Abstract

Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson is a central text in the cyberpunk genre. This article analyzes how, in this book, computing is a metaphor used to represent some characteristics of the psyche and also a social organization not subject to review by a single person. Memory is individual, embodied, and changes continuously. Its transposition in external media has the price of a symbolic death for the subject. At the same time the impersonality of the social machines becomes the object of a psychological projection by the individual, and takes on anthropomorphic forms. The “Matrix” is the space of “virtual” relationships (in the sense of computing). Through simulative processes that take place in real time, it’s possible to make an illusory fusion of the subject with the social body which I, however, linked to a repression of the deeper drives, affective and individual experience. The story ends when the protagonist becomes able to distinguish between external reality and psychic life.

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