All that melts into air is solid: Rematerialising capital in Cube and Videodrome

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Notes

1. For brief introductions to cyberpunk, see Butler (2000) and Bould (2005). More sustained treatments can be found in McCaffery (1991), Slusser and Shippey (1992), Bukatman (1993) and Featherstone and Burrows (1996).

2. Although cyberpunk invariably talks about “information” or “data” rather than “capital,” the metaphoric leap is not a big one. For example, the internet's “technical” standards, such as TCP/IP, are not in some way “neutral” but were adopted in order to facilitate intra-capitalist competition within the US, with the proprietary network standards developed by Xerox, IBM and other corporations being rejected by the US state as impeding such competition and increasing state costs. We are grateful to Lee Salter for this point.

3. See Marx (1965), Nye (1994) and Bukatman (2003).

4. See Panshin and Panshin (1989) and Berger (1993).

5. Likewise, as an editor Gernsback promoted SF in which “the ideal proportion[s] … should be seventy-five per cent literature interwoven with twenty-five per cent science” (quoted in Westfahl 1998: 39), but this interweaving did not go so far as to integrate pristine “scientific fact” with the narrative flow of the “charming romance” but rather tried to keep them as separate and distinct components. On Gernsback, see Bould and Vint (2006).

6. Sterling (1986), reprinted in McCaffery (1991), made a point of emphasising some of these continuities. See also McGuirk (1992).

7. See, respectively, the three volumes of Capital, Hayles (1999), and McNally (2001).

8. While fully aware of the problems of reducing cyberpunk to Neuromancer, for the purposes and within the constraints of this essay, Gibson's socioeconomic imaginary, and the idiom and images depicting it, can with caution be treated as synonymous with that of cyberpunk itself.

9. See Ross (1991), Nixon (1992), Balsamo (1996) and Vint (2006) for critiques of the gender and class limitations of the cyberpunk vision of transcendence.

10. For a provocative account of multinational capital as a cancer on planetary life organisation, see McMurtry (1999).

11. One possible source for this imagery is Escape from New York (Carpenter 1981), of which Gibson has spoken highly. In an early sequence, as Snake Plissken's (Kurt Russell) glider descends into Manhattan, views of the physical landscape are eventually superseded by the wireframe animations on his monitors, virtual abstractions occluding real space just as his cockpit screen eventually fills the movie screen. This resonates particularly strongly with the opening of Neuromancer's third chapter. Early attempts to visualise the space in which computers and networks operate were dominated by hardware images, as in the sequence in Scanners (Cronenberg 1981) in which Cameron Vale's (Stephen Lack) attempt to telepathically connect to the computer is depicted by a camera viewpoint that prowls over circuit boards. Such representations were superseded by computer-generated imagery (CGI) of software space, often from a first-person viewpoint precipitated into and racing through abstract spaces, as in Tron (Lisberger 1982) and The Lawnmower Man (Leonard 1992). By the time of the Matrix trilogy (Wachowski brothers 1999, 2003, 2004), CGI was routinely used to depict not only virtual spaces but also supposedly real ones (with the curious side-effect of often rendering “real” spaces less “realistic” than “virtual” ones), a blurring upon which Dark City (Proyas 1998) is predicated. Cypher (Natali 2002) self-consciously emphasises the interpenetration of real and virtual when depicting the protagonist's flights between marketing conferences in various characterless cities. Along with other recent cyberpunk and SF films, like New Rose Hotel, Demonlover (Assayas 2002), Code 46 (Winterbottom 2003) and It's All About Love (Vinterberg 2003), Cypher captures the disorientation, alienation and fatigue of jetting between airports and hotels in a polyglot near-future unanchored by physical or monolingual markers. In each of these films, it is the privileged elite – those who most closely identify with capital – who are worn out by trying to circulate in the space of flows and instant time. Gibson's most recent novel, Pattern Recognition (2003), set in the near-past, addresses similar concerns.

12. For a more detailed reading of Johnny Mnemonic in this vein, albeit one too beholden to linguistic idealism, see Bould (1999). The “bad grrl” cyberpunk of authors like Pat Cadigan, Lisa Mason, Misha and Melissa Scott places a greater emphasis on embodiment, but typically this is experienced in a markedly heightened form only when the hacker jacks out of cyberspace. For example, in Scott's Trouble and Her Friends (1994): “She leaned forward further, pressing her elbows into her thighs, not yet ready to look up and meet Huu's eyes. The blood-spotted towel lay between her feet, where she'd dropped it, and she fixed her eyes on it as though it was something important. Her crotch was hot and wet, body lagging behind her brain, and she smelled of sex. She could hear the sucking sound of Huu peeling off the rubber gloves, and wanted for a painful instant to feel the other woman's hands between her legs, gloved fingers pressing into her clit – She took a deep breath, shook that thought away” (133).

13. Futurologist Ray Kurzweil collapses this metaphor, suggesting that when the AIs inevitably emerge, they will all be “basically entrepreneurs” (2000: 243) or, as Steve Shaviro, criticising Kurzweil, puts it, “purveyors of an endlessly expanding, frictionless celestial capitalism” (2003: 118).

14. Alluding to Roadside Picnic's “meatgrinder,” Quentin calls it “the sushi machine.”

15. On the ways in which contradictory ideologies about gender, race, class and nationality are still used as forms of labour control in contemporary high-tech industries, see Hossfeld (2001). Numerous service industry examples, generally untheorised, can also be found in Ehrenreich (2002) and Ehrenreich and Hochschild (2002).

16. As the only non-white character, his tendency to seek physical rather than intellectual solutions and his easy resort to violence must also be read through the stereotype of black rage (see Bould 2004). Although beyond the scope of our discussion, it should be noted that his limitations can be read as a consequence of being a subject of capital strongly disadvantaged in other ways, such as by racism.

17. In addition to McNally's work, see Collins (1999).

18. Such metaleptic play recurs throughout the film. For example, when Max's hallucinations are recorded by a device fitted over his head, he fantasises himself in the “Videodrome” arena, whipping Nicki, but the Nicki he whips is a TV monitor, her screaming face turned to the viewer. The start of this hallucination is depicted by a low-resolution image, clearly mediated by a video technology, but this soon gives way to a conventional realist screen image, encouraging us to see the continuities between fantasy and materiality in the diegetic world, and also between representation and the real.