Thought Emporium

Famiglietti, Andrew.  “All Each Other’s Fragments:  Bodily Experience, Agency and Postmodern Identity in WIlliam Gibson’s Sprawl Stories.” Unpublished Essay, n.d.

This is one where I look back on my own writing during graduate school, particularly my own Neuromancer article, and I have to wonder what kind of stuff I would’ve produced if I had the theoretical background going into coursework.

Famiglietti’s paper is attempting to provide an alternate interpretation of gender, specifically masculinity, than the one given by feminist critics. He is reading the male characters in the Sprawl series (to which he adds “Fragments of a Hologram Rose”) for “the way they derive a source of agency from their bodily experience of superspecific sensory detail…[which] articulates a possible way for subjects embodied in dominant positions to move away from serving hegemonic power and re-align themselves with the subaltern” (Famiglietti 3). In other words, there is a meeting of neo-Marxism and postmodernism of a sort.

This is indeed the holy grail, being able to deal with the multi-representational reality of life while at the same time being able to manipulate power structures in order to affect social change. For Famiglietti, the postmodernists are right in their disdain over the “modern subject [which] was built on subjugation and selective memory” (Famiglietti 6). Gibson’s texts are mined for suggestions on how do do exactly this. As such, it’s not quite postmodern (although it does exhibit some postmodern tendencies).

Famiglietti, for instance, does not see cyberspace as either the land of masculine priviledge or as a feminized landscape (as does Nixon). Neither is it a space void of meanings. Instead, “it is the skull of the hacker that is figuratively penetrated upon entering cyberspace” (Famiglietti 9), where Case enters a landscape dominated by corporate power and his hacking is his way of manipulating that power. His postmodernness means he cannot act as an independant agent, but there is still agency. There is, however, a difference between his bodily and sensory experiences and those of ” technology, ideology, and other forms of discursive power” (Famiglietti 15)…and this is an “in” for agency.

How well does Famiglietti ultimately succeed? That would require a few more read-throughs and closer examination all around. But at this point, I have to be very focused in my findings. The main thing that I want to pull out of this is his very concise understanding of postmodernism, particularly of the major varieties of:

“For Baudrillard, the postmodern moment is one in which the real and the discourses meant to represent the real have collapsed into each other, forming a singular whole…It can thus be inferred that the project of liberation, as far as Baudrillard is concerned, is the project of rejecting such “realist” fallacies as the modern self as merely power projections and accepting the hyperreal nature of reality. Without the constraints of the supposedly real, we will be free. Frederic Jameson’s understanding of the postmodern moment complicates this libratory project. Far from seeing the rejection of the “realist” subject as a libratory move, Jameson sees the dismantling of such subjects as a projection of the economic power of the dominant interests of multinational capitalism” (Famiglietti 3-4).

Short version? Baudrillard says “there is no real, and that’s good” while Jameson says “there is no real, and you’ve been duped by corporate interests into thinking this”

Famiglietti’s short version: “Baudrillard elegantly reveals the fallacy of the singular self and Jameson shows us the difficulties of formulating political agency after the singular self has been done away with” (Famiglietti 6)

One thought with the above. For Baudrillard, he seems to thing that the disintegration of the self has extended into the realm of the macro. For Jameson, the macro is what dupes us into thinking the self has been done away.