Biography
Dr. Carmen Méndez García is Associate Professor of American Literature at the Department of English and American Literature, Complutense University, Madrid (Spain). She was a visiting scholar at Harvard University in 2001 and 2002, and a participant in the 2010 Study of the United States Institute on Contemporary American Literature, funded by the Spanish Fulbright program and the US Department of State. Current research and teaching interests include 20th and 21st century US literature, postmodernism and contemporary fiction, the counterculture in the US, spatial studies, gender studies, and minority studies (especially Chicana studies). She is a participant in the research projects “Troubling Houses: Dwellings, Materiality, and the Self in American Literature” and “Pensamiento y representación literaria y artística digital ante la crisis de Europa y el Mediterráneo,” and in a research group dealing with Women’s Studies in English and American literature at Complutense University.  She led the research for the group “Space, Gender and Identity in US Literature and Visual Arts: A Transatlantic Approach” (Franklin Institute-UAH), and she is a participant in a research group dealing with Women’s Studies in English and American literature at Complutense University. She is the coordinator of the Master in North American Studies at Universidad Complutense de Madrid-UAH. She is the editor for Humanities for REDEN, Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos (Instituto Franklin-UAH). She was a member of the International Committee of the American Studies Association (ASA) from 2012-15. She was an Associate Dean for Student Affairs (2010-2014) and the managing editor of Atlantis, Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies (2009-2012). For a detailed and up-to-date list of publications and research, see full profile at Academia.edu. 

“The (Cyber) Center Cannot Hold”: Futures, Bodies and Minds in William Gibson’s The Peripheral

In The Peripheral (2014), William Gibson goes back to the space of the über-modern city, in what has been considered a recent move “from a predictive style of science fiction to contemporary fiction” (Griffith, 44). Gibson emphasizes the connection between the present and imagined futures, stating that “[w]ithout a sense of how weird the present is—how potentially weird the present is—it became impossible for me to judge how much weirder I should try to make an imagined future” (Dayal).

This move seems to contradict Gibson’s adscription to cyberpunk, a genre which carries with it a “bleak perception of the possibility of agency” (Wilson, 91). I would like to argue, however, that Gibson is still writing within the genre, and that the potential for connection between privileged and under-privileged individuals through technology is at the core of Gibson’s novel. While Gibson does use his already typical “sentimental ending” (Elias), The Peripheralalso makes a political gesture by allowing agency to the disfranchised so they can change their own destinies.

The novel is set in two different future times, the first of which is the second’s past. In the later one, early 22nd century London is an extreme late-capitalist society. In the second future, we find “a more fully corrupt, third-worlded version of [rural] contemporary America” in the 2030s (“William Gibson”). Bodies are a burden, with impoverished veterans suffering constant neural pain from malfunctioning haptic implants. A singularity allows both timelines to interact, though not reciprocally: the 2100s future can talk to, but not physically manipulate, the past; while inhabitants of the 2030s, projecting their minds into peripherals, can physically interact with the future. This exchange of bodies and minds promises to be of benefit to both: the future can gather information and skills from the past, while peripherals allow veterans the exhilarating opportunity of escaping their bodies.

Gibson has analyzed the Cartesian divide between body and mind in many of his texts. The ambivalence of cyberpunk as a genre towards the body, and Gibson’s rejection of the body as “dead meat” in Neuromancer, seems to unambiguously celebrate the “bodiless exultation of cyberspace” (12). In The Peripheral, the bodies of veterans have become a burden due the failed use of technology: maimed by war, the government still “owns” their bodies by having left invasive technology in them. The relationship people in the future have with their bodies is radically different: bodies are used as “art,” modified through accumulations and excess of technology. Artificial bodies are also commodified instruments for protection: peripherals can be operated remotely, providing total safety to those who can afford to own or rent them.

The use of bodies in The Peripheral, however, ultimately serves each character’s original communities. The disabled characters in The Peripheral whose minds are projected into other bodies experience thrilling liberation from their constricting “meat” into limitless athletic shells. In exchange, people in the future can use minds from the past. The disadvantaged people from the past enter this pact knowingly and expecting something in return: the initial reward is money, but in the end they are also given agency.

Even if the “peripheral” in the title makes reference to the cyborg avatars, events in the novel suggests that the 22nd century future could be analyzed as the center holding power and agency, with the 21st century future as the margin, the periphery. The periphery is given access to technology insofar it serves the center’s interests, and, as Gibson has noted, in The Peripheral the past is “third-worlded” for the profit of First-World cities (“William Gibson”). Amy J. Elias signals that this relationship could be seen as a replication of “the Colonialism that gave First-World Nations their early-modern economic hegemony . . . now located not only in space but in time” (Elias). However, while the “outsourcing” of technology to the peripheries is a reality in our world, there are ways in which the relationship between center and margins is portrayed as positive in The Peripheral.

In the novel the “other” subjects pose no physical risk, i.e. there is no danger of their uprising against the “center,” since they can only interact with the future if the future allows use of the technology. Most importantly, the relationship of center and periphery is one not of exploitation, but of collaboration, as the periphery is given notable agency and a reward, in opposition to traditional constructions of center/periphery relations. In The Peripheral, giving power to people in the past is also a selfless act, since, due to time-travelling paradoxes based on forking paths, changes in the past will not affect the future in the book.

Gibson understands that technology itself is neutral, and it is use that makes it destructive or “a universal tool for countering hegemonic power structures” (Moorwood 178). Gibson has expressed his “alarm at the ending . . . [where] a situation is set up such that the fate of the world literally rests on the goodwill of a very few people who can easily be corrupted by the power they yield” (Elias). Since both futures are “caught on singularities,” Elias sides with Gibson as potential for improvement seems not to depend on “collective action or democratic representation,” pointing out the tension between Gibson’s “rather old-fashioned humanist ethics—for which the success of social structures depends upon private, ethical decisions by self-determining individuals—and his cyberpunk vision, which implicitly asserts that human ethics is irrelevant in a world of capital” (Elias).

I however would like to emphasize the positivity of the novel’s ending, focusing not on the lack of systemic changes, but on how change may start with individuals with agency to implement incremental changes. The book emphasizes a deep empathic connection of both humanities motivating the mutual understanding of both futures, following the idea of kinship as not merely biological, but constituted by “a sense of relatedness, mutual responsibility, and collaborative creativity, all growing out of a presumption of shared origins” (Gutiérrez-Jones, 72). Gutiérrez-Jones recovers ideas by Haraway, Hayles, and Butler to talk about the performativity of kinship, which Butler identifies as a “shared responsibility . . . [a] coalition, and shared performance, which generates significant creative potential” (73). In The Peripheral, “giving” the past a better future is as a reflection of this re-imagined notion of kinship in the time (dis)continuum, and thus the ending can be analyzed as a powerful deconstruction of traditional center/periphery configurations.

By questioning early models of the periphery as “used” by the center, and by providing said periphery with technology holding the promise for a better future, Gibson moves in The Peripheral towards utopian optimism. I find this to be in line with Jameson’s assertion that literature “can serve as a registering apparatus for historical transformations we cannot otherwise empirically intuit” (Jameson, 312). In The Peripheral, those on the margins find their bodily suffering paradoxically reduced through technologies of virtual labor, while having the possibility of a better future by being given agency by the center. This is a testament to how non-realistic literature, such as the cyberpunk mode Gibson uses, can be political, allowing us to imagine new configurations of kinship as the first step in systemic changes beyond traditional models of center v. periphery.

References

Discord Discussion

This discussion has been copied from the Discord server, names have been reduced to first name, discussion threads have been grouped and edited for better readability.

Carmen: Hi, everyone! Looking forward to answering your questions this afternoon/evening/morning – about bodies and peripheries in William Gibson’s, you guessed right, The Peripheral

Anna: Hi Carmen, thanks so much for your paper (and hope you don’t mind me getting a jump on the Q&A, trying to fit everything in!). I like what you did with the centre vs periphery, it really complicates the relationship between the main timeline and the stub in the novel. I suppose my question is about the ending. You read the ending as positive, and certainly I agree with you that there is positivity on the political level as the future for the stub looks much rosier after the encounter with Wilf et al than it did before. However, I struggled with the ending on the level of the individual characters – it just seemed a bit too perfect to me that they kind of walk off into the sunset in heterosexual pairings, and I thought it was weirdly, overly optimistic. I have a similar feeling about the ending of Agency although there the political element is way too rosy imo too!

Lars: I really have the problem that in both books, we are fine with the colonial intervention from the future, in the first stub even pushing a president and manipulating the power dynamics, in the second the AI as the a technocratic deus ex machina (literally) … it seem overtly optimistic of the status quo of the Klept

Anna: that’s it – I feel like in Gibson’s older work we’d have the lone guy caught in the middle of all of these forces and trying to have some ‘agency’ in the middle of it all – but now things are dispersed between multiple characters (better and more interesting in many ways) but we don’t have that sense of struggle, rather just a sense of optimism that the shady forces with the best intentions will win out. And the ‘I love Hillary’ stuff at the end of Agency was downright weird, but to such an extent that it makes me wonder if I’m missing something, can’t be expected to take it 100% seriously?

Lars: I think that is just Gibson being so shocked by Trump that he had to overcorrect

Anna: That was definitely my first instinct too, it’s sheer fantasy fulfillment.

Alexander: It does seem like Gibson in a continual process of deconstructing his own visions in an effort to find a sentimental conclusion. His twitter presence certain indicates a less radical image of the writer than I’d imagined when I read his books many years ago!

Anna: One thing that made me question my first reading was this interview where he seems to imply that if you don’t ‘get’ his ending you’re just not paying attention.

Alexander: thank you! Reading now. It’s fascinating to me that Gibson had to change/re-orient at least two of his books in response to the immediate present, including one that featured time travel!

Carmen: Thank you for your comment, Anna! I totally agree with your comment, and didn’t have the time to address that in my paper, but I think it’s part of Gibson’s “neat endings,” to kind of “send” every character who is not a villain on their happy, often coupled, ways. That these ways are heterosexual is also very problematic. There was a similar discussion yesterday on this in Synners, in María’s paper. I guess it’s part of what we call “classic” cyberpunk that Gibson is doing this… And of course it’s quite not up to date with our reality. Totally agree too with the political element in Agency, which I found not only rosy but really really problematic (“soft” neoliberalism is good for you, or something to that effect)
Oh, I just jumped into answering @Anna McFarlane’s first comment without seeing the answers! Yes, I think we’re all in agreement here. Rosy, sentimental endings, a little too neat, and I agree to as the ending of Agency MAYBE being connected to Trump’s victory. It is my understanding that he already had that book in the works before the election and I wonder how much was changed/rerouted after election night…

Anna: Thanks Carmen, glad it’s not just me! And thanks for mentioning the Synners chat, I’ll go and catch up with that now. I think with The Peripheral it was also the promise of the babies to follow from the heterosexual pairings (I can’t remember if one of the characters is actually pregnant, but the possibility is certainly implied) and I feel like in the context of the novel’s interest in climate change this is an interesting and potentially problematic way of framing that positivity. I’m thinking of a critique like Rebekah Sheldon’s book Child Through Time on reproductive futurism…. but that’s maybe getting a bit too nitty-gritty, just some things that have been playing on my mind recently.

Carmen: I had not made that connection, but yes, I think that “children are the future” positivity is a little weird in the context of a book partly about climate change. If the character is pregnant at the end of the novel (and yes, I think there’s that intimation) there is again the issue of normative heterosexual reproduction, which is being challenged in other cyberpunk texts in much more interesting ways, I think. I do think that Gibson is definitely more interested in the political (and, even so, he’s often not quite as political as I would want him to be in his books) than in race/gender issues.
@Alexander: I think the present is catching up with his imagined futures indeed! It also took him a while to digest Trump’s victory, I think. Now that I think about it, the stub in Agency is a book about the 2016 election as it did look it was going to be to most people, while the stub in The Peripheral seems to be a post-Trump world, ready for the Jackpot apocalypse. Not that political victories of any kind of candidate is mentioned in The Peripheral, but it “feels” that way to me (impoverished communities, climate change running amok, etc.)

Alexander: I think part of what is disappointing about Gibson’s myopia regarding race and gender is his intensity of focus on politics of the current moment as if the American political system was somehow going to magically ‘fix’ the global catastrophe, and not on the concurrent societal shifts regarding notions of the human experience

Anna: do you have any recommendations for other cyberpunk texts that challenge that heteronormativity/reproduction?

Carmen: Graham suggested Trouble and Her Friends yesterday in a similar discussion, which I haven’t read but seems to be up that alley

Esko: I could recommend Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous and Tim Maughan’s Infinite Detail as possibilities.

Carmen: I liked Moxyland, by Lauren Beukes. I think it does deal with a lot of these issues. Oh, and Autonomous has been on my kindle for a while. I’ll move it up the list!

Lars: I second Trouble, Autonomous… if you move away from cyberpunk a bit Ann Leckie’s stories are interesting there too

Carmen: They are trying to bill Cyberpunk 2077 as non-heteronormative so far, I think, with all that insistence on how you can “customize” your character even down to detailed genitalia, but I don’t have a lot of high hopes for the game. I think it will go all back to classic cyberpunk myopia, as Pawel was discussing yesterday

Alexander: I strongly suspect that all the detailed genitalia in the world (though I believe it’s actually weirdly disparate with two penis options and one vulva? The symbolism for lack of choice there seems almost comical) couldn’t undo the generically masculine videogame coding of Cyberpunk 2077

Carmen: Exactly. It will make for a little bit of twitter talk for a few days (kind of like the “bouncy balls” physics in RDD2), but I am not expecting much…

Adam: Hi Carmen! I really enjoyed your talk, I read Peripheral a while back and didn’t really digest it that much at the time, so your analysis is really enjoyable. As a small, side question, I wonder what you made of the military context of Peripheral, particularly with regard to the recovering ex-soldiers that are entering these ‘peripherals’?

Carmen: I thought Gibson was mostly criticizing the government’s use/ownership of people’s bodies, and on a personal level, I agree with that. Now, the part where the veterans enter the bodies to feel exhilarated by being able to create MORE violence is slightly problematic. I think it could be connected to Pawel’s talk yesterday about masculinity. Though I don’t think Gibson is quite as invested in hypermasculinity as I think Morgan is, I think there is still that association of violence-masculinity that’s a little weird. I know that the razorgirl stereotype (which he seems not to use much in The Peripheral, good!) also uses violence, but I think that’s always portrayed in Gibson as “cool” and what makes her “one of the boys.”
It is like “the military is bad because they still own our bodies, these haptic tatoos hurt” but then they are so happy that they have these amazing technobodies that they can inhabit, so they can be violent and apply their military training. That’s most definitely food for thought, thank you, Adam!

Adam: There’s definitely something as well in the way the future is framed as a Video Game in that way too. I wonder if that plays into this expected violence too.

Carmen: You mean in The Peripheral? Yes, I thought that was interesting though maybe just a little clichéd.

Esko: I realize we’re a bit early for your Q&A session Carmen, but I would like to challenge the reading of the ending you do in the presentation. I have an article from 2016 (and I obviously think everyone should cite me:) where I read the ending as somewhat dystopian despite the domesticity. The main reason is that the events of the novel do not engender freedom from oppression at large and Flynne’s arc – getting a crapton of money – might actually just make her into just another of “the klept” or if not that, just more privileged within the oppressive system of her time (I’m not sure Agency provides answers for this either). And the time-travel-communication and peripheral technologies are also not shown to be enough to divert the jackpot – it still looms in Flynne et al’s future.

Carmen: Will read this carefully, thanks! I will have a better answer when I’ve read your paper, of course. I did mention in passing in the presentation (oh the word limit!) that there are limits to how “subversive” it is that the center is helping the periphery, since it is not “dangerous” for them, i.e. it will not affect them as they have now become a different future from Flynne’s and co.’s.

Jiré: Thank you for this super interesting paper! — „This is a testament to how non-realistic literature, such as the cyberpunk mode Gibson uses, can be political, allowing us to imagine new configurations of kinship as the first step in systemic changes beyond traditional models of center v. periphery.“ — Totally agreed. Then again, this is the case for non-realistic or utopian fiction for hundred of years – what would you say is special about Cyberpunk or Gibsons work in this context?

Carmen: I would say that we tend to think of Cyberpunk as really dark and void of hope, though that is more of a generalized cultural reading which does not hold when compared to most of the works we would consider to belong in the genre. And I think much of our cultural understanding of cyberpunk comes from just a bunch of big works and names. I love how this conference is exposing me to so many examples of products moving away from this “hopeless” cyberpunk

Jiré: Thank you very much for this answer!

Alexander: I found Sasha’s upcoming talk here really zapped me into considering cyberpunk beyond the standard ‘hopelessness’. Their points on ‘critical dystopia’ have given me plenty of new points of reference

Carmen: Also, someone was mentioning in another channel “solarpunk”, which seems to be connected to “hopepunk”. It did look like something to explore! It was in the small talk and kipple channel, at the beginning of day 1 (yesterday). I can’t believe we’re starting now and I’ve had so many interesting comments already! This is the best conference ever.

Steven: Hi, Carmen – thanks for a great paper. Your framing in center/periphery terms helps me get at something that has bothered me in both The Peripheral and Agency. Gibson can claim that he isn’t being overly optimistic because the main timeline still has the Jackpot and the subsequent rule by the Klept. So the stubs are the places where better alternatives play out, without affecting the central timeline. This gives an interesting spin to the way you cite Jameson and utlpianism in the final paragraph of your paper. It is sort of like, there are wishful reforms (e.g. in the Hillary plus high tech plotline of the stub in Agency, or Flynn’s world in The Peripheral), but not for us (since we still belong to the non-interfered-with central timeline).

Carmen: You made it sound smarter but yes, that’s it. It is also interesting (and I think Esko’s paper, which I plan to read tonight, may develop this a little further), that the future is being “generous”, but it is also easier for them to be generous than if the actions of the stub were to somehow alter their future for the bad.

Steven: yes, that makes sense. Gibson wants to remedy wrongs, but he rejects the radicalism that says that the only real way to remedy wrongs is to shake up normative mainstream arrangements more than he is willing to do

Carmen: yes, that makes sense. Gibson wants to remedy wrongs, but he rejects the radicalism that says that the only real way to remedy wrongs is to shake up normative mainstream arrangements more than he is willing to do
I also thinks that sometimes he thinks he’s shaking up a little more than he really is. I have only read Agency once but was quite disappointed by the “good neoliberalism” will save us in the end. I do think that it was also slightly less interesting than The Peripheral, but I find this to be the truth in most of his trilogies: he builds this reallly interesting world/ideas in the first book, then tries to develop them a little further in other books set in that same “world”, and often it doesn’t really add that much…

Steven: This may be too mean, but I am tempted to say that Gibson is offering us utopia in a sandbox (in the computer meaning of the term) as opposed to the dystopianism of the world’s actual operating system

Pawel: Same here – Agency has tons of great writing (Gibson is Gibson, after all) but the whole Elon Musk-like angle seemed so glib to me.
The emergence of autonomous AI was also simplistic – deus ex machina that is so anthropocentric.

Carmen: it was supposed to be mind-blowing but… not so much

Pawel: I know she’s based on that soldier/operative but this is a far cry from the new AI at the end of NR talking to its own kind in Alpha Centauri.
Like Steve said, the neoliberal version of AI based on a soldier fighting neoliberal wars for the U.S. that is being helped by a good Silicon Valley billionaire.

Anna: What I DID like about that AI is its cyborg nature, based partly on that real personality, and with the voice to match (for some of the novel anyway) – I thought it started to draw attention to how humans code themselves into their AIs, which speaks to current issues e.g. bias in algorithmic systems.

Pawel: Sure – a middle road between true AIs and augmented humans?

Carmen: What I am going to say is totally unfair, and I am aware of it, but sometimes I wish Gibson had evolved a little more in his ideas/interests. I, of course, still think that he speaks to me politically (even if not perfectly), but issues of race/gender are really not there, no matter how much you try to find them. And some other things seem clichéd answers that were mindblowing in the 80s but maybe not so much now.
@Anna: Ok, that’s REALLY interesting. Will have to think about that some more!

Anna: I think he does try with the race issue sometimes – just been rereading Count Zero and there is an effort to map a black diaspora into cyberspace there, and I think Agency is somewhat attempting to build on that…. but I think his discomfort with writing the black experience gets in the way (hence Eunice’s voice goes AWOL for most of the book).

Carmen: @Pawel: I think Gibson is still very much a humanist, not a transhumanist or posthumanist. That may be another one of the ways in which his fiction (while we may love it) seems to be a little out of touch with certain aspects of reality.
@Anna: Haven’t read Count Zero in ages… Will have to re-read at some point! Yes, Eunice is a good example of what you are mentioning. It does look like Gibson prefers to “write” Verity

Paul: I’m with Esko on Team Actually-The-Peripheral’s-Ending-Read-As-Quite-Dystopic-To-Me, I think… and I seem to have taken a glummer view of Agency than most, too (though I’ve not had time to write about it, and thus couldn’t say clearly why that might be… though I’ll note that it’s the middle book of a Gibson trilogy, and they always tend to be the baggy, somewhat Hollywoodish one of the three, IMO). But to return to your excellent paper, Carmen: I guess I want to ask whether there’s something more dialectical going on with the periphery/centre relationship than the linear progression you’re suggesting? I think the other half of the synthesis comes from the other parsing of the word “peripheral”, as in “an accessory, usually for a technical device” (which I played around with in my LARB review back when the book was released). Certainly there is some agency granted to the suffering bodies of the stub’s veterans, but they’re in turn being used as accessories to the machinations of the future timeline — and the reasons for that are less than totally benign, as events in Agency seem to confirm…

Carmen: Thank you for this! Yeah, I did not develop the peripheral as technical device part much here. I want to re-read your LARB review again: read it when the book came out but should re-read it. I think there’s something interesting going on having to do with the biological body as center v. the “enhancements” as periphery, or maybe challenging that.

Carmen: This was really fantastic, people! So much food for thought. I’ll stick around for the rest of the afternoon/evening and be contributing in the other channels (and keeping an eye on this one for any other comments). But I would dare say this has been one of the coolest experiences I’ve ever had in a conference. Thank you all for your input!!!

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