"The Self Regained"

n postmodern world, according to Jean Baudrillard, there is no longer room for interiority and intimacy; illusion of control afforded by modernist visions of alienated solitude is no longer convincing. Instead, unified subject of early capitalism has given way to disempowered individual of corporate capitalism who has become switching center for all networks of influence (133). A transparent effect of a commodity world, subject loses all sense of agency: He can no longer produce limits of his own being, can no longer play nor stage himself, can no longer produce himself as mirror. Many critics argue that cyberpunk is genre that most clearly pronounces arrival of this postmodern subject. Veronica Hollinger, for example, argues that cyberpunk is anti-humanist (204), and Brian McHale claims that multiple realities and inset points of view of cyberspace entail a model of self which is correspondingly plural, unstable, and problematic (253). My own sense is that genre of cyberpunk does not go so far, and I would take issue with argument that it portrays a schizophrenic, Baudrillardian subject. It seems clear to me that it is cyberpunk's project to remythologize an earlier, powerfully autonomous subject through a literary form that is, in effect, a latter-day version of adventure/romance. The cyberpunk self, defined as male, is returned within free circulations of matrix-within bustling commerce and dance of biz, as William Gibson puts it-to roles of swashbuckling pirate and/or American cowboy. In Nicola Nixon's words, he rejuvenates the

Art · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Cybersecurity and Cyber Warfare Studies · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

• Literature and Posthumanism

  Open Access•Jeff Wallace•Literature Compass•2010

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