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Local Transcendence: Cultural Criticism, Postmodernism, and the Romanticism of Detail

1990; University of California Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1525/rep.1990.32.1.99p0008g

1533-855X

Alan Liu,

Literature: history, themes, analysis

To IMAGINE WORDSWORTH with his hands on a personal computer is to glimpse a descent, as if of software, from the romantic release of imagination to its various postmodern releases.Cyberpunk, for example.Romantic imagination is the source code (by way of Edgar Allan Poe, the Beats, Thomas Pynchon, and others) of Neuromancer, the novel that marked the emergence of the "cyberpunk" or "mirrorshades" movement in postmodern science fiction.2The comparison is vulgar, but precisely so.Perhaps only our vulgate bards match the original banality, the transcendental everydayness, of the poet of Lyrical Ballads.Transcendence is the issue.Romantic imagination was a mediation between the worldly and otherworldly whose definitive act was the simulation of transcendental release.In such spots of time in The Prelude as the Boat Stealing or Snowdon episodes, Mind was the visionary medium that coded the world as otherworldly.But the dark ricorso of such simulation was what Geoffrey Hartman (in his book on Wordsworth) called the "return to nature."3The thief in the boat turns back from transgressive transcendence to a Platonic cave of legitimacy.The poet on Snowdon views a cloud-video "perfect image of a mighty mind" but then corrects the simulation, turns it at last into an ode to duty: "hence religion, faith, I/... Hence truth in moral judgements; and delight That fails not, in the external universe."4Transcendence is recuperated within the banal-the denotative banal of commonplace experience, perhaps also the connotative and ideological banal: the trite, hackneyed, contained, bourgeois.5Just so, neuromantic imagination simulates release.The visionary medium is now Mind in direct interface with silicon (and secondarily with a kaleidoscope of synthetic drugs updating romantic opium), and the function of the synthetic imagination is once more to allow the world-now corporate, multinational, informatic-to feign the otherworldly.Fashioned in much the same mold of existential theft as Wordsworth's boat stealer, the hero of Gibson's novel, Case, is an outlaw, a "cowboy" hacker riding "viruses" into bright corporate databases.Gliding in cool stealth along datapath traceries of the corporate network, Case is Kerouac on the road, Slothrop in the Zone, the Street that jinks between corporation headquarters.But at last, this thief also ends in the double bind of transgression become legitimation.In the great legitimation crisis of the novel, he raids an evil corporate colossus that is the postindustrial imagination of Milton's Pandemonium.The resulting subversion is transcendental, apocalyptically so-but also, we recognize, indistinguishable in outcome from what economic journalism calls a "minor correction" of the market: a corporate raid, a takeover, a taking care of what Case-in his street talk-has all along called "biz."In this novel, too, transcendence is ultimately banal, which in postmodern science fiction often means that it is parasitic upon a mock-Japanese ideology of ordinariness: corporation consensus, performativity, zaibatsu rectitude.In Gibson's drug-sharp image of his hero bunching his fingers in cold withdrawalfrom his keyboard (in the electric 'Japanese night"), we recognize a consummate need for the corporate grid.On one great screen, then: romantic "unknown modes of being."On the other: "cyberspace" or, in other cyberpunk idiom, the "matrix," "network," "grid," "Plateau."6The media This content downloaded from 128.111.121.