Metamorphic Matrices: Transformation and cyberpunk narrative

It would be hard to deny that technology occupies the role of ‘other’ in our popular consciousness, in spite of the fact that it orbits around us throughout our lives. Our preoccupations regarding technology extend even to popular fiction – indeed, popular culture is a fertile breeding ground for myths surrounding technology to proliferate and grow. Technology is potentially an uneasy subject since it always presupposes either change or progress, or both. It therefore pricks our complacency while keeping us curious and intrigued.  What I aim to do in this essay is look at the ways in which metamorphosis and posthumanism drive two popular cyberpunk narratives, namely William Gibson’s seminal Neuromancer and the sequels to the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix films.  I will employ Bruce Clarke’s Allegories of Writing: The Subject of Metamorphosis and the first chapter of Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman to substantiate my discussion of these texts.

The locomotion of bodies is central to both Neuromancer and The Matrix. Both texts engage in interplay between the human and technology, dramatizing – indeed to popular, or at least cultish effect – many of the fears inherent in the cultural imaginary with relation to technology in general and artificial intelligence in particular. We follow the adventures and misadventures of hackers who ‘jack in’ to an intricate cybernetic system, aptly dubbed a ‘matrix’ in both narratives. The implications of such a flight are at the core of this essay.

Gibson’s 1984 novel is responsible for creating an entire science-fiction sub-genre (cyberpunk) and its aesthetic, as well as many of the concerns about it, and approaches to technology reverberate across the genre – and The Matrix trilogy is certainly no exception. Both narratives could be crudely summarised as featuring seemingly smoothly-operating systems that betray a rupture, which is fixed through the employment of human agents.

In Neuromancer, the artificial-intelligence entity Wintermute needs to employ hackers to override the ‘Turing laws’ that prevent it from merging with its reluctant half, Neuromancer. In The Matrix sequels, Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions, what was previously portrayed, in the original 1999 film, as a totalitarian digital system enslaving humanity reveals itself to be more complex. The rupture in these films comes in the form of Agent Smith, played by Hugo Weaving. In the trilogy’s first instalment, he merely stood as a metonym for the evil AI regime; in the sequels, he is foregrounded against a more heterogeneous portrayal of the Matrix and his role is revealed as that of a virus – bad news for both the Matrix and the ‘real world’ – which is growing exponentially. So once again, artificial intelligence calls upon humans for collaboration. Metamorphosis is necessary for this transaction to take place, since we are looking at the communication between two different forms of life, essentially, so an intermediary level needs to be established.

Transgression is also necessary to get things moving in these narratives. It is the essential trope of the cyberpunk genre; the ‘punk’ suffix would be pretty obsolete otherwise and it is an implied function when computer hackers are stock characters in the genre. It is because of this that transformation becomes inevitable. The digital world and the ‘real’ world can only communicate through metamorphic intermediaries, at least in any way that is dramatically significant or that creates any plot conflict. Were they left alone, they would continue operating on their own, the real world ignorant of its surveillance and manipulation, the artificial world plodding and probing along with its plans.

The transformations of Neuromancer and The Matrix trilogy differ from classical cases of metamorphosis, however. Both Hayles and Clarke make reference to Hans Moravec’s Mind Children as an – extreme – example of the way the technological imaginary figures the evolution and future interaction between man and machine: showing us humans being able to download themselves onto a computer. Clarke ends his historical overview of metamorphic allegory with reference to Moravec and Calvino, returning to the concept of metamorphs as messengers, as agents of communication. He describes the process as being initially a solipsistic one – his insinuation being that while in the past we would expect the gods to transform us at their whim from above, contemporary and cybernetic metamorphic fictions transpose the relationship to a level field, in which we have more direct contact with the deities:

On the basis of contemporary scientific paradigms, daemonic metamorphoses may now be read as fables of cybernetics…In Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics and t zero, cybernetic reinscriptions of physical and biological systems determine an ultimate relinquishing of organic models, and thus the end of metamorphosis based on biological bodies.¹

In this last daemonic translation, humanity crosses over and into the medium of its own information sciences. One gives new birth to oneself from out of one’s head, as Athena had sprung from the mind of Zeus, or Sin from the lust of Satan. Entropy and ecstasy combine in a metamorphic allegory of spiritual release from the mother of living matter.²

Clarke’s envisioning of the body is becoming gradually more futile and echoes some of the concerns of Hayles’ conception of the posthuman body. According to Hayles, the posthumanist stance begins by recalling a mind/body division as a base, only to then unpeel itself, larvae-like, of the biological body so that it may thrive in a cybernetic environment. But its liberal humanist origins – with their prejudice against the body – are inescapable, no matter how reconfigured. The mind still has sovereignty even, or rather, especially, in cyberspace:

Although in many ways the posthuman reconstructs the liberal humanist subject, it thus shares with its predecessor an emphasis on cognition rather than embodiment [my emphasis]. William Gibson makes the point vividly in Neuromancer when the narrator characterizes the posthuman body as “data made flesh”.³

The discourse of cybernetic narrative is a discourse of virtuality. But Hayles’ implication, of course, is that this ‘reconstruction’ is only effective up to a point. As our hero-hackers demonstrate, all that matters is their mental manoeuvring through the metamorphic matrices they plug their brains into. It is significant that Gibson names his central protagonist in Neuromancer ‘Case’. The name is instantly evocative of a hollow receptacle and is a symbol for the way metamorphosis will continue to reassert itself throughout the narrative – mainly, as a kind of possession by a digital entity needing a host body. And on a more basic level, it reminds us how Case can only assert his identity by ‘jacking in’. The fact that Gibson’s physical description of Case is significantly nondescript fortifies this idea. We see this brought to the fore and amplified towards the end of the novel, as Case comes across parodic holograms of himself and his partners-in-crime, doubtlessly engineered by the devious Peter Riviera:

Here, it was as if Riviera…had been unable to find anything worthy of parody [my emphasis]. The figure that slouched there was a fair approximation of the one he glimpsed daily in mirrors. Thin, high-shouldered, a forgettable face beneath short dark hair. He needed a shave, but then he usually did.⁴

Case’s physicality is depicted as unremarkable because the physical body is foregrounded in Gibson’s world to make way for the mushrooming potentialities of the cybernetic revolution on the human brain. He is not an example of a Lockean tabula rasa – rather, he is a human of the post human age and that therefore he envisions – or is forced to envision – ‘the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born.’⁵ In my discussion, I would like to extend Hayles’ ‘prosthesis’ to virtuality, as, in these narratives, the act of plugging in constitutes a very real extension of the self and the mind. As Neo is warned in the first instalment of The Matrix, if you die in the virtual world, your brain dies in the real world too. According to Hayles,

the post human view configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the post human, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals…The post human subject is an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction.⁶

The body has become so passé in Neuromancer that hackers, known as ‘cowboys’, even cultivate a snobbery and resentment towards ‘the meat’. As Gibson narrates Case’s backstory, we discover that he had given in to a professional no-no among hackers, by stealing from his employers and was subsequently punished by having his nervous system damaged and his access to cyberspace – and, by extension, further job opportunities – revoked. The time he would spend in cyberspace is described with longing and nostalgia; in language that would be suitable to both an older man pining for youth and to a junkie in desperate need of a fix:

He’d operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix…The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective. For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he’d frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh [my emphasis]. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.⁷

The most striking image of this passage is, of course, the Biblical association of cyberspace to the Garden of Eden. The association is arguably developed further as the novel approaches its climax and we find Case trapped in an artificial paradise-cum-underworld constructed by Neuromancer, where he encounters the re-embodied consciousness of his ex-girlfriend Linda-Lee, murdered earlier in the novel:

There was a strength that ran in her, something he’d known in Night City and held there, been held by it, held for a while away from time and death, from the relentless Street that hunted them all. It was a place he’d known before; not everyone could take him there, and somehow he always managed to forget it. Something he’d found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew- he remembered – as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked [my emphasis].⁸

We can see that Gibson maintains a conservative stance on our relationship with technology, at least in this passage. Authenticity is to be found in the flesh, as crystallized by sexual union. Case’s ‘physical amnesia’ represents technology as dehumanising because it garbles and scrambles our most atavistic impulses.

Agent Smith memorably articulates a similar contempt of the flesh in the first instalment of The Matrix:

I hate this place. This zoo. This prison. This reality, whatever you want to call it, I can’t stand it any longer. It’s the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I’ve somehow been infected by it – it’s disgusting!⁹

Both Gibson and the Wachowski brothers therefore present artificial intelligence as being Puritanical, as being ‘cleaner’ than human beings in every way. This implication intensifies their position as our new deities. Gibson’s novel is far less ambitious in scope than the The Matrix trilogy as it reveals its world only through Case’s mission. There are no Dantean scenes of humans being harvested; Neuromancer is essentially a technologised detective-noir. However, the human authorities of Gibson’s world are just as concerned about artificial intelligence as we are made to be while watching The Matrix. When the Turing Police apprehend Case, one of the officers confirms that AI has replaced spiritual – and demonic – intermediaries:

“You are worse than a fool…You have no care for your species. For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible. And what would you be paid with? What would your price be, for aiding this thing to free itself and grow?”¹⁰

A significant metamorph that aids Case and his friends in their illicit manoeuvring is the ‘Dixie Flatline’, McCoy Pauley, the thrice-dead hacker-guru that has managed to download himself onto a piece of ROM. Here the notion of ‘braindeath’, of death through virtuality, is given a further twist, reminiscent of Moravec:

They’d all heard of Pauley, the redneck jockey from the ‘Lanta fringes, who’d survived braindeath behind black ice. The grapevine…had little to say about Pauley, other than that he’d done the impossible… “[t]he man was dead, flat down braindeath…”

“Boy,” the Flatline would tell him…”I’m like them huge fuckin’ lizards, you know? Had themself two goddamn brains, one in the head an’ one by the tailbone, kept the hind legs movin’. Hit that black stuff and ol’ tailbrain jus’ kept right on keepin’ on.” The cowboy elite in the Loser shunned Pauley out of some strange group anxiety, almost a superstition. McCoy Pauley, Lazarus of cyberspace…¹¹

The focus here is not only metamorphosis and transmigration but also resurrection. The idea that one can download their personality onto a digital self and resurrect several times over gives the body an almost parodic status – the digital is not only replacing it but it is doing one better over the biological original. The fact that McCoy Pauley (the name is possibly an ironic pun on ‘the real McCoy’) is an adept hacker (indeed, somewhat of a mentor-figure for Case) and a boon to Case’s mission strengthens the idea that in Gibson’s world, the only way to move forward is digitally. Hayles taps into this concern as well:

Hackers are not the only ones who believe that information wants to be free. The great dream and promise of information is that it can be free from the material constraints that govern the mortal world. Marvin Minsky precisely expressed this dream when, in a recent lecture, he suggested it will soon be possible to extract human memories from the brain and import them, intact and unchanged, to computer disks. The clear implication is that if we can become the information we have constructed, we can achieve effective immortality.¹²

Disembodied information is what propels the action of Neuromancer. Wintermute is a perfect example of the information-daemon. He parasitically invades the bodies of Armitage/Corto and ‘the Finn’ to set his plans of integration with Neuromancer in motion. Molly, Case’s partner on the mission and love interest, eventually discovers that ‘he uses real profiles as valves, gears himself down to communicate with [them]. Called it a template. Model of personality.’¹³

Now I am ready to show how the many metamorphoses of Agent Smith reveal him to be a composite of artificial intelligence entities presented in Neuromancer and the significance of these parallels. His obvious parallel is Wintermute, positioned as he is as the ‘villain’ of the piece. Another entity in the novel that recalls Smith would be the ‘Chinese virus’ that Case manages to deploy against the Turing safeguards to facilitate the merger between Wintermute and Neuromancer. Like Smith, the virus is a catalyst for a climactic union between systems. Gibson describes it as ‘[p]olychrome shadow, countless translucent layers shifting and recombining. Protean, enormous, it towered above them, blotting out the void [my emphasis].’¹⁴

The adjective ‘protean’ is significant here, particularly when the link with Agent Smith is being made. He infects himself over Matrix through metamorphosis and replication with alarming speed and proficiency. He also manages to burrow his way into Zion as he takes over the body of Nebuchadnezzar crewmember Bane. But it is his absorption of the Oracle that ultimately allows him access to the Matrix’s ‘Core Network’ through which he begins to assimilate every single human being jacked into it. The situation of human beings being harvested by the Matrix is now made worse by the fact that each individual has become a Smith clone. Clarke’s description of the metamorphic body as being essentially abject is useful here. Because of its freedom from a stable organism, like Smith,

the metamorph can personify the wanderings of signifiers, the change of meanings under metamorphic processes, the wandering of the components of drives under repression, the metempsychoses of the departed soul, the circulation of commodities, and the literal exile of materially displaced persons.¹⁵

Clarke is basically describing the aforementioned protean possibilities of the metamorphic body. However, there is a price to pay for this heterogeneity. We are reminded that

[a] metamorphosis determines at once a monstrous exhibition and a total concealment of the self. The metamorph’s ambivalence between spectacular display and complete effacement plays off the psychology of shame. Shame is to metamorphosis what melancholy is to Baroque allegory: the affective keynote. Metamorphic fictions are often studies of inappropriateness and misappropriation, embarrassment and theft, because the trope of metamorphosis is particularly measured to feelings of shame produced by “misreading”¹⁶

The abjection of the human body can be seen clearly in the utterly expendable way metamorphs-to-be are presented in the Matrix: all of them are extras, fodder for Smith: the grocery-carrying woman appearing right before Reloaded’s ‘burly brawl’, the unfortunate car and truck occupants caught up in the frantic highway sequence in the same film and a host of other innocent bystanders (the word has never seemed more ominous) littered across the trilogy. But it is also Smith himself who is rendered abject.

He exposes himself to the metamorph’s shame because he does not simply remain a relatively stable source ala Wintermute, who only possesses other bodies temporarily. Through his replication, he effectively ‘lowers’ himself to a kind of physicality. Neither is he, nor ever was, an important enough program to justify a position comparable to the gods that command transformations in the Greek pantheon as represented by Ovid.

As I have already mentioned, he is no longer the central stand-in for the Matrix because throughout the sequels we are introduced to programs of a much higher ‘ranking’ than Smith. This foregrounding of Smith therefore reveals him to be just a cog in a very large and intricate machine. But more importantly, it has to be noted that even as Smith’s viral growth reaches dangerous levels, he remains little more than a petulant brat throwing a giant hissy fit – and the Matrix quickly manages to reprimand him and shift his function. The only thing his self-imposed exile and proliferation manages to accomplish, in the end, is to make him a suitable catalyst for the execution of the Oracle’s ‘balance’ (or ‘unbalance’) – the truce between man and machine that Neo manages to bring about after Smith is destroyed and he is subsumed into the Matrix: a final metamorphosis that halts the need for any further metamorphic happenings in the narrative; in a digitised retelling of the Adonis/Baldur/Christ rejuvenation myth.

Smith loses his initial function, his quotidian duty to the Matrix as an agent by becoming a power-hungry virus, only to then be relegated to the role of a regulating mechanism. In his comical comeuppance, he becomes a victim of the very abjection his protean skills of metamorphosis have inflicted: he is useless, malignant and easily defeated (in that order).

The ‘affective keynote’ is also stuck in Neuromancer through Armitage/Corto’s fragmented and further fragmenting selves, as caused by Wintermute. The disintegration is a harrowing one because it shows how a virtual possession leads to a metamorphosis that is not only physically abject but also psychologically shattering. And after that husk is hollowed out, Wintermute methodically closes in on ‘the Finn’.

The body is also made abject by cybernetic sexual exploitation, through Molly’s (or her projection, rather) strange involvement in Riviera’s holographic show. She is conjured up by Riviera onto the stage while her physical body watches:

Riviera was in the bed now, naked…Then the torso formed, as Riviera caressed it into being [my emphasis], white, headless, and perfect, sheened with the faintest gloss of sweat. Molly’s body…But it wasn’t Molly; it was Molly as Riviera imagined her. The breasts were wrong, the nipples larger, too dark. Riviera and the limbless torso writhed together on the bed, crawled over by the hands with their bright nails…Case had seen the medium before; when he’d been a teenager in the Sprawl, they’d called it, “dreaming real.” He remembered thin Puerto Ricans under East Side streetlights, dreaming real to the quick beat of a salsa, dreamgirls shuddering and turning, the onlookers clapping in time. But that had needed a van full of gear and a clumsy trode helmet. What Riviera dreamed, you got.¹⁷

In a world where the body is information and information can be cheaply bought, the cybernetic body becomes amenable even to prostitution. In fact, Molly later reveals that she was embroiled into that world in the hope of making some extra cash by leaving a template of herself for clients to use. She was assured that she would feel nothing. But as she describes the arrangement to Case, she shows how glitches began to appear:

“I wasn’t conscious. It’s like cyberspace, but blank…You can see yourself orgasm, it’s like a little nova right out on the rim of space. But I was starting to remember. Like dreams, you know. And they didn’t tell me. They switched the software and started renting to specialty markets.”¹⁸

Through this ghostly metamorphosis into cyberspace, Gibson shows a genuine fragmentation of the self; as Molly quite literally loses track of where her ‘selves’ are and how they are being exploited. This theft and appropriation of physical characteristics – both by Riviera and the agents prostituting Molly away – is a horrific depiction of humanity gradually losing its identity and subsuming itself into a shapeless sea of digital code.

In both Neuromancer and The Matrix, we are made to experience technological progress as a volatile terrain in which humans and technology are segregated, but significantly in touch. As contemporary parables of the man/God relationship they tap into some of our most basic fears of being rendered abject and insignificant. It is through the genre convention of hackers that the narratives set into motion their ideas on how we are positioned and foregrounded in a world that initially existed only to serve us, but has managed to worm its way into a position of supremacy with curiously organic motion. The battleground is also a playing field, where a plethora of characters are allowed to show us a glimpse of this initially Manicheist division. Virtuality is what makes this game possible. Its condition is that we forfeit our bodies and surrender ourselves into information.

Endnotes

1 Clarke, Bruce, Allegories of Writing: The Subject of Metamorphosis (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), p.49.

2 Ibid., p. 51.

3 Hayles, Katherine, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago and London: The University of                                Chicago Press, 1999), p. 5.

4 Gibson, William, Neuromancer (London: Voyager/Harper Collins, 1995), p. 250.

5 Hayles, p.3.

6 Ibid., 3.

7 Gibson, William, Neuromancer (London: Voyager/Harper Collins, 1995), p. 11-12.

8 Ibid., pp. 284-5.

9 The Matrix. Dir. Larry Wachowski and Andy Wachowski. Warner Bros Pictures. 1999.

10 Gibson, p. 193.

11 Ibid., p. 98.

12 Hayles, p. 13.

13 Gibson, p. 248.

14 Ibid., p. 200.

15 Clarke, p. 57.

16 Ibid., p. 63.

17 Gibson, pp. 167-9.

18 Ibid., pp. 177-8.

References

Clarke, Bruce, Allegories of Writing: The Subject of Metamorphosis (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995)

Gibson, William, Neuromancer (London: Voyager/Harper Collins, 1995)

Hayles, Katherine, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999)

The Matrix. Dir. Larry Wachowski and Andy Wachowski. Warner Bros Pictures. 1999

The Matrix Reloaded. Larry Wachowski and Andy Wachowski. Warner Bros Pictures. 2003

The Matrix Revolutions. Larry Wachowski and Andy Wachowski. Warner Bros Pictures. 2003

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