The Re/Shaping of the Posthuman, Cyberspace, and Histories in William Gibson’s Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties

• Main Authors: Hui-chun Li, 李蕙君
• Other Authors: Rudolphus Teeuwen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/9huen2

碩士 === 國立中山大學 === 外國語文學系研究所 === 96 === Abstract: This thesis aims to explore how utopian desires re/shape the posthuman, cyberspace and histories by means of information technologies in William Gibson’s Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties, which construct a fragmented but subversive power by representing the world in a utopian text that allows the free play of ideology. Gibson uses utopian imagination to cobble together a near future that reflects his concern with information technologies and media over contemporary society. Utopian imaginations on the one hand open up possibilities and transform fixed ideas; on the other, utopian imaginations are easily turned into utopian desires that are subject to manipulation if utopian designers want to sell. I intend to discover how desires to realize a utopia (body, space, and history), which is the ultimate goal of utopian program, are being manipulated by utopian designers. I will mainly adapt and blend Katherine Hayles’s notion of the posthuman perspectives to challenge human possibilities, Donna Haraway’s notion of the cyborg as a blasphemy to Western traditions, Louis Marin’s Disneyland analysis as an apparatus to examine utopic expressions in William Gibson’s textual constructions of utopias, and Walter Benjamin’s notions of material historiography and history’s messianic power in tracing individual memories under a capitalist contextualized History. In Chapter One, I will argue that Idoru as well as Idoru metamorphosize from a dialectical structure into an informational pattern-random structure, from a commodity into a posthuman subjectivity. I will adopt Katherine Hayles’s concept of information narratives in explaining the re/shaping of Rei’s body and her concept of the posthuman to explicate the struggle between the posthuman and the transhuman. In Chapter Two I will argue that cyberspace serves as a utopia that brings forth the desire to transcend the flesh. This utopian desire is a transgressive discourse that breaks up the totality of a closed system. Moreover, cyberspace exposes the feedback looping of the discourses of capitalism and anti-capitalism. Respectively, by the representation of virtual Venice and the Walled City, these two utopias write proposals that project discourses of pleasure and criticism for achieving their programs. I will adopt Donna Haraway’s cyborg ontology in explaining cyberspace as a transgressive discourse and Louis Marin’s Disneyland analysis as an apparatus of utopic expressions and the limits of utopia. Next, in Chapter Three, I shall expose how Harwood the capitalist manipulates the world to fit into his utopian proposal: modernization of the city as a manifestation of a utopia by means of cyberspace as a network that connects people globally. To contravene Harwood, Idoru, Laney and the Walled City denizens collaborate to checkmate Harwood’s king. I will elaborate on the interactions between the universal history and the individual histories based on Walter Benjamin’s concept of history.