Surface inscriptions: implications of the postmodern in William Gibson's future worlds

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Throughout his Sprawl and Bridge trilogies, each of which portray visions of a future evolving from his postmodern present, William Gibson expresses concerns regarding postmodernization and its impact on individuals and society alike. I argue that in these trilogies in particular, Gibson asserts the view that the various dilemmas faced by postmodern culture arise from its passive submission to commodification and technologization. By adopting a Jamesonian approach to the postmodern and combining it with Guy Debord’s theory of spectacular societies and Jean Baudrillard’s hypotheses on postmodern consumerism, I analyze the way Gibson’s fiction details the possible consequences of spectacularization on cultural discourses, the human body, and historical perspective. In Fredric Jameson’s view, postmodernism is imbricated in “the cultural logic of late capitalism.” For Gibson, this logic, and its relationship to the development of multinational corporate powers, is the driving force behind the cultural constitution of his fictional worlds. The Sprawl and Bridge trilogies both articulate perspectives on consumer culture, its evolution within late capitalist societies, and the remodelling of discursive practices it initiates. Through his implementation of technological nomenclature in the Sprawl trilogy and his demonstration of consumer excess in the Bridge trilogy, Gibson expresses anxieties about the spectacle and its relationship to postmodern culture. He further develops these anxieties by way of his approach to posthuman forms and their existential boundaries, and by his profound commentary on postmodernism’s influence on both cultural history and personal memory. These three issues, emerging from Gibson’s observations of the 1980s and 1990s, form the basis of the discussion undertaken in this thesis. Essentially, postmodern culture does not just embrace new technologies or accept the logic of late capitalism with which consumer desires correspond. It also submits entirely to spectacularization, which, as Gibson puts forth in his work, challenges the very nature of humanity as well as our ability to fully understand, or respond to, the world in which we live