Donna Haraway William Gibson's The Gernsback Continuum

If the readings for unit three were stitched together to make a monster, it would be a mess. Some places would be perfectly stitched together, some would be so loose that thread would be almost invisible, and other places would leave you to think, “Is this a joke?” because they obviously don’t belong there. However, I believe this is the whole idea of postmodernism—it’s one giant mess and some stories will make more sense the others, but there’s always some truth to it. Nevertheless, the readings for unit three focuses on fantasy vs. reality, technology, cyborgs as metaphors, and others focus on consumerism.

In Donna Haraway’s essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” she uses cyborgs as a metaphor for electronic devices that we use every day. Haraway

fantasy. This is seen when Gibson says, “All those nights when you discovered that whole armies of Disney technicians had been employed to weave animated holograms of Egyptian hieroglyphs into the fabric of your jeans (515). Here, the illusion created by Disney is revealed by the individual, ultimately destroying the fantasy. This quote also relates to society in that when you’re a child you believe in Santa Clause or the tooth fairy, and live in a fantasy world, but once when you get older you realize that’s not how the real world works and those dreams and fantasies soon die. In addition, this same theme is seen in Linda Barry’s “From Come Over Come Over” as the narrator tries to explain the reality of what her little sister is doing to her plants, which is torturing them. Personally, I feel the two quotes that flawlessly capture the theme are when the narrator states, “It’s from the books you keep reading with no reality in them,” (213) followed by “P.S. I still think life is magical” (215). They work so well together because it shows how you come to accept reality and the way the world works, but deep down you still believe there is some magic in the world; which, ties back to the theme of reality vs. fantasy. The final story that has this theme is Jean Baudrillard’s “Simulacra and Simulation.” For instance, Baudrillard

Each of these pieces comment on consumerism, for example, Coupland captures the theme when he states, “All you have to do is get a chain of reps working under you, and before you know it, you don’t have to work at all—just sit down and skim the profit” (569). In spite of this piece not commenting directly on consumerism, it makes a valid point in that once you get a bunch of people to work for you soon you won’t have to do work yourself, just sit back and relax and watch the profit come in—which is how it works in the business industry. However, Jameson takes a different approach as he says, “I believe the emergence of postmodernism is closely related to the emergence of this new of late, consumer or multinational capitalism” (662). Jameson’s take on this is that postmodernism is tied to idea of consumerism, which would explain why it seems to be a recurring them in so many postmodern works. Additionally, Palahniuk’s novel “Fight Club” focuses more on society by saying, “Maybe self-empowerment isn’t the answer…Maybe self-destruction is the answer,” whereas, the 1999 film adaptation concentrates more consumerism by making comments such as, “ Working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need” and