Term paper free writing 3

In his short story “The Calorie Man,” and “Yellow Card Man,” as well as his novel The Windup Girl, Bacigalupi depicts a world ravaged by bioengineered plagues. I want to suggest that the informational manipulation of the biosphere, as imagined in these texts, represents a crucial element of the biopunk aesthetic as it might be distinguished from Neuromancer. This is a much more profound speculative invention than anything I’ve encountered so far in another collection of biopunk SF shorts, Ribofunk.

In Gibson’s novel All Tomorrow’s Parties, the plot involves a nano-assembler that basically functions as a conduit between the material and digital worlds, and the subsequent collapse of (or challenge to) boundaries and distinctions. The AI Rei Toi can take on material embodiment. This example is interesting because Gibson DOES do interesting things with materiality, information, and virtuality, but not necessarily in the “biopunk” mode of Bacigalupi.

What I’m particularly interested in in Bacigalupi are the latent sexual politics of his representations of advanced bioinformatic manipulation of nature and the human. In the story, “Fluted Girl,” two biotechnologically-augmented sisters have their bones replaced by fluted musical devices. This allows them to “play” one another by mouthing pieces inserted into their bodies. They perform an elaborate dance for fetishists interested in the performative and sexual possibilities opened up by biotechnology. What concerns me with this image is that it figures the “cyborg” as incestuous and perverted. Haraway offers the cyborg as a perversion of Nature-based ontology, but I’m not sure if that’s Bacigalupi’s aim. The story leaves us with a sense of violation, degeneracy, and even “decadence.” Oscar Wilde offers an interesting quotation: “Classicism is the subordination of the parts to the whole; decadence is the subordination of the whole to the parts.” A question becomes, does Bacigalupi provide a speculative window into bioinformatic advance that moves beyond or complicates the rhetoric of organic wholeness?

In “Pop Squad,” a hardboiled, noir, cyberpunk pastiche, a detective is tasked with “popping” illegally-born children – literally shooting them in the head. In fact, the graphic nature of the descriptions of infant cranial and brain matter evokes the rhetoric of anti-abortion activists. “Pop Squad” depicts a society in which radical life-extension technology has created the need to ban new births. However, mothers, driven by an essential maternal impulse, continue to have children despite the risk to their lives and the lives of their babies. They live in squalid conditions, isolated from society in order to raise their young. Thus, in Bacigalupi’s short fiction the posthuman stands in opposition, it appears, to modes of heterosexual reproduction. I would also argue that the intense pathos that marks this challenge represents a heteronormative tendency in Bacigalupi’s fiction. An essential, reproductive sexuality and human nature opposes itself to a cyborg that is figured as degenerative and sexually-deviant.

This theme is repeated in his short story, “Pump Six,” in which humans have difficulty conceiving because of fertility-reducing environmental contaminants. In fact, a race of hermaphroditic subhumans has emerged as a result of toxic mutation. A central pump station that keeps the city’s sewers functional fails, and the company that designed and can repair the equipment has long since vanished. A desperate technician tries to find engineering expertise in order to repair the pump and save the city at a nearby university, only to find that the institution has almost entirely degenerated; he finds only an armed woman guarding an abandoned library. Like the degenerate hermaphroditic subhumans, the college students he encounters seem more concerned with recreational sex than their academics.

The posthuman cyborg is figured through representations of deviant and non-reproductive sex, but in a way that implies incest, pollution, and degeneracy. In Bacigalupi, the cyborg never seems valorized; the possibilities for pleasure it offers, to borrow from Haraway, seem foreclosed. In this sense, Bacigalupi’s handling of bioinformatics advance differs markedly from an author such as Marge Piercy in her postcyberpunk novel “He, She, and It,” which challenges and disrupts heteronormative and organic conceptions of embodiment, gender, and sex.

Term paper free writing 2

I recently finished Pump Six and Other Short Stories, a collection of SF shorts by author Paolo Bacigalupi. If we can call Bacigalupi a “biopunk,” it’s because he’s crafting speculative worlds that engage the cultural and ecological impact of advanced bioinformatics. In Neuromancer, we encounter “cyberspace,” a computer-generated virtual space that threatens to render traditional space obsolete: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” Put a different way, in Gibson’s novel cyberspace challenges the ontological primacy of a pre- or non-digital reality, i.e., what Case terms the “meatworld.”

In Neuromancer, transnational corporations appear to have almost entirely supplanted nations as the primary global political actors. These entities struggle not over land, material resources, or even markets, per se, but information.  Perhaps another way to think about it might be access to information. Corporations use “ice” (protection software) to guard their internal data and company secrets. In an economy that appears to be fueled by rapid technological development, corporations are fiercely protective of proprietary information: software, schematics, novel digital entertainment technologies, etc. Flow, blockage, penetration, infection, and prophylaxis: these are the dynamics through which these agents negotiate relations of power. In fact, we learn in the novel that Operation “Screaming Fist,” an attempt to launch some sort of covert mission into the USSR that occurs around the same time that cyberspace emerges, fails spectacularly when the team is infected by a computer virus. Thus, the invaders are defeated by infection, and earlier modes of shaping, and enacting power, on geopolitical space appear to be outmoded.  

Biology and bioinformatics certainly play a role in Neuromancer; the novel contains many examples where biology and information merge, such as cosmetic genetic engineering. But the primary arena in which the action appears to happen is cyberspace – that’s where everything is at stake. Information flows out of cyberspace into the meatworld: “data made flesh in the mazes of the black market.” Technology fuses with the body in the form of the trodes that Case uses to interface with the matrix, the slots that people use to plug in software into their brains, the designer alterations that people make to their bodies. What I’m trying to get at is there’s a nascent “biopunk” element in Gibson, but his aesthetic concern is in some sense destabilizing, or playing with, the traditional oppositions between the real, the embodied, and the virtual. There’s even a very specific instance in which Gibson associates the “spiral” of DNA with the body, with reproductive sex, with desire – the body and the biological are in some sense opposed to or resist informatics. The Flatline perhaps most poignantly represents this tension. In cyberpunk the emphasis is on advanced information technology, and while Neuromancer explores several instances of bioinformatic advance, the novel’s aesthetization of the cyberspace/meatworld binary limits its engagement with bioinformatics.

A biopunk novel like The Windup Girl changes this formula I think in a profound way. Whereas the biosphere in Gibson’s novel, the biological world, occupies a peripheral role, usually referenced for its decay or its obsolescence, the biosphere in Bacigalupi’s novel is at the center. It has been radically transformed by bioinformatic catastrophes.

Term paper free writing

When I think about it, I find the number of theoretical approaches to literary and cultural studies bewildering. The task of familiarizing oneself with theory is daunting, and, unlike a discipline such as chemistry, for example, no one is functioning as a “gatekeeper” to ensure I’m developing specific intellectual proficiencies; no quizzes, no tests. Sure, there are entrance examinations and admissions committees, but when is someone really going to probe my understanding of Derrida? During a job interview? Perhaps. Another question: out of the dazzling constellation of theoretical work that one could study, what decisions are best? What competencies should one develop?

I’m also increasingly interested in the role of theory in my work and toward what end, what purpose, I take up the work of reading and interpreting cultural texts. By theory, I mean an interpretative and/or analytical framework that in some sense mediates our hermeneutic engagement with a text. Theory helps us frame certain questions, to read texts (broadly defined) in specific ways, for specific critical purposes. When I encounter people who are “theory-averse,” I often think about how we always approach a text – in whatever medium, perhaps – with a set of interpretative “keys” through which we “decode,” to use a cryptographic metaphor, textual content for meaning. I think this holds true even when we're barely conscious in front of a television screen!

Theory seems to ask us to foreground, to bring to the surface, the interpretative keys through which we decode texts in order to make meaning out of them. The cryptographic metaphor seems additionally useful when it suggests that the type of message we arrive at is in some way constituted or determined by the key itself. In other words, a psychoanalytic or Marxist analysis will yield different interpretative results; the development of theory seems to want to offer us ever-more-refined and sophisticated interpretative keys through which to interact with cultural artifacts. Whether we use theoretical decoding mechanisms, or literally employ algorithmic decoding mechanisms (via “distant reading” techniques), bodies of texts become almost a form of “standing-reserve” that we can manipulate to produce knowledge demanded by institutional, disciplinary, and commercial imperatives.

I acknowledge that this is perhaps a naïve formulation, but I want to try to understand better my own complex “positionality” as a literary and cultural critic. A question becomes, in what relation do I stand to cultural artifacts that I take as the subject of my analysis? What are the latent ideological or discursive parameters (I use the terms mainly to connote specific arrangements of knowledge) that allow me make statements about texts? Do I hold the pretense, and is it a pretense, that my work has some kind of bearing on specific, verifiable social, political, or ecological situations?

Perhaps one circuit through which I could travel (to use a posthuman image) in order to answer this question is to ground my relationship with theory in what excites me, what I’m interested in as a developing cultural and literary critic. This is what I’ve tried to do, but it seems as if these questions demand further consideration… especially as I decide upon an appropriate theoretical framework for my term paper.

Cyberpunk and biopunk

What is “biopunk,” and how does it compare with “cyberpunk”? Working from memory, I’ll begin by offering a tentative definition of the cyberpunk genre of science fiction (“sf,” abbreviated). When I think of a cyberpunk novel, I first think of film noir: shadows, gritty, colorless urban environments, rain, stoic, morally-ambiguous male protagonists and dissimulating femme fatales. Hardboiled detective fiction from the early twentieth-century also strongly finds its way into the mix. If you read a novel like William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which is perhaps the archetypal cyberpunk novel, alongside The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep, you can easily observe the stylistic similarities.

Hardboiled detective fiction and film noir, at least in the early twentieth-century tradition with which I’m familiar, are somewhat guilty of being masculinist and culturally-myopic. The barely-concealed racism, sexism, and homophobia in a novel like The Maltese Falcon is a prime example (as much as I enjoy the novel). Cyberpunk is somewhat guilty of repeating these tendencies to the extent that an author like Gibson seems to be uncritically borrowing some of the more undesirable elements of the hardboiled tradition. This is another topic, however.

Cyberpunk protagonists occupy the social fringes; hackers, drug addicts, poor people, members of bizarre subcultures, racial minorities, sexual deviants, etc.  Cyberpunk novels also usually contain some kind of all-present information network or virtual reality simulation. The typical cyberpunk plotline usually involves a conflict between hackers and corporations over some emergent information technology, such as an AI, molecular replicator, etc.

Biopunk shifts the emphasis from software to “wetware,” which is actually the title of a biopunk novel by Rudy Rucker. Whereas cyberpunk concerns itself perhaps primarily with informatics, biopunk imagines the implications of bioinformatics: genetic programming and biological computing.

Paolo Bacigalupi’s short story, “Pocketful of Dharma” contains an interesting biopunk image: a massive bioengineered tree called “Huojianzhu,” or, “The Living Architecture.” It occupies the center of future Chengdu. This biomechanical structure is being grown as a massive building for people to live in: “A vast biologic city, which other than its life support would then lie dormant as humanity walked its hollowed arteries, clambered through its veins and nailed memories to its skin in the rituals of habitation” (1).

Part of what I want to do this semester is examine Bacigalupi’s biopunk aesthetic. Questions include: How do biopunk texts help us imagine the “naturalcultural,” to borrow a phrase from Haraway, consequences of bioinformatics? Is Bacigalupi a “bioconservative,” to borrow a phrase from the transhumanist philosopher Bick Bostrom, or is his imaginative perspective on bioinformatics more complicated? In short, I am interested in how SF texts open up an imaginative space for us to contemplate future naturecultures, as well as to reflect on our current naturalcultural entanglements.