The Archive Incarnate by Joseph Hurtgen

Author:Joseph Hurtgen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2018-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

Archival Control

What’s there to risk if all subjectivity is being extinguished? We’re condemned to effects of giddiness—in all the electronic games as well. There’s no more pleasure, no more interest, but a kind of dizziness induced by the connections, the switching operations in which the subject gets lost.—Baudrillard, Forget Foucault (79)

This section discusses three major forms of archival control in “Johnny Mnemonic” and Neuromancer. In these works, power over society is held by merged corporations that use archives to consolidate power in the headspace of individuals, in the screen-like space of the real world, and in the matrix. Communications technology paired with computer technology in Gibson’s works allows for corporate control over society. In “Johnny Mnemonic” digital storage space in the body allows for corporate control from the inside out. Johnny, with a brain over-brimming with corporate intel, has no way out of this totalizing map of the world under corporate control on his own. Indeed, Johnny’s mind is accessible by those in control of the archive; Johnny’s mind becomes one more node in the system with which to store data. In Neuromancer, the matrix is a corporate creation, intended to benefit already powerful corporate, governmental, banking and military-industrial entities. The matrix allows for rapid communication, instantaneous transfer of funds, panopticon-like surveillance, information gathering, and the centralization and precise storage of information. Power structures exert control over areas from afar as a result of globalized communications and record-keeping (archiving). In effect, the matrix brings the metropole to the colonized empire. Vivian Sobchack explains that “electronic technology has … dispersed capital while consolidating and expanding its power to an ‘everywhere’ that seems like ‘nowhere’” (232–33). To explain Sobchack’s everywhere that feels like nowhere, we might think of ATM machines sitting in convenience stores in America’s most down-trodden areas, used by the poor to get money to burn off on lottery tickets; this is an instance of the presence of wealth and power, silently weighing down upon the powerless. The ATM machine and the lottery, while both seeming to pay money out, both take money away from the disenfranchised and return it to systems of power and control simultaneously absent and present from the situation of the exploited class. Also thinking of social injustice made possible by technology, Cory Doctorow and Karl Schroeder see cyberpunk fiction—of which Gibson is a seminal writer—as concerned with how “science is a doorway into the future enslavement of humanity by its own technology, and salvation lies in co-opting that technology” (Publishing Science Fiction 28). Gibson’s heroes hack into the files of economic and military entities, effectively co-opting technology out of reach to the rest of the population. Gerry Canavan stresses that cyberspace, experienced primarily in the mind, connects individuals to a larger world of information: “Cyberspace is a virtual space of information, an area through which the mind, by means of a computer interface, has immediate access to a global information network” (83), and contains everything, having an “aspiration to totality: cognitive maps of the historical world-system on an immense, even hyperbolically cosmic, scale” (iv).

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