[Wisecup] Lets Get Semiotic (1)

Lets Get Semiotic: Recoding the Self inNeal Stephensons Snow Crash (1992)

K E L LY W I S E C U P

Those organisms that survive will be those whose internal struc-tures are good metaphors for the complexities without.

N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman

CONFUSED BY THE APPARENT LACK OF DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DISEASE AND

cultural movements, hacker Hiro Protagonist asks his ex-girlfriend: This Snow Crash thingis it a virus, a drug, or a

religion? Juanita shrugs, Whats the difference? (Stephenson 200).Hiro and Juanita are discovering the premise of Neal Stephensonscyberpunk novel Snow Crash: that similarities between the informationsystems of humans and computers (minds and hardware, respectively)allow both to be infected by a virus that has virtual and real forms. Theglobalized culture Stephenson depicts in Snow Crash is so saturatedwith consumerism and a devotion to activities based upon inclusion ina mass movementsuch as drug use or religionthat no one can resistthe effects of the virus, which include irrevocable brain damage and aninability to think for oneself. While previous science fiction works suchas Octavia Butlers Clays Ark and William Burroughss Nova Expresshave treated disease as the basis of a utopic, extra-terrestrial humanityor as the source of resistance to a dominant system, Stephensons de-piction of the virus and its effects on society are more pessimistic.1

The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 41, No. 5, 2008r 2008, Copyright the AuthorsJournal compilation r 2008, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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Cyber Disease

In Snow Crash, L. Bob Rife, a powerful businessman and media con-glomerate owner, uses the virus Snow Crash to consolidate the social,cultural, and technological aspects of society and thus strengthen hiseconomic monopoly. It is up to Hiro to fight Rife, his henchmen, andthe virus, rescuing American society from total epistemological mo-nopoly and resisting Rifes attempts to define humanity as worker-machines by positing his own virtual identity in response. DavidPorush writes that Snow Crash attempts to locate and define the hu-man in an increasingly imperial cybernetic cultural space (131). Butthe novels gestures to redefine what is considered to be human, eventhose involving its main charactersHiro and his partner Y. T.donot define subjectivity outside pre-existing humanist discourse. In-stead, Juanita, a character who drops out of the novel toward its end,not only redefines what it means to be human but also disturbs the-oretical definitions of the cyborg. In spite of her role as a peripherycharacter, Juanita does more to resist both infection and Rifes op-pression because she addresses the causes, rather than the effects, bywhich humans are formed and embodies a new form of humanity.

Two complementary narratives collude to construct humans in SnowCrash: that of disease and that of evolution. An informational andengineered virus with cultural and biological components that affectsits hosts mental capabilities, Snow Crash defines subjectivity on thebasis of resistance or infection to disease and, by extension, resistance tocontrol. Humans in Snow Crash are defined either as a weakened com-munity united by the victims susceptibility to infection or as powerfulindividuals who use their viral resistance to dominate the weak. Theinfected form a community of Others defined by its collective irra-tionality and weakness; the dominant characters position these Othersas victims because of their contact and association with the virus. Thosewho resist Snow Crash maintain a liberal human subjectivity based indomination, power, and wellness that ultimately fails because Juanitabriefly yet effectively breaks the dominating discourse. When Juanitamakes herself immune to Snow Crash by prolonged contact with it, sheembodies an ironic subjectivity that subverts the attempts to controland define humanity. She constructs instead an ironic emergent post-humanity based in an interpolation with disease that rewrites virusnarratives and definitions of disease.

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Epidemics and Evolution

To view infection from an epidemiological perspective is to look at itsability to have large-scale effects on a population. Rather than focus onindividual responses to disease, epidemiology emphasizes (1) the in-teraction between pathogen and human populations and (2) the rela-tionships of both to the larger environment and cultural systems(Boyd 7). The causes of disease are tracked by tracing the spread ofinfection over time and geographical areas. Epidemiology views dis-eases as dynamic entities, which evolve and spread and interact indifferent ways with different kinds of human societies; they are par-asites that prey upon human hosts for large-scale survival (9). Whilehumans and pathogens can co-exist in stable relationships, humanpopulations are often devastated when a new strain or particularlypotent disease is introduced into the community. If a generation hasnot previously experienced a particular form of infection, it finds itselfstruggling to resist and control the disease. In this way, disease andculture are linked, for disease exposes a lack of cultural traditions forresisting infection while revealing a cultures level of development,particularly in relation to matters of hygiene. (Disease and culture arelinked in many other ways, but this one is most significant in thecontext of Snow Crash.)

When viewed in tandem with the prosperity or poverty of civili-zations, the spread of disease is revealed to play a significant role indetermining the survival and identity of demographic groups; accountsof epidemics thus take on evolutionary language to describe the cul-tural role of disease. Epidemiology holds that epidemics accounted forthe historical record of conquest, civilization, and decline as a functionof disease patterns (Schell 808). According to evolutionary theories,change mediated by disease unfolds through processes that becomeevident over long periods of stability and reciprocity between host andparasite that are punctuated by periods of variation. Transformationsoccur when external forces applied to the existing systemsuch as theintroduction of a new strain of disease or population migrationdisturb the relatively stable limits of a biological system to result inthe breakdown of the previously existing system and perpetuate anincorporation of smaller parts into some larger or more complexwhole (McNeill 7). The organisms that survive this disturbance torecreate ecological stability are, naturally, those whose inner biology is

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suitable to the new conditions; the survivors thus have minute but keydifferences from the extinct organisms that permitted their adaptation.Evolutionary theories of disease phrase these differences in terms thatdistinguish the fit from unfit organisms, using a series of binary termsthat receive their force from their contrast to descriptions of weakerorganisms. Stronger organisms have capabilities that allow them tosurvive and flourish (28) and that make possible the easy exploi-tation and rapid depletion of resources (30). As opposed to the lessrichly articulated organisms, the survivors are capable of biologicaldominion (28). Evolution is thus articulated as disruptive, a par-asitic act of conquest upon a preexisting stability in nature (27).McNeill notes that one must consider the force of the epidemiologicalsuperiority civilized conditions of life created among those who hadsurvived the local mix of childhood diseases when studying whichorganisms survive epidemics (70). As this selection of evolutionarydescriptions suggests, the organisms best suited to their environmentare described in terms that set them apart from the weaker forms: thefit are capable of surviving, and they are the conquerors, the domi-nators, the exploiters, the superior, and the civilized.

Culture and Control

Snow Crashs ability to define what is human within the novel po-sitions the virus as a primary force of history; it is responsible for bothculture and extinction. Because Snow Crash is an engineered viruscapable of affecting its hosts behavior by infecting their minds, it doesnot merely reveal the cultural development (or lack thereof) of its hosts,it actually functions as culture. Rather than merely shaping culture andpopulation growth or extinction, Snow Crash constitutes culture ac-cording to the wishes of L. Bob Rife, who inflicts the virus uponsociety. Human civilization and sophistication are determined by onesrelation to the virus: the civilized survivors have abilities that allowthem to resist the virus and which prove their mental or physicalstrength. In a manner similar to the biological selection that evolutiondescribes, culturally dominant humans are defined against the infected.Snow Crash becomes much more than an evolutionary metaphor forculture when Rife infects a large portion of the earths population withthe disease. The virus can transmute itself from a biologically trans-


mitted string of DNA into a set of behaviors, and since Rife cancontrol the viruses spread, he can also control human behavior andthus culture and individuals identities (Stephenson 231). Rife finds away to infect the masses who work for his transnational monopoly withSnow Crash, which allows him to control the programmers withoutblowing their minds sky high (338). Infecting his workforce withSnow Crash provides Rife with unchecked control not only of hisprogrammers productthe information with which they workbutalso of his employees themselves. He assembles the infected, calledRefus, on a network of ships, the Raft, off the western coast ofAmerica.

Survival and culture in Snow Crash are based upon the ability tocontrol disease. Hiro Protagonist postulates that Civilization, in itsprimitive form started out as a viral infection perpetuated by a meta-virus, which naturally spawns other viruses within information systems(397). Stephenson draws similarities between knowledge and computerprograms, suggesting that civilization can be compared with a databasefrom which people receive instructions for living. Viruses play an im-portant role in this database, for according to Stephenson, Snow Crashhas similarities to an ancient informational virus used by the Sumeriansas instructionscodesto build their civilization. Such viral knowl-edge allows cultures to be successful, as Hiro says, There is an in-formational entity known as the metavirus, which causes informationalsystems to infect themselves with customized viruses. This may be justa basic principle of nature, like Darwinian selection (396). In ancienttimes, according to Stephenson, the viruses infected a population,spreading the knowledge needed to farm or cook and thus determininga cultures ability to provide sustenance for itself: Its a simple ques-tion of natural selection: people who know how to bake bread will livebetter and be more apt to reproduce than people who dont know how.Naturally, they will spread the me, acting as hosts for this self-rep-licating piece of information [. . .] Sumerian culture [. . .] was just acollection of successful viruses (397). While virally distributedknowledge ensured the survival of Sumerian culture, in contemporaryAmerican society, Rife uses viruses in an insidious manner, to reducehumans to their ability to process information. Rather than determin-ing prosperity, as it did in Sumerian society, infection in Snow Crashnow functions as an evolutionary force of extinction and populationcontrol.

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Virus, Drug, or Religion?

Rife packages the Snow Crash virus in three forms, targeted to whatStephenson pinpoints as the primary weakness of culture in Snow Crash:its inability to view its own society critically. Coded within culturalpractices such as drug use or religion, the virus can replicate through-out the novels global society because it appeals to societys irrational-ity. Snow Crash can manifest itself as a computer virus that infectshackers ability to understand binary code, a biological virus that tar-gets drug users or people from the Third World who are vaccinated bymissionaries, and a biological virus that replicates similar to a sexuallytransmitted disease. Snow Crash infects such large portions of societybecause people have no resistance to it [the virus] because no one isused to thinking about religion, people arent rational enough to argueabout this kind of thing. Basically, anyone who reads the NationalEnquirer or watches pro wrestling on TV is easy to convert (Stephen-son 406). The members of society who are infected with Snow Crashare those whom Rife considers unfit for activities that involve anythingbeyond physical gratification or spiritual practices based in the emo-tional or irrational. Inherent in Rifes targeting of Snow Crash to aspecific population is his attempt to control evolutionary processes anddetermine that the next form of dominant humans will be those whosesubjectivity is based on rational, self-conscious interpolation with anduse of information.

Furthermore, Snow Crashs different forms are targeted to infectdifferent parts of the irrational population. First, its transmission islinked to cultural movements like religion and drug use, which allowsit to infect a section of the population by masquerading as a culturalsign. As a cultural virus, it spreads according to Richard Dawkinsstheories of cultural evolution. Dawkins explains the tendency of cul-tural phenomena (fashions, songs, or art, for example) to survive andspread as basically analogous to the nature of genes to ensure theirexistence by self-replication, saying, life evolves by the differentialsurvival of replicating entities (206). In biological terms, these rep-licating entities are genes; Dawkins terms their cultural counterpartsmemes: An idea-meme might be defined as an entity, which iscapable of being transmitted from one brain to another (210). Memesuse human brains as their hosts, replicating through psychological needand repetition. When a meme is perceived as necessary for comfort or


survival, humans transmit it, thus continuing its existence. In onesense, humans can be viewed as hosts for idea-memes, ensuring thecontinuation of culture as they transmit ideas from generation to gen-eration, a positioning that foregrounds humans in favor of culturalpropagation: memes should be regarded as living structures, not justmetaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in mymind you literally parasitize my mind, turning it into a vehicle for thememes propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize thegenetic mechanism of a host cell (207).

Accordingly, Rife capitalizes on the inability of his globalized so-ciety to think critically about information as well as its susceptibilityto religion in order to spread Snow Crash. Humans function as in-formation processors whose capabilities extend to merely assimilatingnew information in order to ensure their survival, rather than process-ing that information as meaning. Pouring monetary resources intoMidwestern churches allows Rife to spread the linguistic virus byexposing people to a common language similar to Sumerian, known inmodern times as glossolalia or speaking in tongues: The twentiethcenturys mass media, high literacy rates, and high-speed transporta-tion all served as superb vectors for the infection. In a packed revivalhall or a Third World refugee encampment, glossolalia spread from oneperson to the next as fast as panic (Stephenson 402). Information is avirus because its infection strips its hosts of autonomy and individualreason, properties which allow Hiro to compare Snow Crash with re-ligion and to suggest that disease and religion have key similarities:So to them there was no difference between infection with a parasite,like tapeworm, and demonic possession (209). N. Katherine Haylessuggests that human systems in Snow Crash are analogical to those inmachines, saying that Neal Stephenson reasons that there must existin humans a basic programming level, comparable to machine code incomputers, at which free will and autonomy are no more in playthan they are for core memory running a program (272). Theanalogy between information and disease works in reverse, as well:because humans in Snow Crash lack free will, they can be viewed asmachines.

Rife also releases an ancient biological version of the Snow Crashvirus, targeted to infect drug users who might escape the informationvirus released in churches. According to Hiro, a temple prostitutioncultknown as the cult of Asherahcaused the initial biological

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propagation of the metavirus in either latent form or as a sexuallytransmitted disease. And since Rife cannot employ prostitutes to en-large his religious cult, he deploys missionaries to go out into thehinterlands and vaccinate peopleand there was more than just vac-cine in those needles (404). For those in the First World who had beenvaccinated and dont let religious fanatics come up and poke needlesinto them, Rife devised a means for extracting the virus from humanblood serum and packaged it as a drug known as Snow Crash (404).Rife uses his understanding of his culturewhat will appeal to it andwhich idea-memes will replicateand its machine-like nature to gaincontrol of the operating systems of society. The Snow Crash virus is aprogram that, by erasing peoples ability to individually execute theirmental programs, puts control of information in the hands of whoevercontrols those programs. In Rifes control, the virus attacks peoplesconsciousnesses and reduces their mental faculties to operating systemshe can manipulate, leaving their bodies to function as information-carrying shells.

While the Snow Crash virus functions like a computer programwritten to infiltrate the biological immune systems of humans, it canalso infect virtual worlds, where its representation has roots in virusesdeveloped by hackers to contaminate computers. The virus capable ofinfecting a computer is quite similar to a biological virus; it finds thehost most likely to spread the infection furthest and fastest [. . .] like aprostitute in Las Vegas and latches on, using the host to replicate itself(Levy 173). The inventor of the first computer virus, Fred Cohen,defined a computer virus as a program that can infect other programsby modifying them to include a, possibly evolved, copy of itself(Cohen 2). These copies replicate the original, spawning many versionsof the first bug and allowing a hacker to access previously secure files.Additionally, the hacker can control the virus in order to target specificusers and files. Snow Crash is the ultimate computer virus, for it infectsnot only a computer system but also turns against the hackers exposedto it and destroys their minds, or operating systems, as well. Oncehackers, many of whom work for Rife, are infected with Snow Crash,they lose the ability to control the information they utilize or programin virtual reality. Consequently, Rife maintains sole possession of hisprogrammers knowledge and strengthens his monopoly on informa-tion itself. Hiro explains that the digital form of Snow Crash is es-sentially:


An informational warfare agent for him [Rife] to use at his dis-cretion. When it is placed into a computer, it snow-crashes thecomputer by causing it to infect itself with new viruses. But it ismuch more devastating when it goes into the mind of a hacker, aperson who has an understanding of binary code built into the deepstructures of his brain. The binary metavirus will destroy the mindof a hacker. (405)

Community/Immunity

Theories of disease, its definitions, causes, and behaviors, are oftenlinked to cultural beliefs and anxieties. For this reason, epidemiologistsoften position their study of disease within the cultural constructs thatshape its definitions and cultural representations, suggesting thatthroughout its popular and scientific history, disease has carried in-separable medical and cultural definitions and is both constituted andexperienced within social political, cultural, and representational con-texts (Wald, Tomes, Lynch 618). Disease can be viewed as simul-taneously medical and cultural, as produced and experienced throughthe lens of cultural assumptions about the broad range of human be-ing (618 19). Definitions of disease are thus shaped by anxieties andpreoccupations that are manifested culturally, even while disease de-fines culture in terms of sickness or wellness. Cultural attitudes such asfear or horror of disease are influenced by the environment in which thedisease exists and how its representations are linked to social, political,or economic ideas. Views of infection that link scientific descriptionsand representations of disease to its cultural existence suggest thatbeliefs about disease are shaped as much by scientific theory as bycultural anxiety. To study disease and culture in such a way attend[s]to the changing terms of what it means to be human and to therelationship between human being and the human body (620). Associeties define disease within their particular contexts, they arethemselves simultaneously defined by disease and their attitudestoward it.

In her essay, Imagined Immunities, Priscilla Wald suggeststhat infection permits community to: actually recognize[s] (as it de-fines and salvages) what is human about human beings (205). Sheargues that as immune or healthy citizens attempt to maintaintheir health through a fear of disease and the maintenance of their

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separateness from diseased strangers, they imagine a community of theimmune and create a culture belonging to those who can resist disease.To Wald, immunity marks a stable community; strangers bringthe threat of new microbes that can introduce a destabilizing element,manifested as a disease outbreak (199). The healthy form a commu-nity based on a relationship in which immunity replaces kinship,offering a bodily connection through which to imagine a distinctionbetween the communion of connected strangers and the threat of in-vasive or undesirable ones (201). This kinship constitutes a systemthat remains closed to the diseased strangers who compose a potentialthreat to its healthy members; only the disease resistant are welcome(201).

Establishing, or imagining, to use Walds term, the borders of acommunity on the basis of infection and resistance enables the healthyto establish boundaries between themselves and infected strangers. Thefluidity of viruses does not impede the healthy from clearly demar-cating between themselves and the diseased, and so borders reassertthemselves in the monitoring and treating of epidemics (207). Asinfected people are quarantined, controlled, and treated, the geograph-ical progress of disease is monitored and mapped, providing a clearpicture of the diseases path and a physical outline of the healthycommunitys boundaries. By making the track of an epidemic visible,this epidemiological act suggests that it can quantify and thus controldisease. Epidemiological work entails Mapping [that] is about wherethe disease is, and drawing the picture begins to give some idea of howto contain and understand it (Humphreys 852). Citizenship andcommunity are derived from this picture of health and disease, be-longing and outsidership because they allow those who are healthy tocreate a border between oneself and the infected space [. . .] [by map-ping] the trouble areas and thus be able to study and control them(Humphreys 852).

Body Horror

In Snow Crash, Rife and Hiro physically separate themselves from theinfected Refus, marking themselves as a small yet powerful imaginedcommunity based upon their resistance to Snow Crash and their abilityto control the disease and those infected with it. While ideologically


opposed, Hiro and Rifes dealings with Snow Crash stem from theircommon desire to maintain control over the infected Refus and theirown resistant bodies; these desires manifest themselves in attempts tonormalize a masculine identity based upon the control of informationand the ability to maintain control over themselves and others. ScottBukatman suggests that the postmodern fusion of the human subjectwith machines attempts to reseat the human (male) in a position ofvirile power and control (308). In an inverted act of fusion, Rifeinterpolates other humans with machines in order to maintain hispower and health, which are symbolized by his ability to maintain theborders of his body. What Mark Dery calls body horror at the re-alization that the body turned out to spread deadly viruses is ev-idenced by Rifes use of Snow Crash to strip his programmersidentities down to information and to do away with positive functionsfor the body except when absolutely necessary or when viewed as sub-jugated to information (233). Rife and Hiro imagine a community ofhealth on the basis of their ability to maintain the health of theirbodies boundaries and autonomy over their mental systems.

By subjugating society through the virus, Rife emphatically defineshis business dealings as concerned with information, not the body. Heeven says that his purpose for releasing Snow Crash wholesale is tocontrol the information that constitutes his business: were workingon refining our management techniques so that we can control thatinformation no matter where it ison our hard disks or even inside theprogrammers heads (Stephenson 116). When he implants antennasonto the Refuss heads in an act of armoring similar (although inverted)to those Bukatman discusses, Rife implies that technology will allowhim to control the behavior of the diseased and will protect him fromthe Refuss infected bodies. The implantation constitutes an epidemi-ological act that, like those that demarcate certain places as infected,identify the Refus en masse as an infected community. Rife thus protectshimself against Snow Crash by armoring infected bodies rather than hisown, marking the Refus as not only sick and weak but also as lackingphysical and mental agency. He essentializes the Refus when he definesthem solely on the basis of their infection, and he ensures that he willbe able to control them and maintain his power. Additionally, Rifesuse of the virus allows him to position himself as a being superior tothe Refus, whose role he defines as fuel for the continued existence ofAmerican capitalism: Industry feeds off of biomass, like a whale

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straining krill from the ocean [. . .] the function of the Raft is to bringmore biomass (118). Rife constructs the Refus as lower beings, fit fortheir role as biomass because they are content to come here, getdecent jobs, buy a Weber grill, and live happily ever after (119). In hisrhetoric, Rife provides the Refus with the necessities that they need toexist as workersthe only role for which he tells them that they arefitfor dominant humans like himself (119).

For the hacker Hiro, whose world is based on rationality and hisability to find and sell information in virtual reality, where the body issecondary, an irrational, disease-ridden community threatens not onlyhis own resistance but also the masculine-oriented values by which hesurvives economically. His response to the infected Refus is to takecontrol of the Raft by cutting up people with swords since that isthe only thing they are [the Refus] good for and then to re-release thenam-shub of Enki, a code that requires people to acquire knowledgethemselves and that releases them from Rifes control (430). He defeatsSnow Crash through a display of masculine rationality and codingexpertise. Rife and (more importantly) the virus are thwarted; civi-lization regains its masculine-oriented rationality and individualism.

Once Hiro has reversed the effects of Snow Crash on the Refus whowere infected through injection or media contact, he prevents one ofRifes lieutenants, Raven, from releasing Snow Crash universallythroughout the Metaverse. However, rather than using a form of Enkisnam-shub (a magical speech), Hiro creates his own countervirus, SnowScan. Snow Crashin visual formis supposed to infect a large groupof hackers assembled in the Metaverse for what they think is a lightshow. Rife plans to capitalize on the large gathering of hackers to infectas many of them as possible. But Hiro replaces the virus with hiscountervirus, which reads:

IF THIS WERE A VIRUSYOU WOULD BE DEAD NOWFORTUNATELY ITS NOTTHE METAVERSE IS A DANGEROUS PLACE;HOWS YOUR SECURITY?CALL HIRO PROTAGONIST SECURITYASSOCIATESFOR A FREE INITIAL CONSULTATION.

(Stephenson 457)


By advertising security, Hiro is offering a service that seems to allowsociety to maintain individuality and difference. However, his count-ervirus also establishes his control in the Metaverse; by guarding in-formation, Hiro can control virtual interactions. He establishes hisidentity as more evolved than the Refus through his use of force,suggesting that his ability to control the Refuss physical and economicreality proves his superiority. As such, Hiros identity is that of thecyber-cowboy character who appears as the typical cyborg or cyberspaceidentity in science fiction.

Hiro and Rife define themselves as a dominant form of humans whomerit their position by virtue of their resistance to Snow Crash andtheir corresponding control of the Refus. They have superioridentities because they use the virus to prey upon the mentally andphysically weak and because they are able to control the virusthrough mental acuity and rationality. In a society where informationhas been constructed as a basic commodity and the primary constructorof subjectivity, those able to control information and thus resistits viral infections are those who survive. The imagined communityRife and Hiro create allows the two businessmen to achieveunlimited levels of power and control. Their kinship, based inhealth and biological superiority, is made insidious by its treatmentof the Refus, for rather than merely defining their relationshipthrough shared resistance and ability to survive, Hiro and Rife attemptto profit from the weakness of the diseased. Furthermore, they usetheir ability to control Snow Crash, to feminize its victims,and more firmly ensconce themselves in positions of masculineauthority.

Othering and a Cyber-Virus

Stephensons conception of viruses as informational entities emergesout of a precedent of imagined viruses in postmodern science fictiongenres. Previous representations of viruses in science fiction usuallyinvolve scenarios in which a virus serves as a metaphor for some form ofcontrol; cyberpunk artists such as William Burroughs and DavidCronenberg have used the virus to critique contemporary societysmanipulation of individuals through media images. For Burroughs,language is a virus that destroys the unity of mind body beings.

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Viruses primarily attack the body in his narratives to create monstrousentities, as Scott Bukatman says, The recurrent image of the virus (thevirus of the image) biologizes the waning autonomy of the individualin the face of the consumerist spectacle (76). Burroughss accounts ofviral infections and their affects on materiality suggest a correspondingfear of infected bodies. The body responds to the image-virus with abreakdown of human coherence, often illustrated by unfamiliaritywith ones body or the emergence of strange, nonhuman beings (80). InNova Express, the language virus that preys upon human bodies reducesthem to mutated, subhuman identities: Language, the word, im-prisons people in material bodies, which are subject to decay and littlebetter than excrement (Murphy 117). The word-virus preys upon thebody in order to graft it into a society that controls its every need anddesire and where Divided within itself rather than an organic unity, itis subject to occupation and expropriation by a variety of parasiticforms, both cultural and physical (Hayles 212). Burroughss bodiesare, to use Bukatmans term, biologized because they manifest theeffects of the virus through a reduction of the human to physicality, ormeat. Languagethe virus Word that is fleshassaults bodies, ma-nipulating them when they fall victim to its images and producingbiologized humans, an essentialization reinforced by the viruss reduc-tion of identity to the mutated bodies that emerge when humans areinfected (Burroughs 71).

In Burroughss virus narratives, if one can understand the intent ofthe virus, that is, speak the language, then one can attempt to subvertits dominance. Language has control only as long as it is given freereign over bodies both textual and human, but if the bodies fight backwith subversive mutations, refusing to be written and thus controlledby language, the virus can be countered and its control resisted. ToBurroughs, then, language is both virus and countervirus, an entitycapable of imposing and subverting control. In Snow Crash, Stephensonrecodes the uses to which Burroughs puts the virus that contaminatesbodies and focuses on its affects on consciousness and its ability tocontrol on information, rather than materiality. Where Burroughs usesthe virus to represent societal control of human needs and desires,representing an oppression of the physical body, Stephenson takes themetaphor in a different direction, suggesting that the virus as Rife usesit recodes identity as information to control that data, identities, andthus subversion.2


An othering of the diseased is a common feature of postmodern virusnarratives, in which, as a general rule, unnatural humans are discrim-inated against. Heather Schell notes that Fears about an emergingviral menace thus actually offer a revamped justification for reassertingnational, racial, and sexual categories, thereby averting any long-termtransformation of our ideas about identity (Outburst 114). She goeson to connect the characterizations that science fiction novels give toviruses as dangerous (96) and foreign entities as signs of a culturalfear of strange, diseased bodies (102). Disease, according to Schell, isused as an excuse to continue the tradition of othering those outside adefined community. In such a scenario, the metaphor of social mar-ginalization as infection is apt (124). In Snow Crash, the Refus, unableto control their mental and physical processes, constitute a communityshaped by infection. Rather than a community that affirms humanityand kinship, such as those Wald describes, the Refuss kinship is foundedupon disease, social marginalization, lack of agency, and thus weakness,not variation or individuality. Disease marks them as inhuman andOther, and their infection determines their identity as a lower form ofhumans who can best serve society as machines or workers for Rife.Schell writes, In stories in which a virus rather than culture driveshuman evolution, flexible immune systems are what we need [. . .]. Infact, the greater the role allocated to disease in human evolution, themore inflexible social structure is seen to be (The Sexist Gene 814).

Hiro and Rife associate the Refus with weakness, constructing themas objectified, feminized victims and revealing their own avoidance andcultural fear of virus-carrying bodies. By virtue of their infection, theRefus are feminized, constructed as mindless creatures whose only ra-tional thoughts are beamed to them from Rife. By essentializing theRefuss identity as diseased, Rife ensures that he will be able to controlthem and maintain his power, for Essentialism (the belief in a givenfemale nature) in the end always plays into the hands of those whowant women [or oppressed groups, in this case] to conform to pre-defined patterns of femininity (Moi 108). Snow Crashs identificationwith an ancient Sumerian goddess known for her promiscuity, Asherah(and concomitantly with bodily disease), Rife and Hiros attempts tocontrol its spread through technology and physical prowess, and theoverall attempt in the novel to reduce the body to an informationcarrying entity suggest a masculine attempt to dominate the deadlyfemininity of the infected and a corresponding body horror.

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Emergent Resistance

Juanita, a programmer turned religion expert, embodies the ironicexception to the dominant-species metaphors by which Hiro and Rifedefine themselves as she disrupts the categories of infection and fem-inization that determine the Refuss identity and those of technologyand information that determine Hiro and Rifes. Unlike either group,she neither resists nor is infected with Snow Crash; rather, she buildsup her immunity to Snow Crash through prolonged exposure to theirrational knowledgeor datawith which the virus is associated.Rather than resisting the religious irrationality that characterizes theRefus, Juanita immerses herself in religious texts by studying Jesuitreligions (the novels metaphor for the cultural virus), a knowledgewhich builds her immunity to the informational virus. According tothe evolutionary paradigms through which contact with Snow Crash ispositioned, Juanitas prolonged contact with religious texts should al-low her to be either an even more powerful, immune form of humanitythan either Hiro or Rife could imagine or else reduce her to a memberof the weak community, which (inadvertently) sacrifices itself throughextinction in order that stronger humans may survive. Yet Juanitaembodies an emergent posthumanity that allows her to function asboth a cyborg and an embodied female human while maintaining herindividuality within the community of Refus. Her specific immunityconstitutes a feminist resistance to the narratives and hierarchies bywhich Rife and Hiro exercise control while constructing her as anironic figure within Stephensons text and its narratives of evolutionand disease.

According to Hayles, emergence occurs when properties or pro-grams appear on their own, often developing in ways not anticipated(225). She suggests that attempts to create artificial life and intelli-gence demonstrate how emergent organisms utilize contact with theirenvironments to develop complex levels of organization on their own.Artificial intelligence starts small, with fundamental elements oforganization and being, then develops by complicating them throughnonlinear processes so that the complex phenomenal world appears onits own (232). While this advancement in organization and complex-ity certainly has a place within evolutionary frameworks, emergenceoccurs within a relatively short period of time when compared withthe duration necessary to support natural selection. Thus, emergence


constitutes an alternate evolutionary pathway that embraces envi-ronmental chaos and complexity to evolve organisms that are capable ofchanging definitions and descriptions of human life and how it changes(235). Juanita is an emergent posthuman, for she facilitates a rela-tionship with infection that makes her immune system increasinglycomplex. By immersing herself in the complex, chaotic interactions ofthe virus with its hosts through her study of ancient Jesuit religions,Juanita achieves a relationship with her environment that enables herto move to a higher level of informational complexity, to become aneurolinguistic hacker.

Hayles projects that the (post)humans who successfully assimilatethe cultural changes mediated by machines are those whose biology isbest suited (or fit) to collaborate with a world growing increasinglycomplex: those organisms that survive will be those whose internalstructures are good metaphors for the complexities without, she says,suggesting that as humans evolve toward the posthuman, the survivorswill be those who adapt, inwardly and outwardly, to changes in howhumanity is configured (287). Juanitas emergent properties constituteher as just such a posthuman, and her immunity has important im-plications for fictional treatments of disease. As Hayles points out,Juanita drops out of the plot because Stephensons narrative does notallow Juanita to practice her magic (276) and because for him, hercourtship with the mystical is beside the point (Porush 139). But shedoes not exit the narrative without profoundly disturbing the discur-sive categories by which she can be critiqued as a posthuman being.

Juanitas emergence means the failure of Hiro and Rifes maneuversto feminize the Refus through their treatment of the virus and theirattempts to dominate culture. They fail because Juanita recognizes thepotential of the informational virus as a mechanism not only for controlbut also for expanded knowledge and emergence. The emergent humanshe becomes through her immunity is mediated upon contact not witha natural environment but with an informational one, thus making herinto a non- or unnatural yet emergent being. Such a positioning ofsubjectivity confuses the boundaries between human and machine uponwhich Hiro and Rife based their definition of the Refus as less complexbeings and allow Juanita to reposition the role of Snow Crash specifi-cally and disease generally. Juanitas ironic subjectivity offers the pos-sibility of an identity that is purposely interpolated with disease yetthat lacks the expected association of discrimination and othering

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common in virus narratives. She recodes what can be counted as naturalby using an unnatural, that is, informational, virus to take her systemsto a higher level of complexity. She thus thwarts those who would usedisease to mark infected bodies as unnatural by suggesting that herbody was not natural in the first place.

Unnatural Immunity

Juanitas study of religion integrates data with her physical experienceof Snow Crash, making knowledge of the virus part of her informa-tional makeup and creating her identity as a posthuman through pre-existing biological processes, rather than technological ones. Her ap-proach to information mirrors the method, called network theory, bywhich biological immune systems fight disease. Network theory positsthat any antibody molecule must be able to act functionally as bothantibody to some antigen and as antigen for the production of anantibody to itself (Haraway 218). This theory revisions the distinc-tions of what is foreign and familiar to the body because it endows theimmune system with the ability to regulate itself using only itself(218). The antibodies that fight disease must be diseased themselves inorder to recognize the infection threatened by the antigens and tomaintain the bodys immunity. Because Juanita instantiates her relig-ious knowledge (the molecules forming her immune system) into herbody, it can function as an antibody that maintains her immunity toSnow Crash because it has already functioned as a form of the virusitself (her knowledge is of the irrational religions Rife uses to infect theRefus, after all). Juanitas religious knowledge is neither a belief systemintrinsic to her being nor an invasive virus that can strip her of agency;rather, it functions simultaneously as both part of her and informationfrom outside the given boundaries of her mind. The network theorywhich allows Juanita to build her knowledge and immunity is an aptmetaphor of Juanitas dealings with society: she refuses to mark theRefus as Other but joins their community while still maintaining herimmunity and difference. The workings of her immune system enableher to exist within the Refuss othered community and in the subject-oriented world of Hiro without making distinctions between self andOther. She at once constitutes an emergent being whose internalstructures are good metaphors for the complexities without and who


refuses to distinguish between those inner and outer metaphors, selfand Other (Hayles 287). Her relationship with Snow Crash allows herto break the oppositions constructed between the body and technology,male and female, weak and strong.3

Like the cyborgs about which Donna Haraway theorizes, Juanitaseizes the tools to mark the world that marked [. . .] [her] as other,but in a series of actions that identify her character as ironic, she doesnot re-mark the world in mastery-subordination, machine-body, weak-strong binaries (175). Juanita joins the Raft and allows an antenna tobe implanted in her brain without being feminized or controlled (likethe Refus) yet without using her invulnerability for the mastery ofothers (like Hiro and Rife). She explains how she built up her im-munity: Your brain has an immune system, just like your body. Themore you use itthe more viruses you get exposed tothe better yourimmune system becomes. And Ive got a hell of an immune system(429). Juanitas knowledgeher immunityenables her to become aneurolinguistic hacker who can hack the brainstem (430). Like Rife,Juanita can transmit signals to the virally infected, but unlike Rife, sheuses this ability to restore health to the Refus. When Hiro suggeststhat he take command of the Rafts control tower by force since thatsthe only thing theyre [the Refus] good for, Juanita subverts his at-tempt to assert control on the Raft by speaking a command that simplyputs the Refus to sleep until Enkis nam-shub is released (430). Byrefusing to use her immunity for mastery, Juanita subverts evolutionaryparadigms would define those resistant to viruses as more fit and thusmore human.

Beyond the Cyborg

Juanita provides an extreme new version of cyborg boundary confusion.Her identification with the Refus confuses the categories of gender,machines, and humans on which Hiro and Rife build their status asdominant beings. Logically, she should be feminized because of hercoexistence with the Refus and her identification with Snow Crash.However, by the same logic, her ability to resist the virus should allowher to exert the masculinist control by which Hiro and Rife attempt toregulate society. When Juanitas immunity to Snow Crash neitherfeminizes her as weak nor leads to her repression of a weaker group, she

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slips between gender distinctions, escaping signification as either maleor female. Managing to retain the body constructed as female, Juanitaalso embraces a cyborg identity that is without need of gender; heridentity as female is thus simultaneously embodied as female and am-biguously technologized as a cyborg. By being strategically body andmind, Juanita avoids the unitary self against which Haraway cautionsfeminists (170).

Juanita resembles the postmodern collective and personal selfHaraway uses to describe the cyborg (163). As a cyborg, Juanitas ironicembodiment blurs the distinctions between mind and body. She allowsherself to be wired up in order to inconspicuously join the communityof the Raft and build her knowledge of Snow Crash, an action thatsuggests that, like the Refus, she does not function as a human butrather as a machine that responds to coded commands. However, shecuts the antennas connection to her brain when Hiro speaks Enkisnam-shub onto the Raft, which allows her to maintain her naturalconnection with the virus and disturbs definitions of machines. Juani-tas ability to function as a neurolinguistic hacker without her antennasuggests that it ever only had visual purposes and that her pre-existingbody had machine-like functions. She says, I went through hell toobtain that knowledge. Its part of me (430). Her ability to exist as acyborg without any technological mediation whatsoever confuses be-yond recognition the boundaries and definitions of human and ma-chine. David Porushs description of the implications of cyberspacefollows theoretical lines characteristic of much cyberspace theory whenhe writes that the relationship between our mind and realitythepersistent delusion that leaps the bifurcation between sensation andthoughthas now become self-evident, incarnated in hardware (121).But Juanita problematizes the lines Porush and others would drawbetween body and information as well as suggestions that the body willbe eclipsed by its submersion into technology.4 Her subjectivity isunique and problematic because she succeeds in making the relation-ship between mind, body, and technology evident in her body, withoutthe aid of hardware, and in embodying a technological identity with-out needing to be constantly immersed in technology to do so.

Haraway writes that she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess,suggesting that posthuman liberation lies in forming a new subjec-tivity based in an originless mythology (181). Haraway and others havepointed feminist theory toward the possibility of imagining a wholly


other consciousness, one that does not derive its being or definitionfrom its relation to a masculine counterpart. To these feminists, cyber-identities are an insurrection on the part of the goods and materials ofthe patriarchal world, a dispersed, distributed emergence composed oflinks between women, women and computers [. . .] (Plant 335). ButJuanita intermingles her ties to an ancient goddessand thus to his-tory and human civilizationwith her nature as a cyborg, for hervoyage on the Raft and her immunity to Snow Crash are explainedthrough their similarities to ancient Sumerian myths involving thegoddess Inanna. In one myth, Inanna travels to the watery fortress [anancient parallel to the Raft] in the city of Eridu where Enki stored upthe me and got Enki to give her all the me. This is how the me werereleased into civilization (Stephenson 316). Juanitas journey to theRaft and her role in re-releasing to the Refus the skills for individuallyacquired knowledge into society is analogous to Inannas journey toEridu. In another myth, Inanna descends to the underworld, where shegave up . . . all she had accomplished in life until she was strippednaked, with nothing remaining but her will to be reborn . . .. Becauseof her journey to the underworld, she took on the powers and mysteriesof death and rebirth (317). Like Inanna, who desires to personallyunderstand and apply knowledge to reality, Juanita stops using herability as a programmer to create lifelike avatars for the Metaverse, tomake avatars show something close to real emotion, and insteaddevotes herself to pursuing a knowledge of and immunity to SnowCrash (63). When viewed in relation to her interpolation with ma-chines, this mythic sub-narrative constitutes Juanita as simultaneouslycyborg and goddess. She possesses the capabilities to fully succeed as aprogrammer in the Metaverse, but chooses an identity as a being withboth physical and technological components.

Recoding the Self

The oppositional and individual immunity Juanita fosters provides a(post)feminist critique of the masculine-defined subjectivity that Rifeand Hiro seek through the control and imposition of Snow Crash. BothRifes plot to restructure society based upon his control of informationand Hiros countervirus advertisement perpetuate a system based uponprofit, control, and dominance by those with access to information.

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However, Juanita, realizing that there is really no point in pursuingthe masculine dream of self-control, self-identification, self-knowledgeand self-determination, speaks from a position of selfhood withoutbeing reappropriated by existing power structures or reinstating op-pression (Plant 327). She performs this act, which simultaneously al-lows her to jam the theoretical machinery, and to posit an ironicidentity, forging an experimental emergence that is individual, oppo-sitional, and in constant flux and contact with its environment (Iriga-ray 126). Not only does Juanita profoundly disrupt the narratives bywhich Rife and Hiro define humanity, she establishes her own narrativebased upon ironic immunity and blurs the binaries that empowerevolution to define dominant humans. Her embodiment of differenceallows her to deconstruct dominant structures of difference withoutpositing an alternative that would merely redraw the binary bordersbetween healthy and ill, human and machine, weak and strong, maleand female.

Juanitas subjectivity ruptures the narratives of evolution andepidemiology that create borders and communities, necessitating a newdiscourse to describe her posthumanity. Her identity also requires thatSnow Crash specifically and the social aspects of disease generally betreated differently, that we recognize and explore their ability to pro-duce immunity and to foster the imagining of previously undefinedcommunities. To step out of the discourse of evolution and to treat avirus as an opportunity for new communities and new identities, asJuanita does, is to suggest new definitions of the human and new usesfor science.

NOTES

1. Like the cyberpunk writers who precede him, Stephensons novel is an adventure tale that

occurs in a world in which virtual reality occupies a central cultural and economic role; like the

science fiction of William Gibson, Stephensons version is both uncannily futuristic and dys-

topic. And like other second-generation cyberpunk fiction, Snow Crash explores the impli-

cations of cyberspace for the body, culture, and economy. Its difference from previous works

lies in its treatment of disease as both virtual and physical and its exploration of the identities

that emerge from interaction with the virus.

2. Science fiction and postmodern cyberpunk literature have utilized the self-reproducing nature

of viruses to critique society, adding a linguistic and social dimension to physical disease.

Philip K. Dick describes a virus that replicates itselfnot through information or in in-

formationbut as information (qtd. in Davis 193). William Burroughs says plainly, lan-

guage is virus (qtd. in Davis 194) and writes in Nova Express that these information


molecules were not dead matter but exhibited a capacity for life which is found elsewhere in

the form of virus (49).

In Octavia Butler and Burroughss novels, disease creates a new being altogether, one that is

founded upon the body of its human hosts but that leaves this body behind when it produces

the new creature. For example, in Clays Ark, Eli and his community of diseased outcasts serve

as hosts for Jacob, the child whom they can only identify as unlike themselves and thus as not

human. Similarly, in Nova Express, Burroughss creatures take a bug like, nonhuman form. Snow

Crash is significant, then, in that it reduces humans to their lowest intellectual capacity, while

still allowing them to retain a human form.

3. Chela Sandoval suggests that for humans to enter a world where any activity is possible in

order to ensure survival is also to enter a cyberspace-of-being and consciousness. This space is

now accessible to all human beings through technology (384). Juanita complicates this utopic

entrance into a technological consciousness, for she locates access an alternate consciousness in

her body and her use of disease and immunity, rather than through technology.

4. While Y. T. appears to present an alternative identity and certainly does her best to resist Rife,

her use of technology and information reveal that she does not offer an alternative to the

masculine ideology which governs her social and business dealings. Y. T. is as interested as

Hiro is being financially successful, and she works as hard as he to gather intel, the in-

formation which they sell to the highest bidder in virtual reality: Shes thinking: This is intel.

This is intel. I can make money off this with my pardnermy podHiro (97). And while Y.

T. does manage to subvert Ravens advances and maintain her immunity during her stay on the

Raft, the end of the novel finds her enjoying the explosion of Rifes plane and the end of his

domination. Y. T.s methods of resistance are more comparable to Hiros than to Juanitas; as

such, they do not offer a mode of resistance that is outside the discourse she resists.

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Humphreys, Margaret. No Safe Place: Disease and Panic in AmericanHistory. American Literary History 14.4 (Winter 2002): 845 857.

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[Wisecup] Lets Get Semiotic (1)