Critical carnival: Cyberpunk and the postmodern condition(al)

My dissertation employs the work of Mikhail Bakhtin to transform the study of cyberpunk science fiction (the literary movement born in the 1980s and led by William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, Pat Cadigan, and Neal Stephenson). In an attempt to correct the reigning critical perspective, which persistently—if erroneously—views cyberpunk through the lens of postmodernism, I argue that cyberpunk can be fully grasped only by recognizing its fundamentally carnivalesque poetics. Attending to cyberpunk's carnivalesque content/sensibility and its literary debt to carnivalesque novels (by Rabelais, Melville, Joyce, Burroughs, Pynchon) has allowed me to refute and revise the current tenets of cyberpunk studies. Accordingly, I reassess cyberpunk's recourse to the hard-boiled detective formula: not simply scripting sullenly romantic postmodern noir, cyberpunk combines the Chandleresque with the carnivalesque to show that the cityscapes and cyberspaces of postmodernity are not necessarily “intolerable spaces.” I re-map cyberpunk's seedy milieux as heterotopian spaces rather than dire wastelands: cyberpunk satire deploys the seemingly dystopian to critique and convert problematically utopian (i.e. naively technophilic and cryptofascist) worldviews. Delineating cyberpunk's cyborg body politics as a celebration of grotesque realism and transgressive hybridity, I counter claims that cyberpunk manifests body disgust and an escapist desire for technologically-facilitated transcendence. Similarly, I move beyond notions of “punk” as a muted, stylized nihilism in order to trace the dialogism and tricksterism of cyberpunk's countercultural characters. Underlining and unifying the revisory work of these chapters is the contention that cyberpunk is not the passive reflection or “supreme expression” (Fredric Jameson's famous label for cyberpunk) of postmodernism but is committed to a critical dialogue with it. With a Bakhtinian espousal of openness and unfinalizability, cyberpunk consistently anatomizes the notion of an already-crystallized, absolute, and monologic postmodern condition (as grimly theorized by Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard) and instead operates within the discursive space of the “postmodern condition(al)”—where cultural conditions aren't thoroughly demeaning, and where subjects still contest for meaning.