ABSTRACT
Cyberpunk’s fascination with the interface between the body and technology has been widely remarked upon in cultural criticism of this mode. This chapter takes a novel approach to this familiar entanglement by focusing on the animality of the living body in the encounter between corporeality and technological systems. Where cyberpunk imagines an opposition between the organic and the finite on the one hand, and the incorporeal datastreams of communications technologies on the other, critical analyses have not sufficiently reckoned with the fact that the body in this conjuncture is figured specifically as an animal body. Our own finite organic bodies become at best a surface upon which new technologies induce ephemeral ‘sim-stim’ pleasures, or at worst an archaic residuum that is scarcely relevant to the richer experiences made possible by (incorporeal) cyberspace. Dreams of transcending corporeality via technology become, in this analysis, a kind of zoophobic contempt for human animality that is not unrelated to the industrialised slaughterhouses and mass extinctions of the twenty-first century. This chapter revisits two cyberpunk classics, William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Pat Cadigan’s Synners, in the light of this critique of the species logic of cyberspace fantasies.
