Transcendence Through Detournement in William Gibson’s Neuromancer

In Neuromancer, William Gibson uses computers as a metaphor for human memory and personality. He is concerned with how easily people can change themselves, and by what methods. Memory is represented as solid traces left behind by experience, a kind of programming. For most of Gibson’s characters, the inability to overcome this programming, to transcend the self, leads to a desire for self-destruction or dissolution. They seek to escape their bodies, their pasts, or their eventual deaths, and technology is the method of choice. Most often, this involves technological detournement: appropriating tools and putting them to uses for which they were not originally intended. The technological transcendence of human limits, seen in the context of the cyberpunk movement, is a liberating, evolutionary force, although its results often seem monstrous. In Gibson’s work, the human need for self-transcendence is itself detourned, co-opted by governments and corporations, in order to maintain the status quo. Gibson’s creative method can be seen as a kind of literary detournement, a prose-collage of semiotic elements from every branch of the cultural stream. This technique liberates him from his own creative difficulties and the strictures of the SF genre. (GG)