The Aleph


 * "Jacked In. ... Fairytale, he thought, looking up at the mansion's broad stone brow, the leaded diamond panes; like some vid he'd seen when he was little. Were there really people who lived in places like this? But it's not a place, he reminded himself, it only feels like it is. (Mona Lisa Overdrive, 180)


 * From the moment we see the words "fairytale" we are reminded in the Aleph's embodiment of the fantastic. Contrasting heavily with where the Aleph and Slick Henry are (a toxic wasteland called "The solitude") the environment of the Aleph is lush, sophisticated, groomed, and suggestive of wealth. In a word, the environment of the Aleph is other. Other, in the sense that it visually contrasts the with the real world, and other in the sense that it is not real world.

What is the importance of the opulence of the construct that Slick Henry jacks into? For one thing, it seems to correspond to Bobby Newmark's handle "The Count." For Slick Henry, not knowing much about the body he has been taking care out in the desert, save that nickname, the construct must represent a validation of Newmarks credentials. At least for a few fleeting moments, where in Gibson's prose one can discern Slick Henry's sense of awe. But each description of his awe connects the construct of the Aleph not to some place, object, or experience in reality, but to imagined settings or other spaces of mediation. Henry calls the construct a "fairytale" and it reminds him "of some vid he saw when he was a kid." Both of these descriptions suggest that at best, the Aleph is an immersive fiction, but certainly not an enveloping reality. When he asks reflexively "Were there people who really lived in places like this?" a potent double meaning is suggested. On the one hand, the question is a comment on the visual reality and the overwhelming ficitiousness (in the sense that it might be from a TV show) of the space. On the other hand, Slick Henry is asking how it is that people (specificall Bobby Newmark) could like within such a fiction.

When Slick Henry reminds himself that the visual fiction of the Aleph is "not a place," he invites the reader to re-consider the simulacra of space for something else. Suggestively, the phrase "not a place" corresponds to the greek translation for the word "utopia," so it would seem tha Slick Henry is tacitly comparing the immersive fiction of the Aleph for Thomas More's imagined realm of alternative politics. This statement also demonstrates Slick Henry's unwillingness to let the fiction of the Aleph dissolve his understanding of it. Having been introduced to the Aleph by recognizing it as a large, biosoft chip, Slick resists ignorning that physical fact for the suggestion that 'inside' of the Aleph a large space is contained. In a way, Slick's comment is really a critique of cyberspace and mediated environments in general. It threatens their status as places by grounding them in a hard physicality which they aspire to escape. But if this is true, why does Slick then add to his comment that the Aleph is "not a place," "it only feels like it is." In Neuromancer the construct of "Dixie Flatline" said just the opposite, that there's to feel in cyberspace. So either the Aleph possesses a more advanced stimulus of human perception or Slick is is articulating the convincing-ness of the visual world. Importantly he uses the comparative "like" in the sentence, suggesting that even the feeling of reality in the aleph is emulative of primary reality. Nevertheless, this utterance contains a great deal of implications for a critical understanding of the Aleph.

"You, uh, hang out with her? In here?" " She hates my guts. See I stole it, I stole her soulcatcher..." (229).
 * "Dead girl" Bobby said. "You saw her construct. Blew her family fortune to build this thing."

A lot of information comes quickly in Gibson. Just like that, one recognizes a specter as 3Jane Tessier-Ashpool, there when Case hacked the head in Villa Straylight. There when the mythical "change" took place, the same change that Bobby Newmark and Gentry are talking about at this very instant. 3Jane is dead now. But's she still stalking around the Aleph, like Dixie, in a second, mediated form of life. Recalling Norbert Weiner, "the individuality of the body is that of a flame rather than that of a stone, of a form rather than of a bit of substance" (The Human Use of Human Beings, 102). 3Jane is the individual as a "flame" and persistent form who has been transcoded into the Aleph. Weiner believed that following the idea that human body's metabolism eventually replaces every part of it, identity was something of a pattern. It is this pattern that seems to be present in the Aleph. This is the status of 3Jane. She is not a "ghost in the computer" though her behavior makes her rather morbid and discomforting. She is the pattern of an identity, and she is interested in a body- Bobby's body- for a purpose we never discover. Regardless, there is something of an irony in that Bobby Newmark wants to spend the rest of his life disembodied, and 3Jane- who must remain disembodied- is after a body.

The "soulcatcher." This is how Bobby Newmark defines the Aleph for Gentry. So it would seem that he (like Norbert Weiner) sees the individual as a pattern that can be transcribed and ported into a machine. Or at least, the "soul" of an individual can be made to escape its body for the realm of data and cognition that the Aleph presents. We might wonder what the status of the Aleph is given that it was made for 3Jane Tessier-Ashpool, and that Newmark considers it her "soulcatcher." Is it a digital mausoleum? Some sort of an interactive, electronic diary? Is 3Jane really 3Jane, or just some copy of that individual? This last point is particularly important as 3Jane was a clone of a child in the first place, so in many regards she suffers an 'abstracted' humanity. Being already something that was transcoded from someone, 3Jane becomes a powerful model for the post-human in Gibson's cyberpunk, and is arguably the inflection point of the transition away from the Sprawl to the Aleph, from the expansion to the collapse, from infinity towards the finite.

Several things about the Aleph suggest that it is an object of great value. From Slick Henry's experience inside of it, we know that the visual reality it manifests is one of wealth and sophistication. From its complexity, and uniqueness, we can also gather its status as an object unlike any other, which is strange, considering the world of gadgets, tools, and console jockeys that the Aleph is itself objectively situated. Now we have Bobby Newmark telling us that 3Jane, heir of a massive Tessier-Ashpool fortune, "blew" her inheritance on developing the Aleph. This equates the Aleph to the Tessier-Ashpool inheritance, which is more than monetary: T-A was the family/corporation that developed the artificial intelligences that overthrew the order of man-technology symbiosis, and caused "the change." Therefore, we must read the Aleph as a sign or product of this change. For 3Jane, the development of the Aleph as personal microcosm seems to be more than a simple extension of her "life." Indeed, it would seem that the Aleph in being a personal cosmos, bars unwanted guests such as the fused AI Wintermute/Neuromancer, which 3Jane may still fear to some degree. This makes Newmark's "theft" of the Aleph all the more threatening. Not only does it invade her "space" but Newmark also puts 3Jane and the Aleph at a certain type of risk. In fact, Newmark recognizes some degree of this when he tells Slick to hook the Aleph up to the matrix if anything gets dodgy. This would expose the Aleph to the very thing it modeled and escaped.


 * "There are worlds within worlds," he said. "Macrocosm, microcosm. We carried an entire universe across a bridge tonight, and that which is above is like that below... It was obvious, of course, that such things must exist, but I'd dared not to hope... And now... We'll see the shape of the little universe our guest's gone voyaging in" (108).

Mona Lisa Overdrive is made up of more than the opposition within the Aleph between the already-dead 3Jane, and the desiring-death (or something like it) Bobby Newmark. Indeed, there is also Gentry, a sort of techno-mystic, interested in "the change" and the shape of Matrix. His foil is Slick Henry, who couldn't be less interested in digital technology. Slick prefers the mechanical to the digital. This pair of characters is not of a first-order concern to the novel's narrative, but it is certainly indispensable, and this quote is proof of that, as Gentry articulates the major theme of the novel: the pursuit of personal microcosm. There are any number of reasons why an individual might desire such a "world within a world," but for Gentry, the significance of the microcosm is that it models the larger system. Gentry believes that "that which is above is like that below" suggesting his certainty in the reflection of the microcosm upon the macrocosm, or in this case, the Aleph upon the matrix. Thus, what is too vast to discern (the matrix) is made visible in the would=be atomic unit of the Aleph.

This explication is meant for Slick Henry, but it ends up being a succinct sermon of the techno-mysticism found throughout Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. Overcoming computer metaphors, this mysticism begins to think in the terms of traditional Western thought. From the Greek for 'little world' microcosm can be defined today as "a place encapsulating in miniature the characteristics of a place much larger,' and indeed that is how it appears Gentry is using the term, referencing the Aleph as a world in miniature of the universe he is interested in. Like the philosophy of Christianity, Gentry believes in the presence of a logos behind the meaning of the world around him. He is seeking its decipherment, which Slick tells us is his only true occupation. The arrival of Bobby Newmark with the Aleph represents something on an order like fate for Gentry, as he explains that he "dared not to hope" that he should someday witness/explore an object of this significance. That Gentry found it "obvious" that "such things must exist" tells us that Gentry is caught up in a teleological progression which would suggest the development of technology like the Aleph. This teleology, again, returns us to characterizing Gentry as something of a techno-theologian, enmeshing the tradition of Western thought within cyberpunk's emerging digital technology.

What is the obsession with the shape? What does Gibson mean by shape? On one level, we might imagine the shape to be a sort of code architecture, how the program works and where its processes take place. On another level, we might imagine the shape as a short of map, a view of the entire expanse of the matrix. As Deleuze & Guattari suggest, writing is not really about signifying, its about mapping and surveying. This seems to be the view of Gentry and Gibson as well, who seem to equate gaining an understanding of the "shape" of the Matrix as method of gaining power over the structure. At least in the sense that the Cartesian mind continually objectifies the world around it, reducing the realm of materiality to the realm of the instrumental (as Peter Wollen writes). So in his search for the Shape, Gentry is seeking something beyond the shape, but a something only made possible by perceiving it in the first place.

"Yeah," the Finn said, turning onto the long straight empty highway, "but nobody's talking human see?" (308)
 * "I don't understand," she said, "If cyberspace consists of the sum total of data in the human system..."

We are beyond the Aleph now. In it, and beyond it. Through it, I would think is the best way to put it. Her, on the other side of the Aleph, Angie Mitchell is looking for answers. The same answers the reader is looking for. But when she thinks she's finally got it, the sentience of the matrix and its single consciousness enclosing "the sum total of human thought," the world becomes more complicated, as the matrix discovers another at the moment of its triumphant unity. The detection, and existence of this other appears to be something of a Sci Fi trope being weilded clumsily by William Gibson. We are told that the other sentience is different, and that it is in "Centauri." This is short hand for "Alpha Centauri" one of the closest neighboring solar systems to our own, and therefore of frequent use to science fiction. Gibson's invention of a new territory for his protagonists to set off for weakens the end of his story, as he produces a clumsy contradiction; post-human beings in an oversized mircrochip pondering the existence of life elsewhere in the galaxy, even as they cannot resolve their relationship to life or death in the mediated spaces of cyberspace.

In case one were to miss it, this last page of Mona Lisa Overdrive explicitly confirms the novel's interest in developing ideas of the post-human. Here the Finn tells Angie that she needs to stop thinking merely in "human" terms, the suggestion being that she is now beyond human, and the things she is about to behold are likewise, non-human. More correctly, Finn tells Angie "nobody's talking human" emphasizing verbal language as a signifier of humanity. "Noboby's talking" has two meanings in this statement. The first is that no one is discussing "human" things, and the second is that nobody is actually "talking" in the Aleph. Their communication, reduces to electrical transferences of data, is no longer vocal language, and therefore partially post-human.

When the Finn asks Angie to "see," he further emphasizes the arrival of the post-human in the final pages of Mona Lisa Overdrive. Intentionally playing her senses against themselves, Finn tells Angie that nobody is talking (in the Aleph, about humanity) and now tells her to "see" as though there were anything 'real' to visually perceive. If your eyes are not open, one might ask, can you "see"? The answer seems to be yes and no. One on hand, you "see" in the Alpeh, in the same way that you see in a dream, for indeed Bobby Newmark dreams the Aleph for almost the entireity of the novel. On the other hand, one can "see" in the Aleph in that way that seeing is believing, or better yet, understanding. This is "seeing" as a metaphor for perception at large, "seeing" as comprehension of that which is true.