The Business of Cyberpunk

Brande, David. "The Business of Cyberpunk: Symbolic Economy and Ideology in William Gibson." In Virtual Realities and Their Discontents. Ed. Robert Markley. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996: 79-106.

From Heather Hicks "Striking Cyborgs: Reworking the "Human" in Marge Piercy's He, She and It": In this essay, Brande, like Donna Haraway asks "readers to regard work as elemental to any discussion of the contemporary interface between humans and machines," and usefully "defines the cyborg as 'an effect of advanced capitalism's restructuring of modes and relations of production and its corresponding transformations in ideological production," which in recent Marxist analysis, we will add, includes artistic production. Hicks quotes Brande that, with some exceptions

[...] critics often situate [William — Hick's interpolation] Gibson's work[1] within the context of "postindustrialism" and occasionally praise it for its depictions of "late capitalism," without defining these terms or saying exactly how his work embodies or works through them. While it is, perhaps, out of a healthy skepticism of "vulgar" base/superstructure models of economics and culture that leftist critics are wary of making deterministic claims about the connections between macroeconomic transformations and the appearance of the cyborgs, the social and economic conditions of the production of cyborg life nonetheless remain to be articulated. (Brande, pp. 79-80; Hicks, p. 88)

Brande identifies these conditions as "'the social and economic conditions of the production of cyborg life'" that center on the "large dynamics and 'coercive laws' of capitalist markets" (Brande, p. 88; Hicks, p. 88). Hicks would add Pam Rosenthal's observations on the current changes in production and consumption and how that has changed the lives of those in postFordist cultures (Hicks, p. 89).

The "Ford" here is Henry, developer of assembly-line production;[2] a postFordist world would be one beyond mechanical industrialism (and maybe one with less antiSemitism, but that's not what's usually meant. Note "our Ford" in A. Huxley's Brave New World and the theme of labor in such works as Player Piano.

RDE, finishing, 29/30Jul23