One thing that often anoys me about cyberpunk is constant reference to mysticism - voodoo (Grimwood and Gibson), buddhism (Grimwood - 'redRobe'), christianity (Stephenson - 'Snowcrash', 'The Matrix' is a classic messiah tale with Mopheus as John the Baptist, and esp. in anime), Paganism (Noon), and just spirituality in general. There are other examples in sf in general like 'Dune', but cyberpunk seems to emphasise it even more.

I guess there is a certain 'spirituality' to the disembodied nature of cyberspace, but this seems to fall into the trap of not fully exploring this new space opened up, by explaining it with old ideas. What does everybody else think?

This thematic constant in CP is connected, I think, to the constant reiteration of classic archetypes in literature in general, and SF in particular.

It's especially interesting when you contrast these themes against CPs baroque fetishisation of consumer products.

Doesn't most of this orginate with Timothy Leary?
I'm not sure but I'm pretty sure he was talking about the transcendental aspects of cyber space back in the 1980s.
On the other hand people often want some mystical justification for their personal fixations. (Have you heard of channeling?)

Well, I think that the reason a lot of writers use mysticism as a literary device has to do with the sort of evocative connotations that religion/spirituality has for the reader. Hmm. That was poorly said. Try again...

Things like voodoo have preprogrammed evocations for the reader. It's a 'readymade', as gibson likes to say. Everyone, pretty much, has some kind of exposure to religion, and using that exposure is simply an effective use of imagery.

Also, religion is a constant theme in all literature, genre or otherwise. It's simply a cultural current that we've all swum in. Please note, however, that whatever spirituality is presented in WG's work tends to have real world origin. The Voodoo in CZ (spoiler!) is just the fragmented AI from neuromancer. No real ghosts in the machine, just science we haven't gotten our head around just yet. And that's something I respect about gibson.

Computer programmers tend to use a lot of vaguely mystical and magic related terms of reference in describing what they and computers do: there is lots of discussion of wizards and dark magic. This may come from the very nature of what programming actually is. Writing a program is the closest thing in real life to casting a spell. Programming is the writing down of words, and things actually happen as a consequence of those words.

I think that mysticism, which I understand as the belief that there is a transcendant and knowable aspect of our universe, is essential to anything "cyberpunk."

My reasoning: just as the mystic believes there is a part of him or herself that can know a part of the universe that is not physical, and therefore must posess the equipment or senses to know it, characters in cyberpunk fiction are able to know and have the equipment to know the "cyber" aspect of the universe they are in.

For me, this is part of what makes cyberpunk so cool. If I wanted just hard SF, I would read something else.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Nate:
I think that mysticism<snip>...is essential to anything "cyberpunk."<snip>

---

Nate, I agree with you 100%. The concept of spirituality and mysticism in cyberpunk exist specifically because of the crazy relationship that technophiles have with technology.
The mysticism that surrounds new technology is really the draw of cyberpunk, the oddness and the thrill of something that isn't completely understood-- sure, you could just explore that concept, but it becomes incredibly sterile and dry if you don't add in a healthy bit of something that exists now.
I always thought the whole point of the Cyberpunk and Dark Future genres is that they have just enough of what we're familiar with to make the plots seem eerily believable in the very near future context. Religion and mysticism play an active part in the world today (think about Al Queda and tell me religion doesn't impact our lives); cyberpunk simply uses it as a tool.

-Hawksfire, the Cheshire Harlequin

The snake biting its tail... we've gone so far into a universe we've ourselves created, that now we feel alone. So the temptation of re-populating the shiny, empty niches with old icons (in both the new and old meaning of the word) is too great.
Or... you could see it as a cynical, harsh explanation of many religious phenomena: it's just neurons misfiring. Excited phosphenes. A really good hack that works...
I recall reading about many of the early VRML pioneers all being wicca, pagans, etc., and trying to instill those ideas as the foundation of the new 3D web universe. Did they succeed? Or did they just re-packaged it all in new, shiny polygons?

How do we perceive the universe, and what is "real" and what is not "real?" These profound questions, and disagreement about the answers, are part of why art and literature exist.

quote:

---

... a cynical, harsh explanation of many religious phenomena: it's just neurons misfiring. Excited phosphenes.

---

Using this same argument, one could argue that when a bird flys overhead, my optical nerve is creating the image in my mind, and there is no bird. When I pass a bakery, the smell of fresh bread is just created by "neurons "mis"firing and phospenes getting excited. There is no bakery.

The mystic believes not only that there is a bird and and a bakery, and that we can trust our physical senses to be reliable in detecting those things, but also that we can have a spiritual sense of a transcendant universe. How does literature and art affect us emotionally? Does it help us to apprehend some transcendent level of the universe, or do the patterns of print on a page simply fire neurons in a certain order, releasing whatever chemical gives us that feeling?

quote:

---

I guess there is a certain 'spirituality' to the disembodied nature of cyberspace, but this seems to fall into the trap of not fully exploring this new space opened up, by explaining it with old ideas. What does everybody else think?

---

-- Ipsrod's orginial question

In literary terms, I think it is important to allude to other work or themes that came before.

For example, James Joyce's ULYSSES is considered one of the greatest books in the English language, and one of the reasons is because of its brilliant and profuse allusions to classical literature, which addressed many of the questions that literature and philosophy and religion still ask today.

The strength of new literature, such as Neuromancer, for example, is that it addresses these age old questions in a new WAY, and using old ideas to do it is a convenient way to do it. I think it would be very difficult to address new ideas without borrowing from the past.

"There is nothing new under the sun" -- Ecclesiastes. (see what I mean?)

"Mysticism" appears to have been around at least as long as the cave artists at Lascaux and Chauvet. Artists may simply be hard-wired to expound on "transcendental" themes.

That words don't convey mystical experience is a given. That you can't talk about mystical experience without words is also a given.

Being that all matter/energy is interdependent and interrelated, why not find mysticism in cyber punk?

Cyberpunk definitely corresponds with magical archetypes to me. I consider mystical explorations as a form of fantasy. The traditional mage who can travel out-of-body, acquire knowledge through quests to attain objects, influence things from a distance, change form and so on, directly translate to what cyberpunk embeds in near future societies.

The only difference is technology supplies the magic. The same human needs for a greater existence and the thrill of discovery are met. Cyberpunk is particularly thrilling in that it places the objects required just out of our grasp in the near future. It makes me wonder if readers of magic tales really imagined their wizards just over the last horizon as we imagine grand scale AI somewhere in our future.


"Art depends upon the inexactitude of sight."

I think most human experiences that go beyond simple concrete "hot/cold dry/wet up/down" events into abstract areas need metaphors to explain/unravel their effects on us. That's how our brains work. So it's inevitable that religion is going to be invoked because people aren't very original and powerful experiences routinely get related to God or sex.
But transcendence IS what religion is all about. The insubstantiality of the flesh, the spirit that isn't tied to the body, etcetera.

As far as magical terminology goes, I like Michael's thought about the spell-casting aspect of programming, but a more banal thought occurs to me: a lotta programmers love to play RPGs. And they love naming things after all that Tolkien business. That's the main reason we have sprites and daemons and wizards in daily use. Cute geeks.

mysticism (from the ancient greek - mystery)and spirituality are intrinsic elements to human nature. Regardless of whether or not it is simply nuerons firing in a aprticular pattern or wether there is an objective reality that is being accessed by the person we need to have formats in which to understand and percieve reality. (assuming of course that there is an objective reality at all) It has been demonstrated in various tests that we are unable to percieve that which is truly alien. we have to see something twice before we can "see" it. Most vision, and most other brain functions, are a result of network patterning.
So it makes sense that we put things like mysticism into those things that we don't yet understand enough to conceptualize.
I don't really "grok" this 1 and 0 thing. I am a very physical person. Yet I have had "spiritual experiences" that allow me to create a frame work of understanding, and coping, external reality.
And, by the way, chemistry is a lot more like magic than programming.

Watching the evolution of both these ideas going hand in hand you cant help but come to the conclusion that they are two sides of the same coin.
I see computers and mathematics as a natural extension of our will upon the physical universe and I really get the idea of a computer program being much like a spell or ritual.
I've been well interested in mudman and nates points and thats what draws me to gibson's work amoung others.

I think it all comes down to uncertainty. A recurring idea in cp lit is the breakdown of contemporary secular ordering sructures. Law, government itself, even the minimal amount of trust we have among each other in contemporary society is gone in CP lit. CP settings have (d)evolved into a futuristic, pseudo state of nature (in the Hobbesian sense, not the Lockean sense). As such, there is little predictability or certainty in people's lives. In such circumstances, it is only natural that there would be an attempt to find deeper meaning or comfort in the spiritual. The extra-sensory world would be the only place to find comfort, because the physical world around people provides none. Some use drugs or tech (simstim) to escape, others will always fall back on the old standby of religion. It only makes sense. Otherwise, suicide rates would be so high that the Sprawl would be a one-horse town.

-----------------
"That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code, does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code." --Major Napier, Stephenson's THE DIAMOND AGE

I think that there is a certain tension in cyberpunk with regards to the question of mysticism. What I would like to see is a confrontation with the new modes of thought opened up by technology from within the discourse of said modes of thought. Instead, by reverting to older modes of thought, i.e., mysticism, the technological is never confronted head on. Its nightmareish world is covered up with a much more humanistic (or maybe anthropomorphic) world of spirits, gods and magic (this is why pointing to human nature as a reason for it does not seem to cut it for me). The dehumanising force of the technological modes of thought/production, the very destruction of aura and spirit, is rarely examined as a rejection or overcoming of the old idols. So sue me I read too much Heidegger and Benjamin.

In some sense this is an academic topic which needs to be explored from within academic discourse, and I still enjoy cyberpunk as it stands. However, I think that new ground needs to be broken within the genre. Just as 'hard' s-f gave way to the experimental 'speculative-fiction' of Moorcock, Ballard and such like, I would love to see a more experimental side to cyberpunk, where the content spills into the form, engaging the reader in new and exciting ways. This does not mean an expulsion of the gods but a confrontation with them from within the technological mode of thought.

The twilight of the idols.

quote:

---

Originally posted by lsprod:
This does not mean an expulsion of the gods but a confrontation with them from within the technological mode of thought.

The twilight of the idols.

---

Gibson's Loa in the Sprawl series, I think, provide you that. The Voodouns believe that these are the loa of legend, wherein they're actually just beings from a different net. They came in a form that is readily understood, but abused it, warped it, and made it fit their own ways of doing things.

Their only way of interacting with any of the characters is through Angie and her cranial cyberdeck-- but this makes it all seem very real to those who don't understand the technology. I think this is very much so a confrontation of what the old Gods and Idols stand for: how much is simply based on misunderstanding. As far as I could tell, the Loa of Gibson's books provide a benevolent Gozer the Gozerian (sp?) choose-the-form-of-the-destroyer type situation-- although they don't come to conquer, they come in a form that will be recognizable to those they interact with.

You say Gibson and Cyberpunk wrap everything up in mysticism; I say Gibson especially has done his damnedest to explore the collapse thereof. What better to shatter faith than to see the puppetmasters for what they are?

-Hawksfire, the Cheshire Harlequin

quote:

---

Originally posted by lsprod:
I think that there is a certain tension in cyberpunk with regards to the question of mysticism. What I would like to see is a confrontation with the new modes of thought opened up by technology from within the discourse of said modes of thought. Instead, by reverting to older modes of thought, i.e., mysticism, the technological is never confronted head on. Its nightmareish world is covered up with a much more humanistic (or maybe anthropomorphic) world of spirits, gods and magic (this is why pointing to human nature as a reason for it does not seem to cut it for me). The dehumanising force of the technological modes of thought/production, the very destruction of aura and spirit, is rarely examined as a rejection or overcoming of the old idols. So sue me I read too much Heidegger and Benjamin.

---

But this is the history of religion! When new religions or social organizations come along, they don't REPLACE the old systems; they blend with the old systems. Christian practices in much of the world are idolatrous, yet idolatry is one of the first things outlawed by Christianity. The new belief/technology never wipes away with the old. It only changes the context of the old.

-----------------
"That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code, does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code." --Major Napier, Stephenson's THE DIAMOND AGE

Splitcoil: "The new belief/technology never wipes away with the old. It only changes the context of the old."

True - Sol Invictus/Christmas; equinox/Easter; Ygdrasil/tree of Life/cross; Samhain/All Saint's Eve; Mithras/Christ; idols/icons.

Neuromancer/The Matrix......

http://www.toolonginthesun.com/sol.htm