunk texts compromise that vision so that the narrative possibilities of opposition are deflected and readers are trapped in the thrilling dead-end of cynicism, left with fashionable survival or displaced rebellion. I got closer to the spirit of this formal split when I read Larry McCaffrey's 1988 interview with Gibson: in that interview, McCaffery observes that the plot and characters of Neuromancer are quite familiar-"the down-and-out gangster who's been fucked over and wants to get even by pulling the big heist"-and he asks Gibson if he consciously decided to use such an established framework. In a response that uncannily echoes categories of the Reagan era, and helps to explain the accommodations of cyberpunk with the dominant culture, Gibson explains that his inexperience as a novelist led him to seek a narrative "safety net" that could contain his multiple and intense cyber-images (McCaffery 224). That is, he sought what he termed a "plot armature which had proven its potential for narrative traction" (Gibson, quoted McCaffery 224). While he did not govern his imagery with a "pre-set" agenda, he decided that his plot had to be "a familiar structure" that he felt comfortable with (225). This instance of writerly insecurity, in which Gibson sought refuge in recognizable film noir plots and macho heroes already embedded in the dominant ideology, provides a symptom of the tactical compromise at the onset of cyberpunk that stymied what Delany, in American Shore, calls sf's "discourse with the world"-a discourse through which the very form of sf can chart and challenge the ideological constructs and structures of the prevailing social system-a discourse which, as Fredric Jameson reminds us, in its very incapacity to imagine the actual, not yet attained, future brings us coldly back to our own unacceptable present ("Progress" 153).7 Despite its entrapments and accommodations in the affirmative culture of the 1980s, cyberpunk nevertheless captured the imagination, and stimulated the social resentment, of many readers (especially, as Fred Pfeil, Marc Angenot, Darko Suvin, and others point out, males of the professional-managerial-technical class, or at least those who aspire to such a position in spite of the shrinking job-market).8As a major development within contemporary U.S. (and, in a different way, British) culture, cyberpunk can be understood as a movement of the 1980s that attempts to trace the terrible ramifications of what Bruce Sterling has called "an entire culture bigfuck" that has run its way through global society over the past fifteen years (see Fischlin et al. 2). And yet, Lucius Shepard pronounced cyberpunk dead as early as 1989, although Pat Cadigan's Synners and Emma Bull's Bone Dance, which came out in 1991, probably belie his claim and argue for a "late" cyberpunk moment that appears to be dominated by women writers.9 However one chooses to periodize it, cyberpunk's creative breakthroughs led to new possibilities within sf, and the cyberpunk imaginary extended beyond the genre into the crevices of popular culture, into the computer industry itself, and (as we saw in the Gulf War) into the very conceptualizations and operations of the postmodern cybernetic military. As well, cyberpunk stimulated the search for oppositional sensibilities and strategies-as the work of Donna Haraway and others attests. With the new energies and tensions of the 1990s taking shape, we may now be in a late, or post, cyberpunk moment (and with films such as Lawnmowerman or the short-lived TV series Mann and Machine we are certainly in a pop-cyberpunk milieu). Nevertheless, it is still important to continue the already lively examination of cyberpunk itself. In teasing apart its methods and its slippages, its agendas and its silences, hopefully we can get a better grasp on this 1980s phenomenon-and on how it plays out in the social matrix that has come to envelop us all.10 IIOne way to put cyberpunk in this larger perspective is to approach it in terms of its intertextual relations.11 Cyberpunk authors have acknowledged the influence of works by William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, and Phillip K. Dick; and Samuel Delany has written of cyberpunk's unacknowledged, or suppressed, debt to the feminist utopias of the 1960s and 1970s-most immediately to the work of Joanna Russ (see "Some Real Mothers"). Yet, another body of work that feeds cyberpunk's intertextual web is the classical dystopian tradition: that is, the novels from Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell to those by Wolfe, Bradbury, Vonnegut, and Atwood. In general, dystopian writing typically presents the reader with a "bad place," a place organized according to less perfect, more destructive social and economic principles than those found in the author's community. Dystopias, Lyman Tower Sargent reminds us, are not anti-utopian in their spirit or textual strategies, for, as opposed to anti-utopias "which are directed against Utopia and utopian thought," these works preserve the memory of the better place even as they delineate the contours of an oppressive society. Soeren Baggesen, however, notes that even within dystopian writing, an anti-utopian tendency can develop. Working from Ernst Bloch's categories of "militant" and "resigned" pessimism, Baggesen distinguishes between a "utopian pessimism" in which the social conditions are explained in terms of the material processes of history and a "dystopian pessimism" in which the destructive elements are based in ontological conditions which lead to "resignation" rather than "militance." As Hoda Zaki has pointed out, this analysis allows for a more complex understanding of the dystopian-utopian spectrum wherein some works incline toward an open-ended utopian hope while others tend toward the closed realm of anti-utopia. This tendency toward a utopian or anti-utopian quality can be discovered in the treatment of the typical protagonist of the dystopia-the misfit or dissident who questions and breaks with the system-and in the utopian enclaves, or remnants, that offer inspiration or refuge to the misfit. If the dissenting protagonist manages to achieve a base of effective opposition and if the enclaves are actually existing liberated zones (as in We or Fahrenheit 451 or Handmaid's Tale), then the dystopia carries within its pessimism a trace of utopia that preserves the possibility of historical change. If, on the other hand, the protagonist is reconfigured or destroyed by the ruling system and the enclaves turn out to be some form of artificially negative reservations for rebellious misfits (as in Brave New World or in more subtle ways in Vonnegut's America), the text collapses into anti-utopian resignation. Certainly, many commentators have noted cyberpunk's affiliation with the utopian/dystopian spectrum. David Porush, for example, reads the name "cyberpunk" itself as a signifier of that very spectrum. For Porush, the "cyber" half of the neologism suggests the dystopian postfordist apparatus of control: "growing feedback loops of self-organization and complexity" that allow the "human nerve net" to "imperialize nature through artifice, appropriating what it can" in its pressing, inclusive logic (332). On the other hand, the "punk" tag represents a "lizard-brain passion clawing its way through the cerebrum of urbanity" and deconstructing the palimpsests of civilization to "expose its deeper codes" (332)-a strategic move which in its oppositional spirit is solidly utopian, but only in an appropriately suspicious, negative sense. Pushing the intertextual web back further, Peter Fitting argues that rather than achieving a formal breakthrough in terms of dystopian writing, cyberpunk is but another step in the longer tradition of dystopian sf that begins at the end of World War II (see "Modern Anglo-American SF" and "Ideological Foreclosure").12 IIILike the classic dystopias, therefore, Gibson's cyberpunk trilogy-Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988)-presents a grim near-future which suggests that the present we now live in (and its upcoming future) is (and will be) worse than previously imagined. In each novel, we find a world just twenty minutes into the future in which transnational corporations and criminal organizations compete for control of the highly developed information matrix-imaged by Gibson's invention of cyberspace-that is the fundamental economic resource and vehicle of the new world order. The realm of the "rich and famous" corporate and criminal elite and the mass of the subordinated underclasses-both employed and derelict-are the major sectors of the toxic, mass-mediated, urban-suburban society. True to the logic of postfordist restructuring, the secure middle sector of skilled workers and managers has largely disappeared, to be replaced by a small tier of low paid service workers and relatively well-paid contract workers who have the technical skills (in cybernetics, medicine, security, or entertainment) that the transnational economy requires but is unwilling to pay for in the form of regular and secure employment. Each novel, then, focuses on an assemblage of protagonists who are usually based in that small and insecure middle sector with alliances with the better organized sectors of the underclass. The oppositional group, however, is almost always (and the departures from this are significant) dominated by a lone male hero with his female counterpart, a few non-white sidekicks, and various forms of artificial intelligences intent on establishing their own identity in the matrix. True to the dystopian mode, this diverse group, but most of all the male hero, tries to survive in the brave new world and in doing so becomes embroiled in some form of (largely unsuccessful) resistance to the dominant forces. Along with these immediate protagonists, each novel in the trilogy features a marginal "utopian" enclave which (like the Mephi resistance in We; the book people in Fahrenheit 451; or the Mayday underground in Handmaid's Tale) plays an important role in the resentment and resistance of the main characters and represents the persistence, the traces, of utopia in the dystopian landscape. For the rest of this paper, then, I want to focus on these utopian enclaves. In doing so, I will work toward describing at least one strategic spectrum upon which cyberpunk-or at least Gibson's version of it-operates as part of the cultural logic of the 1980s. In Neuromancer, the most significant utopian enclave is the rastafarian colony of Zion whose (all male) occupants have retreated to a cluster of cast-off space vehicles to prepare for the last battle with the forces of Babylon. Hired by Case's boss, two Zionites, Maelcum and Aerol, help Case and Molly break into the aging corporate core of Straylight and carry out their mission against the decaying power of the Tessier-Ashpool family corporation. In Count Zero, the primary utopian enclave is occupied by the Brotherhood: an urban voodoo commune based in an "arcology" in the sprawling Projects of the New Jersey suburbs, living quarters which have been reclaimed from the abandoned structures of an earlier period of modernist development. Unlike the radically separatist rastas, the priests/hackers/businessmen-and their female helpers-maintain their "holy space" by means of a more immediate involvement with the mainstream society. Through their blackmarket software "biz," they finance their commune; through their practice of voodoo (a politicized street religion), they manipulate the information matrix to protect their own people and their clients. Like the rasta helpers of Zion, the Brotherhood allies itself with the protagonists of Count Zero (primarily the two white males, Bobby and Turner) in their battles against both the old corporate (multinational, family) power represented by Virek and the new transnational power represented by the competing forces of Maas Biolabs and Hosaka. In Mona Lisa Overdrive, the representation of utopian space, and its place in the overall narrative, dissolves. The artists' colony known as the Factory-set in a former industrial waste dump in "rustbelt Jersey"-is occupied by three social outcasts: two rogue artists and one hanger-on. Although they have carved out an avant-garde zone that rejects the dominant society, the artists, Gentry and Slick Henry, are less philosophically and politically engaged than the members of the previous two enclaves. They lack the long range vision of Zion as well as the street power of the Brotherhood. Nevertheless, it is Slick Henry and his robot assemblages that provide the utopian contribution against the corporate powers. At this level of reading-that is, at the level of the text's overt content-in a recuperative interpretation of the utopian enclaves-one can identify a militant opposition that maintains a trace of utopian hope in the dystopian text. Read this way, the maneuvers of the enclaves resemble Michel de Certeau's description of the oppositional tactics of "making do" as they are practiced in the urban areas of Brazil-tactics which de Certeau sees as a useful form of resistance in an order of things that seems immutable. De Certeau argues that within a "polemological space" in which at least the perception prevails that "the strong always win and words always deceive" there is also "a utopian space" in which other possibilities are articulated, often in evocations of the miraculous by means of the retelling of religious stories which subvert traditional religious and secular power. In other words, a hope for another way of life is maintained by cultural practices that refunction the imposed cultural forms and thereby "subvert the fatality of the established order." What emerges is a "way of using imposed systems" that "creates at least a certain play in that order, a space for maneuvers of unequal forces." At least in an initial, quite unsuspicious, reading, de Certeau's tactics of "making do" offer an interpretive perspective that could reinforce the utopian quality of Gibson's work. What one discovers through such a reading is a popular culture version of Bloch's militant pessimism or of a Gramscian war of position carried out primarily on the terrain of cyberpunk's alternate worlds-largely by outlaw groups using abandoned or derelict materials and spaces at the margins of society. IVHowever, to stop an analysis at this point, with an interpretation of the utopian content of these enclaves, would be to fall into an unsustainably optimistic version of a romantic anti-capitalism-one that neglects a wider review of cyberpunk's implication in the socioeconomic developments of its time. What remains to be considered is the formal relationship of the enclaves to the main plot and protagonists of Gibson's trilogy as well as some of the more direct intersections of the trilogy itself with the historical context of the U. S. in the 1980s. Gibson's texts begin to lose their critical edge as the utopian enclaves (as developed in the iconic register of the alternative world) fall under the compromising influence of the primary plot and protagonists (as developed in the register of the "master narrative" running through all three volumes). As I noted above, despite the help of the utopian allies, the protagonists do not break beyond the boundaries of Gibson's near-future society. They may find refuge (Turner on a farm, Slick Henry in Cleveland, or Bobby in a cybernetic construct), or they may find new work (as do Case, Molly, Angie, Marly, and Mona); but they do not negate or transform the social order; rather, as Sterling warns, they willfully survive or thrive within that order. Following the narrative spine of the three volumes, which has its own tendency toward implosion, the utopian status of the enclaves gradually diminishes as the enclaves literally come "down to earth": the hope represented in the radical alternative of the Zion space station shades into the more engaged yet also more compromised opposition of the Brotherhood highrise, and finally disappears entirely with the destruction of the minimalist utopia of the (white, heterosexual, male) artists of the Factory. Indeed, the enclaves themselves become more and more immersed in the prevailing social logic: the rastas of Zion persist in helping Case and Molly not because of their radical political vision but because of their male-bonding with the edgy hero; through their assistance to Turner and Bobby, the Brotherhood manages to protect its male-dominated street religion and achieve even more success in its blackmarket biz. Most tellingly, in the final volume, the art colony is excised from the text altogether when Slick Henry loses his utopian valence as he shifts into the master narrative as one of the main protagonists.13 Seen in terms of this plot trajectory, the enclaves simply become the homes of very traditional sidekicks, and the utopian agents become no more than typical Proppian helpers who are duly employed at the standard three points in the narrative to advance the action of the main characters. By the end of Mona Lisa Overdrive, therefore, the possibility of an historically engaged dystopia (with its utopian traces) dissolves in an apocalyptic/fairy tale flourish. The social flatline that the reader encounters in the closing pages then reinfects the entire trilogy with a retro-virus of accommodation and closure. Thus, Gibson's work is refashioned into a postmodern simulation of the modernist dystopia: it fades into an anti-utopia closed to the processes of history and vulnerable to the stasis of political resignation. In the light of this formal effacement of the utopian potential of Gibson's text through a master narrative of anti-utopian resignation, some of the other shortcomings of the trilogy can be understood as instances of the text's complicity with the social order of the 1980's. As we saw throughout the decade, the opportunities in this period of restructuring were monopolized by the dominant sectors of the population. In contrast, the economic and social well-being (not to mention the psychological and physical safety) of less powerful members of society was steadily eroded. Read through the social filter of racial struggles, for example, the agential function of the enclaves becomes another version of a non-white Tonto in thrall to the actions of the lone white hustler ranging through the near-future world of street and matrix biz. In an appropriation of non-white cultures that resembles little more than a form of a "yuppie postmodernism" (see Kaufmann) engaging in a trendy consumption of the life and art of racial Others, Gibson has created three textual populations that serve as happy helpers: the rastafarians and the voodoo priests-and especially the women of the Brotherhood who are doubly subordinated as helpers to the helpers-never become actors in their own right, never claim a different voice or space within the narrative. Structured in this helper position, these non-white "buddies" do the grunt labor of softening up the battleground for the protagonists and then conveniently step aside as the white heroes finish up the work. It is Maelcum who sets up the final confrontation in Straylight: and yet, Maelcum (through the signifiers of his music, his attitude toward time, and his easy undertaking of violence by means of a machete that is just this side of the razor used by the Steppin Fetchit stereotype) is basically a humorous sidekick in the ignoble popular culture tradition of Pancho and the Cisco Kid or Tonto and the Lone Ranger. The members of the Brotherhood provide the hacking and the muscle (and the dead female bodies) that win the battle of the Hypermart; they do so, however, not as humorous sidekicks but as powerful primitives who are to be enjoyed for their mysterious excitement and then quickly dispensed with when the spoils of the plot are divided. Following the logic of this racial agenda, then, it is quite consistent with Gibson's textual tactics that the third enclave, the refuge of white males, disappears as its remaining artist hero becomes a major player in the plot. Like Tom Jones coming into his inheritance (as one of the boys after all), Slick Henry is free to leave his bohemian half-way house and move on to the fairy-tale ending of his entry into domestic bliss with Cherry in Cleveland. Read in terms of the equally vicious backlash carried out in the 1980s against women and against gays and lesbians, the enclaves are just as compromised. All three are marked as heterosexual male territories: Zion is populated only by men, and Maelcum serves Case as a manly buddy. The Brotherhood is dominated by male leaders who use their women as "horses" (vehicles for their voodoo/hacker runs). The three derelict men of Dog Solitude can barely communicate with each other and hardly know what to do when a woman comes to stay with them-they are inept as eleven year olds whose clubhouse has been invaded by one of the neighborhood girls. Certainly, unlike the overtly chauvinistic "hard science" sf of the same period, the intertextual memory of other sf works which push the possibilities of gender and sexual preference beyond the enforced binary limits (as in the work of Russ or Tepper, or of Delany or Varley) haunts Gibson's narrative and generates the potential for more engaged texts. However, at each opportunity for such a move, Gibson retreats into the folds of a security blanket stitched with quite familiar images and stories. The trilogy's implication in the dominant agenda of the 1980s is further revealed in the economic positioning of the protagonists and the enclaves. One of the main characteristics of the recent restructuring has been the change in the nature of the work force. As the power of organized labor is challenged by the mechanisms of a computer-based flexible production, workers who have held a secure place in the economy since the 1950s are losing ground, and new forms of labor are emerging that are amenable to the limited awards of this leaner and meaner system. Three categories of workers can be identified in this flexible economy: a declining number of skilled industrial workers who hold relatively high paying and secure jobs in large corporate structures and who are still protected by union contracts; a growing number of minimum-wage, part-time workers who are hired as needed and fired with short notice and who have no union protection and consequently no job security; and a smaller, but growing, number of skilled professional-managerial-technical workers who individually contract with corporations (and governments) for limited term, relatively high-paid tasks. It is in this last category that the protagonists (and indeed many of the readers) of Gibson's cyberpunk world can be found, -albeit at the lower end of that sector's pay scale. Case is a hacker turned espionage expert who is adept in manipulating cyberspace to steal corporate secrets; Molly/Sally is a street-wise "razor-girl" who has turned her survival skills (after earning the money to buy her bionic weaponry through prostitution) into a postindustrial commodity that can be rented by corporations needing extra muscle against their competitors. Turner is a war veteran and former corporate employee who works as a contract security expert in delivering executive defectors to their new companies. Finally, and not to be oversimplified as emerging forms of an unfashionable opposition, the enclaves themselves can also be identified in the terms of the new economic structure. Seen as micro-enterprises, each has found its niche in the planetary market. The space jockeys of Zion work as independent contractors who supply transportation at the fringes of that market. The computer wizards of the Brotherhood are dealers of software and hardware in the urban sprawl: they also perform the dangerous work of carrying out basic research on security software for major corporations unwilling to risk their own staff. Betraying the growing uselessness of the utopian in the text (and in Gibson's version of contemporary society), the artists' space of Dog Solitude serves as the most destructive enterprise of the three: the Factory becomes an independent research and development facility for products which were created as art but which turn out to be prototypes of new postindustrial weaponry for the corporate wars. In these economic spaces, Zion, the Brotherhood, and the Factory resemble not so much forward-looking utopian communities but rather residual forms of small, paternal and patriarchal, businesses. All three are hierarchical, "familial," risk-taking institutions that are occasionally useful to the corporate giants. VAs the form of Gibson's trilogy is examined in relation to the dominant mode of production of a planetary capitalism, the anti-historical, anti-utopian tendency of these early cyberpunk works comes into sharper focus. In terms of older versions of exploitation and oppression-those of gender and race-the trilogy's "utopian" Others are reduced to the status of servants and tools for white males (including writers) intent on surviving in a grim society; and in terms of economic structures and practices, the heroes and enclaves become little more than useful cogs in those larger machines. This anti-utopian drift within Gibson's text can be more broadly understood as an example of what Paul Piccone and Tim Luke have called an "artificial negativity" that supports the status quo by re-containing sources of potential opposition through reification and commodification-thereby removing their useful negative power and repackaging it as yet another exchangeable commodity. Through this cooptive mechanism, oppositional expression is tapped as a necessary source of independent creativity that is capable of ferreting out solutions, or at least diversions, to systemic problems: the knowledge base of the opposition becomes the knowledge base of the system's own refinement. As Mike Davis puts it, in the related context of science fictional portrayals of the city of Los Angeles as the prophetic map of the future, such potentially provocative and critical signifiers of the near-future "tend to collapse history into teleology and glamorize the very reality they would deconstruct" (86).14 In this light, therefore, Gibson's three-volume text itself can be understood as an instance of artificial negativity in the larger cultural logic of global capitalism: it is a product that ranges through the new social regime like a pop culture Godzilla that validates the very terrain it threatens to destroy. Cyberpunk, therefore, cannot be uncritically praised as the cutting edge of opposition that Bruce Sterling spoke of in his cyberpunk manifesto. Although its intention might have been to celebrate what Sterling called the "unholy alliance of the technical world and the world of organized dissent" found in the interzones occupied by hackers and rockers, cyberpunk often works as a late capitalist version of what Herbert Marcuse described as "the affirmative culture" of modern bourgeois society. Unlike earlier manifestations of affirmative culture-that is, those "high" forms of art, literature, and philosophy which assert a "universally obligatory, eternally better and more valuable world" that reigns in human "souls" happily detached from "the factual world of the daily struggle for existence"-the popular affirmations of cyberpunk offer not idealist intimations of immortality but rather utilitarian calculations of the odds of "making it" through speculative (ad)ventures on a rapidly reorganizing earth. VIAnd yet, in closing, the arguments of de Certeau and others (especially the likes of Laclau and Mouffe, Donna Haraway, and those involved in the "new social movements") that a diffused, often mutually antagonistic, constellation of agents can find ways to develop strategies and tactics of resistance on the terrain of the present society cannot be ignored. Simply to abandon these forces would also be to step quietly into the cage of affirmative culture. In terms of cyberpunk-despite the indictments I have belabored-it needs to be acknowledged that its near-future fictions continue to stimulate socially critical responses in many writers and readers. There are sf texts (such as Lewis Shiner's Deserted Cities of the Heart or Richard Paul Russo's Subterranean Gallery) which work with the creativity unleashed by the cyberpunk movement but which manage to map and to challenge the social system in ways that Gibson's never quite achieved. And, other writers working around the lively ambience of cyberpunk or post-cyberpunk-such as Kim Stanley Robinson, Fred Pfeil, Ian Banks, or Kathy Acker-traverse a similar fictional terrain but manage to self-reflexively resist the cyberpunk entanglement in limited visions and gestures. Finally, in an outburst of published work since 1990, women writers working within the cyberpunk paradigm (such as Emma Bull, Pat Cadigan, Sheri Lewitt, and Laura Mixon-along with Marge Piercy's related cyborg/golem novel, He, She, and It) have turned out novels that promise to shift the literary ground to one of more clearly oppositional reconsiderations of the lean and mean global order. These more contentious works, each in their unique way, slide around cyberpunk's affirmative ambience and stimulate a more discomforting reception which is stronger in its evocation of a utopian pessimism (or a critical utopianism) in a dystopian world-offering strong critiques of the present and pre-conceptual anticipations of emancipatory alternatives somewhere beyond what Ernst Bloch called the "darkness of the lived moment." Notes
Works Cited
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