Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 145
Machines for Ultimate Questions
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transcendence as a recurrent symbolic and beyond-reaching institution. Let us recall
Case from Gibson’s now legendary Neurom ancer, a successful console cowboy
who manages to break the ‘ice’ of the modern fortress Tessier-Ashpool, yet he is a
vulnerable and tragic person from the edge of physical survival. The money which
is accumulated on his Swiss bank account as a reward for some successful business
in cyberspace, he will spend on a new pancreas and liver, i.e., for the urgent salvation
of his ultimately endangered existence. He is no full-blooded James Bond and
once the mission has been completed, there will be no holiday with beauties awaiting
him on the Seychelles, but, as the first thing, the journey to the hospital to get the
transplants. Alex in Bruce Sterling’s H eavy Weather ( \994 ) , too, is sickly, fragile,
a hero in need of medical intervention. That is why at the end of the novel his sister
and rescuer Jane declares their common fate: “We’re not lucky, Alex. This is not a
luck time. We’re alive, and I’m glad we’re alive, but we’re people of disaster. We’ll
never truly be happy or safe, never. Never, ever.” (Sterling 1994: 275)
Neither Case nor Alex are in any way a version of Rambo, and the same holds
true for a number of other characters of contemporary SF. But, and this is the most
important here, the vulnerability, fragility and tragic condition of the characters as
“people of disaster”, who range from the characters found in Hoffmann and Shelley
through to those found in Gibson and Sterling, is indeed a prerequisite for the shift
in orientation mentioned at the beginning of this text, i. e. the move away from
fascination with the achievements of the new technologies (which, however, is still
dominant now in a number of cases) towards technologies which sustain the context
for articulating the first and the ultimate issues of man as a person and social being.
Encounters with technologies—often also in the form of natural disasters and
consequences of misconceived social Darwinism and apocalyptic events—are used
as a screen which grants insight into the clea r space where the issues of the person,
freedom, self-realisation, attitude towards death, fellow-humans and transcendence
are articulated. All of a sudden, the most varied, extremely pointed and conflicting
options stand side by side: birth, death, sex, transcendence, apocalypse, salvation,
pain, happiness, transgressive action. And this background is also extremely
productive for language itself, since the extraordinary, the deviant, and the reaching
beyond may be adequately described in language which itself is dri ven to its extremes.
The issues concerning the characters in these texts, seen in the framework of
various theories of post-modernity, point towards the postmodern destabilisation
of the individual’s identity. In question are the issues of the individual as merely a
software (RAM)construct, virtual agent and net clone (at this point let us recall
Mark and his life beyond contingency with flesh in the novel by Pat Cadigan,
Synners (1991)). Furthermore, there is the mind/body problem in the sense of the
mind/network problem, the issue of the body without organs (the concept found in
Deluze-Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus) and of organs without the body (Arthur