| A brand new avenue for interdisciplinary research
between technology and literature
"Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being.
And we can do most anything to rats.
This is a hard thing to think about, but it's the truth.
It won't go away because we cover our eyes.
That is cyberpunk."
The above words from Bruce Sterling, a pioneering cyberpunk writer, represent the ethos of cyberpunk literature. Cyberpunk, a portmanteau word from "cybernetics" and "punk" has entered the postmodern literary scenario with works like Bruce Bethke's "Cyberpunk," William Gibson's Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. Although the term is linked with literature because of its representations in fictional writings, it is closer to technology due to its affinity with super-computers, cyberspace and virtual/hyper reality. The most popular cinematic versions of cyberpunk fictions are Blade Runner, the Robocop series, the Terminator series, and the Matrix trilogy.
Picture 1: Entering the Cyberspace
The linking of "cybernetics" with "punk" interestingly reveals the attitude and concerns of this genre. Cybernetics is the scientific study of communication and control. It uses feedback as a method of controlling living organisms and machines and is applied to the regulatory function of computer controlled machines and organisations, automata and robots. It is an umbrella term that covers other specialized subjects like adaptive systems, artificial intelligence, complex systems, control systems, information theory, simulation, and systems engineering. While cybernetics basically deals with control and, to a certain extent, manipulation of an individual or a system, punk ideology is radically about freedom and celebrates the autonomy of the individual. This paradoxical juxtaposing of cybernetic control with punkish freedom characterize a sub/counter culture movement that is both a progressive and reactionary response to a world in flux and a fiction in stagnation.
Cyberpunk, among other associations, is reckoned a postmodernist, deconstructionalist and feminist sub-genre of science fiction owing to its focus on "high tech and low life." Ambiguously playing with the emancipatory as well as cataclysmic effects of "the Information Age," Cyberpunk foregrounds several pressing themes of the present culture and technology like the interfacing and commingling of humans and machines, the new relationships between gender and science, and an imminent counter culture backed by savvy technological transmogrifications and amoral cyber ventures. In these narratives, information holds supreme power, crimes are electronically committed, body is considered "meat" and resented, prosthetic replacements are welcomed. All such tendencies, symbolizing the advent of "the Cyber Age," technologically produce an ultra-modern generation of cyborgs (cybernetic organisms) but ethically cause human cripples struggling to survive in a world that is inherently callous, cruel, and corrupt. Despite its glitz and glamour, the Cyber Age is ultimately seen as more violent, and more harrowingly alienating man from himself and his surroundings and leaving him intensely agonized.
Picture 2: Simulation, Simulacra, and the hyperreal
Thus, Cyberpunk literature offers ample scope for research in the interface between literature and technology; man and machine; cyberspace and hyperreality; utopia and dystopia; identity conflicts; professional ethics and human values.
Dr. T. Ravichandran
Assistant Professor of English
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
E-Mail: trc@iitk.ac.in
Homepage: http://home.iitk.ac.in/~trc
|
www.iitk.ac.in