“Prominent readings of Neuromancer—though not all—tend to focus on Gibson’ s representation of cyberspace, and the late-capitalist/postmodern culture this cyberspace is taken to both to symbolize and characterize. Indeed, to some degree, Neuromancer has become a kind of Ur-text for all things cyber and its author an elder statesman of information technology, regularly interpreting youth-oriented technology such as “mashups” for the readers of WIRED. In academic circles, the novel’s reputation as a key text of late capitalism was solidified shortly after its publication. In an early, influential article, Pam Rosenthal argues that Neuromancer “articulates the dilemmas of post-Fordist work and life”, while Fredric Jameson, in Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) famously describes cyberpunk as “as much an expression of transnational corporate realities as it is of global paranoia itself” .
For both Rosenthal and Jameson, Neuromancer represents, or perhaps reproduces, an epistemological shift, engendered by the technological and economic changes of the 1970s and 1980s. Because of this early framing, the register in which Gibson’s masterwork has been understood has remained limited. While technology and economics get plenty of attention, Neuromancer criticism has attended less to the geopolitical shifts that shaped the moment of its production, in particular the shift from imperialism to “globalization” or “neocolonialism.” And it is not as if Gibson’s text ignores these shifts; as a byproduct of its rapid geographical movement, Neuromancer nods clearly to the unevenness of globalization, an unevenness both produced and revealed by the novel’s transportational and technological networks. Neuromancer engages with what sociologist Manuel Castells calls the “network society,” a transnational network of flows characterized by uneven distributions of labor, information, and capital.
“Neuromancer presents a contrast between imperial and neocolonial management styles; I read the novel as a contrast between the archival, hierarchical managerialism of imperialism and the “nomadic” managerialism of the Network Society. Neuromancer demonstrates that even as capitalist management has evolved into a globally networked age, it continues to manifest vestigial traces of a seemingly older imperial managerial system, one based in hierarchical, masculine management structures and dependent on a colonial Other. While arguably one of Gibson’s tasks in writing Neuromancer is to displace this imperial imaginary, to cast off the hidebound, cathected power of imperial management in favor of the displaced, rhizomatic power of the network, the novel validates the older mode of power through its plot choices, which produce a kind of imperial, managerial framework over the novel’s dispersed subjects. In making this argument, I am hardly arguing that Gibson’s novel should be dismissed; if anything, I would argue that Neuromancer is more complex than is often understood. At stake in rereading Neuromancer is a reconsideration of the dizzying velocity of technology in contrast with the slow grind of History. As critics from Andrew Ross to Istvan Csicsery-Ronay have argued, Gibson does not show his readers the future; he attempts to show them the present. This present, as postcolonial theorists assert, has yet to recover from imperialism—or, at least, its accompanying managerial imaginary—in even the basest ways. Gibson shows how the seeming discontinuities produced by technology can mask the continuities of history. Do not be confused, Gibson says: Benjamin’s Angel still faces backwards, and information technology, as seductive as it is, forms part of the hazily understood debris of History.”
Andrew Strombeck, The Network and the Archive: The Specter of Imperial Management in William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Science Fiction Studies, July 1, 2010.
Image: The Imperial Bureau of Standards, in Andor, Season 2, 2025.
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