(Here begins the second part of my conceptualization of cyberpunk. Expect these sorts of things to be irregular, but at the same time a part of this blog, because much of what I will be doing as a graduate student is exactly what I am doing here, but simply on different subjects. This is, for all intensive purposes, practice. Regular programming should, as always be expected.) First, a recap of what cyberpunk is, with some inferences to what it is not: What is it?Cyberpunk is a genre of fiction, primarily of the science fictional vein, that attempts to merge the concept of cyber (taken broadly to mean the speculative future of technology embodied as objects such as the net, artificial intelligence, and other such items) and punk (to be taken as the resistance by a figure or figures to the dominant social paradigm of the post-industrialist complex, with reasonable removal of the unfortunate hypocrisy that eventually took over the punk movement and established its resistance as moot; one can look at Istvan Csicsery-Ronay’s concept of “No Future” in his essay “Cyberpunk and Empire” to get an idea of the nature of the gray that is the punk; and, of course, reading that essay can offer some unusually powerful insights into some of the aspects I glossed over in the first post for this series). Typical elements include: noir imagery, excessive representations of urbanity (to the extent that the urban is typically the central scenic POV and the corporate/industrial complex is instead removed or seemingly nonexistent, and thus is present more as a disembodied head than anything else), urban decay, hacker culture, and the introduction and general adoption of some form of social resistance through the technological (enhanced drugs, code manipulation, use of online-as-real environments, rogue AIs, etc.). It would be fair to say, then, that cyberpunk has already happened, insofar as certain aspects (such as artificial intelligent at the human level) have yet to happen, but other elements (the dominance of the web, the use of networks to mount resistance, both locally and internationally, etc.) have certainly occurred or are occurring. Example: Neuromancer by William Gibson and “Cyberpunk” by Bruce Bethke. What it isn’t?Cyberpunk is not a grand, ridiculously Hollywood-ized foray of random technological gadgets and faux-hacker-culture obscenities that have been so readily adopted by the reading/viewing public as definitively “cyberpunk.” While cyberpunk certainly includes those elements found so grandly exposed in The Matrix and various other films and novels that have been applauded as cyberpunk, it is not so much a genre of visual or technological appeal as a genre of deeper, grander meanings and statuses of resistance. So, while one might say “that guy has a bionic eye and a talking computer” and think “it must be cyberpunk,” we can automatically dig deeper to find where its cyberpunk-ness ceases to be anything but visual aesthetics. We cannot, for example, call such a tale “cyberpunk” simply because of a bionic eye and a talking computer, but precisely because the bionic eye and the talking computer are part of a grand resistance as per the “punk” suffix, demonstrated as such through the interaction of said subjects, willingly or otherwise, with a social paradigm that is radically corporate and radically homogenized as such. Example: The Matrix is arguable, because one could argue that the robots, intelligent and sadistic, in a way, are simply an allegorical representation of an economic model of social structure, precisely because the use of humans as commodities (i.e. the use of people as objects rather than as subjects) is so obvious. But, one would have to see the Animatrix to understand that The Matrix and its sequels are not about commodity so much as about revenge and survival. A grey area still exists; perhaps further attention to such a thing may be elemental to a broader conceptualization of cyberpunk. Now, having said the above, I think it is fair to resume the discussion of cyberpunk as a genre. Cyberpunk is comprised of three movements, though not, by any stretch of the imagination, linear movements, but movements equally as resistant to standards as the punk in cyberpunk. It should be noted, too, that these movements are not definitive categories in the sense that they exist independent of one another, though it is true that they are in genres other than cyberpunk. These movements can be imagined as follows:–Post-humanism–Post-industrialism–Post-nationalism I will only briefly discuss these, because their broader contexts are not necessarily needed here, though certainly worthy of exploration outside of this attempt at literary criticism. Neither of the above categories are necessarily extreme in representation when seemingly adopted by an author, nor are they categories that should be ignored simply because they have been given a weaker role than others (literary critics would tell you that it is possible that those elements which are so hard to discern in relation to other elements are probably the ones most worth paying attention to). But to the descriptions: Post-humanism, in the sense of science fiction, is quite literally what the name seems to imply: post (after) the human. In cyberpunk, and most of science fiction, post-humanism takes the shape, primarily, of the technological: artificial intelligence, robots, cybernetics, bionics, and other forms of prosthetics, whether for the outward body (a robotic arm) or for the internal body (a chip in the brain). Post-humanism, however, should not, in this broad definition, be confused with the alien, and if further explanation is needed for this point, then feel free to tell me in the comments. Post-industrialism we have discussed before. It is the switch from super economies to service economies. Taken literally, again, it means the reduction of manufacturing and the production of service. Post-industrialism is not the end of manufacturing, since no society can possibly survive without the ability to create the goods that thus enable service, but there is simply less emphasis on the creation of objects, and more emphasis on what those objects do for us. For example, one

To define cyberpunk is to literally take up the foundations of science fiction and say, “this is it, and there are no other options.” Anyone who attempts a definitive definition to science fiction will know how ridiculous this is to accomplish, particularly because no two individuals will agree. Cyberpunk is to punk what science fiction is to itself. Any attempt to define cyberpunk will be either heavily contested, patently wrong, or shortsighted. I expect here, in this brief forum, that I will have approached some semblance of all three categories. Cyberpunk began, at least in its most recognizable form, with Bruce Bethke, a fellow most of you have never heard of precisely because another fellow by the name of William Gibson stormed onto the scene and stole the limelight from our little Bethke. You see, Bethke was a visionary who unfortunately was rather shortsighted in his presentation of what we now know to be “hacker culture.” His story, aptly named “Cyberpunk,” was quite literally the embodiment of punk in the narrowed vision of the future, a molding, literally, even, of cyber (to mean future technology) and punk (to mean what I attempted to utter here). Fitting how the term came together, don’t you think? Then there was Gibson, and Bruce Sterling, and Pat Cadigan, and even a few friends from the past who, for better or worse, were adopted into the fray by enthusiasts of the genre, even though they were not, by any stretch of the imagination, attempting to toss their names into the cyberpunk hat (how could they when they had no idea that cyberpunk would exist in another decade or two, the Philip K. Dicks and Stanislaw Lems, with all their proto-cyberpunk tales that were either ignored or acknowledged as wonderfully complicated). And what were they writing? Future punk, to be rather brutally simplistic about it. They were extrapolating upon the present by imagining a future that punk had yet to conceive: one in which globalization had been taken to the extreme, so much so that corporations took that final step to being more than just entities with a voice, but true powers, global entities with desires, wills, and superiority over the then-present (future-present) society. Here is when punk met cyber, because as society in the 1980s was gearing up for the incredible shift in economic priorities, cyberpunk writers, whether announced or silent, were imagining the decay of cities and neobarbarism (an examination of extremist urbanity), and envisioning the future of post-industrialization. Super economies were becoming service economies (Fordism vs. Toyotaism) and the entire structure of society, as envisioned by the league of cyberpunks themselves, was shifting from that in which the individual fit into one of two categories: 1) the hapless victim of social and economic change, unwilling or unskilled to mount any sort of resistance, except to adopt the new cultural paradigm and become “citizens” of the post-industrial, corporation-as-self structure; and 2) the “punk” as embodied in he/she who resists, who mounts some form of opposition and bleeds into the structure of society as one who is not supportive in action (though in mind they were not necessarily aware of said resistance) of the dominant social structures. And so, cyberpunk became a way of envisioning the future as always already screwed up, as filled with all that was wrong with the present amplified, but all that was right with the future. There was the net, a force of both social cohesion and discord, and even such wonders as quasi-noir imagery (a la old detective novels), cybernetics, bionics, excessive reference to new or improved drugs, and hacking. Much of cyberpunk, thus, saw the net as coming alive, becoming, as it were, a being-to-itself, with artificial intelligence and pre-visualized navigation structures that allowed it to be more than just a place of numbers and code. Here you should think about the nature of video games and how the Internet has change how we play them; cyberpunk saw that coming from a mile away, but yet was so clearly wrong in some respects, because we have yet to devise a game world that is a world experienced as such. This post, unfortunately, has grown too long, and must be split. Here I have conceptualized a relationship to punk itself and given a brief idea of what cyberpunk is, though rather haphazardly. There is more to say, but for now we have the above. There are movements to be discussed, within cyberpunk, and other elements that have largely been forgotten, including the interesting nature of merger and collaboration amongst the various other genres, and even the supposed death of cyberpunk. Those are forthcoming. But, for now, if you have thoughts, disagreements, or downright hatreds for what I have uttered here, please use the comments below to relay them in the manner you deem appropriate. And that concludes my rather formal, somewhat critical language. Have at it! ————————————— Read Part One (Punking), Part Two (Punk), Part Four (Cyberpunk B), and Part Five (Cyberpunk C).