M. Michaela Hampf and MaryAnn Snyder-Körber

Breaking Your Historical Neck: Interdisciplinary Reflections and Introduction

Machine Encounters: Varieties of Technological Experience

In 1900 Henry Adams was led into the so-called “Gallery of Machines”

at that year‟s World Exhibition in Paris by his friend and compatriot

Pierpont Langley. Up to then Adams had, by his own account, helplessly

“haunted” the exhibition, “aching to absorb knowledge and helpless to

find it.” Langley, in contrast, “knew what to study, and why, and how”

(317). As an astronomer and physicist, he viewed the fair‟s exhibits with

the keen eye of a scientist. From Langley‟s pragmatic perspective, the

dynamo housed in the great hall was to be seen primarily as an ingenious

means to a practical end. At the same time, the turbine (or, more

precisely, the alternator) was part of a grand narrative of progressively

more ingenious means. And the presentation of the dynamos at this, and

previous World‟s Fairs, certainly emphasized the grand. In Paris the

machines themselves were not only massive, but had been placed in a

towering domed metal and glass gallery that was a clear successor to

London‟s Crystal Palace. The open use of mass-produced, clearly

structural rather than decorative construction elements such as steel

support beams made this building type a hallmark of nineteenth-century

fair architecture and an index of the cultural politics shaping these

events. In their display of prefabricated elements buildings like the

Crystal Palace and the Galerie des machines aligned themselves with the

power of modern manufacturing and its aesthetic of steel-girded

efficiency. At the same time, the architecture cited older spatial

vocabularies: Romanesque and gothic forms of the cathedral in

particular. The setting suggests that industrial forces at once break from

the past and offer continuation; turbines and steam engines carry the

redemptive promise of older practices into a new era. Alternatively, new

innovations might constitute a stirring end to narratives of progress and

salvation. Langley had his doubts as to whether new technologies could

be wholly contained. Forces tapped into and exponentially increased by

M. MICHAELA HAMPF AND MARYANN SNYDER-KÖRBER 10

the innovations on display—electrical currents, heat, and Roentgen

rays—tended to the “anarchical,” as he saw it (318).

Although not disregarding of Langley‟s warnings, Adams ultimately

discerned something different in the innovations on display than utility

or resourcefulness, salvation or damnation. His reflections transform the

dynamo as a literal power maker into a symbolic, epoch-defining force:

“a symbol of infinity” and, ultimately, of a modernity whose dynamic

departs from the sequential cause-and-effect logics the historian

conventionally deals with and which Adams had according to his own

reckoning followed to the point of a nihilistic resignation. As he recounts

in the distancing third-person perspective of his Education (1918),

“[s]atisfied that the sequence of men led to nothing and that the sequence

of their society could lead no further, while the mere sequence of time

was artificial, and the sequence of thought was chaos, he turned at last to

the sequence of forces.” This line of inquiry brings him to the Gallery of

Machines and down on the floor, “lying […] with his historical neck

broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new” (321).

This episode highlights two perspectives on and, indeed, two

concepts of the technological. On the one hand, you have a use-oriented

view of technology as a repertoire of progressively optimized means and

ends. This is Langley‟s take on the turbine and it shapes both this

segment in The Education of Henry Adams (1918) and the larger project

of grasping turn-of-the-century modernity which Adams pursues in the

reflective mode of memoir. The episode ending with a paralyzing crack

to Adams‟s “historical neck” recalls a day spent with Langley in Paris,

but also gives the personal/collective historian Adams the opportunity to

work through issues which had concerned him since the Columbian

World‟s Exhibition of 1893 and, one can also say, rework his earlier

response to technology rendered spectacle. On that occasion Adams had

also studied the dynamos on display in the sprawling Machinery

Building: an edifice that was outwardly Beaux Arts, but in its interior

displayed fair-typical, functional metal and glass building components.

The exhibition of the operating dynamos amidst conveyor belts, steam

engines, and sewing machines brought him to questions which begged

answers: “What was it, did it pull or did it push? Was it a screw or

thrust? Did it flow or vibrate? Was it a wire or a mathematical line? And

a score of such questions to which he expected answers and was

astonished to get none” (287). Seven years later, frustration yields to

insight in Langley‟s company. The result is a very different

understanding of the turbine‟s significance. This second view is symbol-

focused and aesthetically charged. The machine is not understood as a

Breaking Your Historical Neck 11

response to needs and problems. Adam‟s phrasing rather suggests that

the dynamo emerges as an irrepressible volcanic “irruption” (321) from

the very heart of the modern Zeitgeist.

As strongly effected or, more precisely, affected as Adams is by his

renewed encounter with new technologies, he does not wholly bracket

out the question of usefulness which grounds his friend‟s position. Use

is, after all, closely allied to the questions of function—”did it pull or did

it push? Was it a screw or thrust? Did it flow or vibrate?”—which had

dominated his earlier response to the dynamo. Befitting Adams‟s

profession, however, the interest emerging from his second encounter

with machines is historically analytical in nature instead of technical.

The apparatus is useful as a concretizing symbol. This function does not

follow from the push and pull of gears, but rather from the part-and-

whole relations characterizing synecdoche. The question for Adams is

less the oft-repeated, determinist “Does Technology Drive History”

(Marx and Smith). The historian‟s reflections on the significance of the

machine instead offer a variation on the “End of History”: all stories

have run out except the new, uncontainable sequence of force. This kind

of power, but more particularly the present which Adams links to it, is a

notoriously slippery thing for the historian: often too close for the

distance analysis requires, slipping into and biasing perspectives through

an unwanted “presentist,” all-too “undetached” slant.1 The dynamo

renders the ephemeral force of invisible electricity and x-ray as well as

the ephemeral “now” of experience tangible and, thus, offers an

opportunity to grasp the difference between old and new narratives, past

and present orders. Following the logic of the synecdoche, the dynamo is

the part which explains and, equally important in Adams‟s

characterization, generates awe of the modern whole. Langley‟s anxiety

regarding the possible “anarchy” of new developments feeds into

Adams‟s vision of the machine as an updated manifestation of extra-

human, almost numinous power. As David Nye would phrase it, such an

encounter generates a sense of “transcendence,” if temporary, in a

demystified age: a technological sublime that synthesizes “a temporary

community,” articulates a “distinct political and social,” and for Adams

also analytical, “relationship to technology” (American Technological Sublime 205, 279).

Utility versus sublimity, tool versus symbol. These varying takes on

the nature and use of technical inventions initially seem to stand in

contrast to each other. While a second appraisal suggests points of

1 On the ethos of detachment in early twentieth-century historiography, see Becker.

M. MICHAELA HAMPF AND MARYANN SNYDER-KÖRBER 12

convergence, the impression of a general opposition remains. Langley

and Adams might both be interested in use. Their notions of usefulness,

however, diverge starkly. This difference is a consequence of the

professional and, one can go as far as to say, “cultural” affiliations held

by Adams and Langley. As a historian, Adams‟s allegiances lie with the

humanist camp in Charles Percy Snow‟s mid-century account of the

modern cultural divide. Langley‟s work places him firmly in the

opposing realm of science. Snow argued that this division is constitutive,

but ultimately debilitative for twentieth-century modernity. The period is

marked by increasing complication in technological developments as

well as heightened destructive potential. Progress in nuclear physics was

the—at times stirring, at other moments chilling—example of both

tendencies in the post-World War II era. In view of this dynamic, Snow

called for a comprehensive bicultural education, particularly for the

liberal arts and social sciences. Scientists tend to be aware of cultural

developments, but humanists, to their own peril, turn a blind eye to

scientific developments.2 Adams‟s anecdote about his sojourn with

Langley in the Gallery of Machines would seem to bear out Snow‟s

point about cultural division. Seeing different things in the dynamo is the

climax as well as the finish of Langley‟s and Adams‟s visit: to the

exhibit and, for the most part, with each other. Once the machine as

sublime symbol takes hold of Adams‟s imagination, Langley exits the

scene of his recollections, returning only once more in a brief aside later

in the memoir (377).

Two viewpoints, two cultures, limited conversation. It is a key

presupposition of this volume collection that this impression of

discourse-derailing difference deceives. This holds both for Adams‟s

account as well as the larger framework of not only academic, but also

popular discourses. We put this book together on the premise that

technological developments in the material sense of devices and

operations intersect with the immaterial, but powerful imaginative

potential of technology to reflect as well as shape our responses to the

current moment. And these responses are always embodied ones. This is

to say that perception, knowledge, and all other acts of and in the world

2 For a discussion of Snow‟s dichotomy and its continued significance as well as

reflections on the shift from two opposed cultures to a “third”

disciplinary/discursive space in which the so-called “hard” sciences communicate

to the broader public without the intervention of the humanities or social sciences,

see recent commentaries by Jardine and Krauss. On the current “science wars”

waged between the disciplines for recognition and funding, see Benesch,

“Diverging Cultures, Competing Truths?”

Breaking Your Historical Neck 13

occur in reference to or by means of our body. Adams‟s perception of

the dynamo is thus as related to his body height as his thoughts on the

socio-cultural role of electricity are shaped by the position of his white

male body in that society. In turn, as we make use of a technology,

devices structure our body practices and thus our body; and our

figurations of the technological are shaped by our bodily conceptions.

That thinking about the dynamo throws Adams to the figurative floor of

the exhibition hall, specifically causing him to imagine this blow to his

conceptual categories as a physical wound is from this perspective not so

surprising. Thinking and feeling, observing and theorizing, acting and

reacting all begin with the bodily and, therefore, inevitably loop back to

this base and the distinctions (of gender, class, color, and all the

dichotomizing rest) confounded with it.

In regards to these dynamics at the current moment, an inspection of

recent dynamo technology is not necessary. An evening in front of the

television is far more educational. The highly popular C.S.I. franchise

(2000-) seizes on the analytical power of common biomedical

technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The DNA

profiling prominent in this and other forensic-focused television

programs such as Crossing Jordan (2001-2007) or Bones (2005-), based

on the bestselling thrillers penned by the forensic anthropologist Kathy

Reichs, is another case in point. In the last years this technology, too, has

moved not only from laboratory to courtroom, but into ordinary homes

through paternity testing kits “as seen on TV!” according to the

advertising line of a prominent DNA-testing company (DDC) or genetic

genealogy. Henry Louis Gates Jr.‟s multimedial project Faces of America (2010) has used DNA profiling to explore the questions “What

made America? What makes us?” in print and television documentary

(PBS).3 Yet more significant for C.S.I.‟s connection to the contemporary,

however, is the web-linked network computer. What the dynamo was for

Adams at the turn of the last century, internet technology arguably is for

the newly launched millennium. It not only continues the radical

reconfiguration of time and space considered the defining signature of

modernity.4 Like photography, one of the “older” technologies Stephen

3 For recent scholarly reflection on genetic genealogy, see Nelson.

4 The geographer David Harvey speaks of a “time-space compression” in The

Condition of Postmodernity, published in 1990 (260-307). The sociologist and

modernization theorist Anthony Giddens describes the same processes in the

slightly earlier A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (1981) as

“time-space distanciation” (90-108). Like the cultural historian Stephen Kern in

the roughly contemporaneous The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918

M. MICHAELA HAMPF AND MARYANN SNYDER-KÖRBER 14

Kern considers in his panoramic The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (1983/2003), the internet brings the distant into local purview. In

the age of the infinitely reproducible images everything becomes

accessible. Marshall McLuhan follows the same general line of argument

as Walter Benjamin does in regards to image proliferation in an age of

mechanical reproduction, but ups the critical as well as polemical ante.

Borrowing an image from Jean Genet, he credits photography with

turning the world into a “brothel without walls” in which anything can

be bought, traded, and sold (189). One can argue that the internet pushes

back the walls of the “brothel” yet further by generating an archive of

heretofore unimagined scale to which we can, at all times and in almost

all places, be connected.

William Gibson is credited with coining the term “cyberspace” and

creating a neon-lit, eighties-era noir imagining of this virtual landscape

in his so-called Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer 1984, Count Zero 1986,

and Mona Lisa Overdrive 1988). More recently, he has reflected on the

internet‟s appeal in the distinctly non-dramatic quotidian: not hustling

and whoring as a “console cowboy,” but clicking, surfing, and shopping

for deals. He writes:

The content of the web aspires to absolute variety. One might find anything

there. It‟s like rummaging in the forefront of the collective global mind.

Somewhere, surely there is a site that contains…everything we have lost

(Distrust That Particular Flavor 194).

This sense of “a collective global mind,” as Gibson puts it, paints the

web as an infinite archive. Contents, available to all, seem to serve as the

base for a democracy of information. Participation is envisioned as a

community beyond common boundaries. A spate of recent work has

argued that this vision of the internet, while not as fantastic as the

cyberspace scenarios Gibson cooks up in the 1980s, is also a fantasy.

The web lures with “world-wide” horizons, but actually, as critical

observers have come to argue, it locks us into a far narrower range of

information, positions, communities and regimes of self-observation.

Michel Foucault famously analyzed Jeremy Bentham‟s public building

model in terms of observation. Designed to allow total observation of all

inmates of an institution—prisoners, pupils, or workers—by arranging

(1983/2003), both identify the period from mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth

century with its accelerating cross-global connections through production, trade,

communication and consumption, in short globalization, as the fulcrum of this

reconfiguration.

Breaking Your Historical Neck 15

work or living spaces in a circular form around a central observation

station, the panopticon was seen by Bentham as a pragmatic technical

answer to a social problem (Discipline and Punish 203-4). In this regard,

the philosopher and social theorist Bentham seems a predecessor of

Adams‟s practical friend Langley; Foucault‟s perspective on the

architectural innovation, in turn, bears a certain resemblance to Adams‟s

response in the sense that the innovation is transformed into a wider-

reaching symbol and tool of analysis. For Foucault, the panopticon

figures a regime of ever more total and internalized observation in

modern society. Bentham‟s plan had two advantages. First, a limited

number of staff could monitor a large group which, secondly and most

significantly for Foucault, was due to the architectural setup of the

panopticon never sure if they were being directly watched or not. The

possibility of observation, however, is always present and, thus, behavior

adjusts itself to this assumption. In the end, subjects no longer have to be

monitored by others because they are continually monitoring themselves.

Such dynamics can be connected to what Martin Heidegger, in one of

the most fundamental philosophical explorations of “The Question

Concerning Technology” (1954), describes as “enframing” (Ge-stell,

27). Contingency and openness are eliminated, as human, natural, and

social resources are all bound into an increasingly stringent total order

that bears on us even, and perhaps most strongly, in those moments in

which we seem to be most free: for example, in our free time online. In

social networking observation becomes a minute-by-minute docu-

mentation of feelings, attitudes, experiences with downloaded photos

and smiley faces. Performance studies scholar E.J. Westlake speaks of a

“performative surveillance” (21).5 The regime of control is thereby not

merely externalized, but networked in a way which requires continual

updating and response in a presentation of the self in interrelations with

others which are up-to-date but at the same time normed through the set

technical parameters as well as the implicit communication protocols of

such forums.

Other aspects of norming show themselves in even more general uses

of the internet medium: not every computer user is on Facebook, but

nearly every use of the internet via the computer begins with a search

request. Search engines make our forays into the web more efficient;

they render its “absolute variety,” in Gibson‟s phrase, user-friendly. To

5 Westlake ultimately argues that this performance is an engagment with the

panoptic gaze that has resistant as well as critical potential. For a more general

overview of the networking practices of Generation Facebook (and one less

committed to discerning emancipatory potential), see Leistert and Röhle.

M. MICHAELA HAMPF AND MARYANN SNYDER-KÖRBER 16

do this, they do not simply rank retrieved information according to

frequency of cross-reference: the original search engine model imported

from academic practices for determining research impact (and, from

there, determining tenure or funding worthiness, for example). Results

are now refined according to location through Intel Part Number (IPN)

and user preferences that have already been tracked by browser cookies.

This newer practice is known as “personalization,” and since December

2009 it has been the standard setting for all users of the market-dominant

search engine Google. This customization can be turned off, as Google

support duly notes, but not all consumers who use Google are

necessarily aware that it had been turned on at all (cf. “Personalized

search for everyone”). Thus, as Eli Pariser writes in The Filter Bubble

(2011), “[t]he algorhythms that orchestrate our ads are starting to

orchestrate our lives” (9). And they do not lead our lives into new

directions according to Peiser and other observers of networked

practices. On the contrary, internet searches mirror back to us what we

have already written, read, or bought and, thus, ultimately what we

already feel, think, and believe. To highlight this dynamic is not

necessarily to impute conspiratorial energies to Google, making them the

latest successor to Bentham‟s panoptical ambitions. The new setting

optimizes the ordering powers of the search engine as a navigational

filter. It also, of course, allows for more precisely targeted advertising.

Both are central, hardly hidden business objectives of the enterprise.6 In

the larger scheme of things, what the debates about search engine

personalization really illustrate is how misapprehension of a tool skews

our view of the larger medium it gives us access to and, thus, in decisive

ways shapes.7

The ultimate irony of technology in our currently globalized world is

that the larger world it apparently makes available has actually tended to

create a “turn within,” as Susan J. Douglas has aptly described it (620).

We do not look out, but increasingly inward in ways which work to

maintain a conservative or, at least, complacent status quo. The historian

and communications studies scholar Douglas specifically concerns

6 One further observes that the new personalization policy is “sold” to the general

user as an extension of privileges to a wider clientele that uses the search engine à

la carte rather than through member login: “Today we‟re helping people get

better search results by extending Personalized Search to signed-out users

worldwide, in forty languages” (Horling and Kulick). 7 In addition to Pariser, see also Carr, Morozov, Röhle, Turkle, and Vaidhyanathan,

The Googlization of Everything as further examples of recent critical reflection on

these issues.

Breaking Your Historical Neck 17

herself with trends in television since 2001: strongly local news

reporting, unscripted “reality” programming, and an intensified celebrity

culture all keep our attention primed to domestic and consumer realms

rather than political conflicts waged in the larger world beyond the

Kardashian family compound. The internet, as commonly used and

increasingly critiqued, enacts a similarly ironic turn from horizon-

broadening promise to opinion-confirming feedback. And it is this

seemingly objective but actually highly subjective, interest-shaped

technological medium that the fabulously successful C.S.I. franchise has

raised to the ultimate, and ultimately comforting, authority. The series—

whether staged in the neon glow of Las Vegas, under steamy orange-

tinted Miami skies, or in cool New York shadings—seems to follow the

formula for the mystery or detective genre familiar to us since the

nineteenth century and Edgar Allan Poe‟s ratiocinations. In truth, it

renders the ratiocination redundant by transforming the networked

apparatus into the source of all knowledge. Investigators begin to

function primarily as collectors of information which the technical

equipment they work with then processes with maximum efficiency (and

a generous dose of special effects brouhaha). A device as common as the

computer becomes a rich visual spectacle when its touch screen leaves

the keyboard to hover in space before the user. The computer desktop is

projected in sharply contrasted layers into a low-lit room so that human

subjects and technical devices both share the same dramatically

darkened space and have equivalent dimensions. Even autopsies become

virtual: the corpse is projected and transformed with a mouse click,

allowing investigators to not only zoom in on but actually enter body

cavities. The enlargement of IT-equipment in particular can be read as

the visual expression of an increasingly cooperative relation. Technology

is no longer subordinated to the role of a visually negligible tool. It

rather functions as an at least equal, if not superior, co-actor in crime

scene analysis.

The body remains the base and necessary evidence. Our responses to

the series involves moments of shock and disgust in view of mangled

body parts, but also awe and admiration at the apparatus employed to

extract meaning out of the grisly. As in the case of Adams‟s encounter

with the dynamo, there is a bodily loop to our response. We are hooked

into the series through basic affects which become reworked into more

specific emotional stances such as commiseration for the wounded, but

also reverence for the machine that puts together the pieces of the crime

puzzle. Here, even more prominently, however, we detect a social effect

that bears not solely on individual bodies and their privileges, but rather

M. MICHAELA HAMPF AND MARYANN SNYDER-KÖRBER 18

the body politic. Response to the multi-colored, human-sized computer

interface is not quite the transcendence which Nye links to the great

engineering projects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: ever more

towering skyscrapers, daring suspension bridges, and the harnessing of

the Colorado River at Hoover Dam in addition to the turn-of-the century

motors which so impressed Adams.8 C.S.I. does, however, tap into

anxieties about and concurrent desires for social order. By putting an

efficient machine at the side of justice authorities who, in the wake of the

Rodney King beating that provoked the 1992 Los Angeles Riots and

other scandals of the last decades, have been increasingly criticized, the

series indirectly restores faith in the established order. It also lends

support to that order‟s extension from street-side monitoring to all-

encompassing archives and regimes of observation. For the computer to

identify the criminal, it requires a storehouse of general and highly

personal information. C.S.I. investigators tap into databanks that store

everything. They have instant access to, for example, the innocent plop

of a soda can being opened. Other databanks yield more tendentious

evidence: fingerprints, DNA profiles, and hours and hours of videotaped

footage.9 C.S.I. stages technology in such a prominent manner to

produce visually interesting television, not to directly promote the

panopticon. In the process, however, it allows the viewer, who is also

almost inevitably a user of these technologies in their less spectacular

forms, to imagine improved collective functioning by means of such

monitoring and, yet more importantly, the processing of that

information. The deeper appeal of the series is arguably the vision of a 8 Nye‟s most important discussion of these issues can be found in American

Technological Sublime (1994). His further publications, however, persistently

concern themselves with large-scale projects like the Hoover Dam, the discourses

surrounding these endeavors, and the questions these spectacular technologies

raised for contemporary observers and now pose for historians. See, for example,

Electrifying America (1990), Narratives and Spaces (1997), Consuming Power

(1998), America as Second Creation (2003), and Technology Matters (2006). 9 For good general introductions to the dynamic of C.S.I. from the vantage point of

television and media studies, see Allen and Kompare. A thought-provoking

discussion of the “cultural work” performed by the series is offered by Mark

Seltzer in True Crime (2006). While on the surface True Crime continues the

discussion of commiserative “wound culture” central to the predecessor and

companion study Serial Killers (1998), Seltzer‟s observations come to suggest a

turn from commiseration to what one might term a “technology-authority

culture.” The role of DNA analyses in the discovery of unjustified legal

executions is another elucidative case in point, although here the larger authority

matrix is arguably remixed rather than simply confirmed. On these developments,

see Krimsky and Simoncelli, Garrett.

Breaking Your Historical Neck 19

fully effective social justice system which Jerry Bruckheimer and his

production team develop through their use of technology as a not merely

visually impressive, but infallible analytical apparatus. Imagining

“better” communities, from this perspective, hinges on imagining

optimized because ever more systemically observing and archiving

technologies. This message reaches and appeals to publics which

statistically tend to bear the prejudiced brunt of that policing system. In

percental terms, C.S.I. actually has come to have a larger viewership

among African Americans than in the general US population (Nielsen

Company): a development beginning in the 2006/2007 season that the

Nielsen rating agency found noteworthy enough to justify a press release

(“African-American TV Usage”).

Before our television screens we are thus, like Adams faced with the

dynamos, compelled to consider questions for which we find no

immediate answers. Between Adams‟s exhibition visits in 1893 and

1900 and our viewing experiences in 2012, however, a few things have

become clearer. We still need to ask “did it pull or did it push?” Adams‟s

own example suggests that the physical cogs and gears feed into the

equally important imaginative dimensions of technology‟s impact. One

must, however, further interrogate the rhetorics of technology through

analysis of technological practice, eyeing constructions of access and

mastery, for example, for what they leave out as much as for what such

discourses opine. “Technology is slippery,” as historian and American

studies scholar Carolyn Thomas de la Peña has noted (“Slow and Low

Progress” 916) and such slippages make it more slippery still. It is for

this reason that questions of technology compel our attention and

analytical energies: in the humanities as a whole, but with long-standing

insistence in American studies.

In this opening chapter, we aim to give a sense of the larger field and

longer history of thinking about the technological in its varied

interfaces—with the body, with difference regimens, with the individual

and the collective, the concrete and imagined—from the vantage points

of literature, history, cultural, and, not least, media, feminist, and gender

studies that meet within the frame of American studies. These reflections

serve as an introduction to this volume. We also hope that they might

offer a starting point for further conversations: in the classroom, but also

between disciplines and modes of disciplinary thinking. Such an

endeavor brings distinct possibilities for disagreement with it. In

sketching out pertinent backgrounds, drawing attention to lines of

inquiry, and suggesting grounds for common discussion we aim to

M. MICHAELA HAMPF AND MARYANN SNYDER-KÖRBER 20

provide a foundation that pushes the discussion towards productive

insights and away from Adamsesque whiplash.

The Techno-Cultural Imaginary in Rewired Fields

The intersection between technological developments, artistic production

from the novel as the high end of the cultural capital spectrum to more

mass-appeal genres such as the television serial, and the preoccupations

of particular cultural spheres and time periods have proven a remarkably

productive ground for scholarly inquiry in American studies. Half a

century ago, Leo Marx laid the foundation for a key area of Americanist

scholarship when he highlighted the “symbolic properties of the machine

image—its capacity to embrace a whole spectrum of meanings ranging

from a specific class of objects at one end to an abstract metaphor of

value at the other” (164). In Marx‟s influential account, the machine as

symbol offers a point of identification and thus cohesion for emerging

narratives of national self-conception. A product like C.S.I. arguably

renders technology spectacular and omniscient as a way to address and

sooth the anxieties which threaten national conception at the current

moment. In each case, the machine is related to fact, but more

importantly figures possibility. In between these two dimensions of

technological discourse lie a multitude of further issues and questions. In

an important 2006 special issue of American Quarterly devoted to

“Rewiring the „Nation,‟” Siva Vaidhyanathan joins his co-editor de la

Peña in arguing that the long-standing interest in symbolic uses of

technological deployments in American studies needs to be

supplemented through more precise materialist inquiry. In the

introduction to this collaboration, he highlights issues of access, socio-

cultural effect, and the complexities of interaction between innovations

and historical context:

Which members of a society get to decide which technologies are developed,

bought, sold, and used? […] What are the cultural and economic assumptions

that influence the ways a technology works in the world, and what unintended

consequences can arise from such assumptions? [….] Do technologies spark

“revolutions,” or do concepts like “revolution” necessarily raise the

expectations and levels of effects of technologies? (557).10

10

This special issue was consequently reissued as a print volume under the same

title in 2007. All references to the essays put together by de la Peña and

Vaidhyanathan in this piece are taken from the original journal publication. See

also the earlier 1996 special issue of Amerikastudien/American Studies on

Breaking Your Historical Neck 21

Vaidhyanathan uses the term “techno-cultural imagination” to describe

this analytical frame. In doing so, he offers not only a vocabulary, but an

argument that our project also aims to follow and further articulate. The

model‟s strength lies in its double focus which, as we argue in

concurrence with Vaidhyanathan, de la Peña, and other scholars working

in a new revitalized Americanist-inflected technology studies, allows us

to hone in on the interface between the actual and imaginative

dimensions of technology development. Such attention promises not

merely a more nuanced insight into technology‟s place in the modern

world and within modern lives, but arguably into our conceptions of

modernity itself.

The modern as a historical and conceptual formation constitutes the

larger horizon of the case studies presented within this volume. The

approaches used in individual contributions draw on a variety of

disciplines within the humanities. History, media, cultural, literary, and

gender studies are represented with varying intersections between the

fields. The historian Olaf Stieglitz uses US-American films of the 1930s

as historical sources, for example, while Luis Longarela as a student of

film explores the longer history of reflection on the cinema as a means to

interrogate the analytical apparatus of his discipline. In another instance,

a literary and cultural studies scholar of American culture, Ruth Mayer,

teams up with Brigitte Weingart, a colleague who works within a

German studies context, to analyze viral tropes at the millennium. An

interest in US-American developments and their ramifications in a wider

international frame and discursive contexts nonetheless brings these

varying disciplinary perspectives together. This is in part a result of the

affiliations of this volume‟s editors—one a historian and the other a

literary studies scholar who both work in a multidisciplinary institution

devoted to North American studies—but most strongly due to the

pedagogical project which evolved into this essay collection. In the

winter term 2007/2008 we put together an interdisciplinary seminar

organized around issues of the body, gender, and technology. One aim

was to revisit classic positions, such as those developed by Marx, in

order to test out their continued applicability as well as the possibility of

productive revision. As we set up the syllabus, literary studies and

history determined the initial reading list and discussion trajectory. In

“Technology and American Culture” edited by Benesch. Further arguments for a

technologically inflected study of American culture through cross-disciplinary

networking have recently been articulated by Cortiel and Gerhardt as well as

Schäfer-Wünsche.

M. MICHAELA HAMPF AND MARYANN SNYDER-KÖRBER 22

practice, however, this double disciplinary lens was further refracted and

complicated by the varying analytical frameworks our students used.

Participants in the course included economics and political science

majors, students with an emphasis in sociology and cultural studies in

addition to young history and literary studies scholars and several guest

students. Some students were passionately interested in theory, others

confessed a deep aversion to anything carrying this label. Similarly,

gender was a central thinking coordinate for some and an analytical non sequitur to others. We did not have any physicists. Astronomists were

also lacking. In short, the venture stayed firmly on the humanities-side of

Snow‟s cultural divide. Nevertheless, one would be hard pressed to find

a more heterogeneous humanities and social studies mix.

It was, on the one hand, a challenge. On the other hand, you can say

that it was just another day at the office. American studies is a

multidisciplinary, in its most interesting moments a genuinely cross-

disciplinary venture particularly open to collaboration beyond the

narrower bounds of academic compartmentalization. The field directs

the energies of different disciplines to an issue or problem pertaining to

“America” as a wider concept or allows for the thinking through of

wider issues using US-American examples or conceptions as starting

point or analytical lens. Different perspectives can thus play out

alongside but also potentially in interaction with each other. In his

reflections on American studies “at the crossroads” of disciplinary

paradigms, Philip J. Deloria highlights the field‟s propensity to promote

inquiry “centered in a discipline” but at the same time able to “„cross

[…]‟ over to borrow tools, metaphors, concepts, or questions from

another field” (4). Deloria‟s case for the interdisciplinary strength of the

Americanist endeavor suggests that interdisciplinary conversation offers

a useful supplement to monodisciplinary insight. Organizational

sociologists and economists see interdisciplinary heterogeneity as a

catalyst for innovation (cf. Gibson/Waller/Mason). Our experience with

the disciplinary mix of the seminar and the international conference

[machine] body.gender.technology in February 2008 which was a further

offshoot of the project, however, has suggested to us that a key

advantage of interdisciplinary conversation lies in discord. Our

reflections begin with Langley and Adams‟s visit to the Paris Exhibition

not just because its recollection offers a discussion of the machine and its

role in our conception of the modern pertinent to the issues which the

volume takes on. The episode also illuminates an approach to these

issues which we have found productive: agreeing to disagree and taking

it from there. The perspectival disjunction between the historian Adams

Breaking Your Historical Neck 23

and the scientist Langley is, after all, what goads Adams into an account

of modernity and the machine which, since the publication of The Education in 1918, has become a touchstone moment for further

thinking about modern conditions and the various ways in which they

are shaped by technological developments.

Disciplinary Diversions

The disagreements which came up in our seminar discussions ultimately

had less to do with what we saw as significant in the texts and issues

taken on in the course of the semester: therapeutic and lethal uses of

electricity, telegraphy, images of the “body electric,” narratives about

men‟s and women‟s work at the machine, science fiction in various

frames, and shifts from mechanic to “machinic” notions of the body as

developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in works such as their

Anti-Œdipus (1972) were among the key discussion blocks. More

striking were divergent ways in which we arrived at our conclusions

about what was significant. Literary studies aims to hone awareness of

representational strategies. Why this turn of phrase and not the other?

What difference does a particular narrative perspective make for

response to a text, for the response to technology it offers? How does a

narrative play with interpretive possibility through the construction of its

figures, shaping of temporal structure, and evocation of sensational

detail as well as the deployment of historical resonance. A post-

structuralist historiography also considers (and problematizes)

representational strategies. As Hayden White has argued most ardently

from Metahistory (1973) on, history too is a narrative. Yet, there is a

difference because (hi)stories are drawn from different sources in each

discipline. Historians deal with texts that are ultimately located in

archives set up as depositories for the “indefinite accumulation of time”

and knowledge, as Foucault has phrased it (“Of Other Spaces” 234).

Although historical texts are constructed in the same way as literary

ones, the depository limits the narratives generally read by students of

history (cf. Finzsch). Participants in the course thus found themselves

reading not only more, but different kinds of texts than they were

accustomed to. One result of this reading list remix was that we all

developed an acuter sense of “the arsenal of imaginative possibility”

technological innovations and practices afforded across the available

archives, to quote the apt formulation of seminar participant Erin Rieser.

Archive crossing, however, also put the question of how disciplines read

M. MICHAELA HAMPF AND MARYANN SNYDER-KÖRBER 24

their materials into the foreground: of discussion and, again,

disagreement. Classroom conversations frequently oscillated between

micro-analyses of textual strategy and macro-perspectives on media and

social change. In the process, we came to realize that literary and history

studies in their standard frames were perhaps not enough to address the

issues at hand. The insights of cultural studies, media studies, and

particularly film studies with their long-standing interest in apparatus

and medium became increasingly important as the seminar progressed

and segued into the conference. This two-day event extended the

heterogeneous dialogue of the course in another direction. The Masters

students, emerging scholars in American Studies, presented and

discussed their ideas with established Americanists as well as scholars

from other disciplines. From seminar to conference, sessions were a

testing out of ideas rather than a rote repetition of established points

which, as another participant confessed in a hallway conversation,

sometimes made “my mind hurt.”

The volume, which is the final print result of seminar, conference,

and the conversations that developed from these occasions aims to

continue this tradition of exploratory dialogue with its potential for

productive disagreement. This interdisciplinary exercise unfolds with a

particular focus on the “American”—both as concrete social context of

the developments considered as well as a conceptual coordinate—which

allows for Americanist insight, but also the collaboration across the

disciplines which is a strength of the field as it allows us to explore the

making of modernity both in and beyond the nation.

The Land of Futurity in an Age of Machinery

Adams is not alone in imagining modernity in terms of the machine.

Indeed, the linkage is a topos in discussions of American and wider

Western social conditions from the latter half of the nineteenth well into

the twentieth century. Walt Whitman develops, not surprisingly, a

rhapsodic lyrical take on technological developments and the

reconfiguration of time, space, and the imagination they enable. In

“Years of the Modern” (1865/1881) the poet sings:

Years of the modern! […]//

Never was average man, his soul, more energetic, more like God,

Lo, how he urges and urges, leaving the masses no rest!

His daring foot is on land and sea everywhere, he colonized the

Pacific, the archipelagoes,

Breaking Your Historical Neck 25

With the steamship, the electric telegraph, the newspaper, the

wholesale engines of war,

With these and the world-spreading factories he interlinks all

geography, all lands.

What whispers are these O lands, running ahead of you, passing

Under the seas?//

The unperform‟d, more gigantic than ever, advance, advance upon me.

(489-90, 1, 15-20, 29-309).

In his essay “Signs of the Times” (1858) Thomas Carlyle, in contrast,

huffs:

Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated

contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps and accompaniments,

some cunning, abbreviating is in readiness. […] The shuttle drops from the

fingers of the weaver and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster. The sailor

furls his sail, and lays down his oar; and bids a strong unwearied servant, on

vaporous wings, to bear him through the waters. […] There is no end to

machinery. […] For all earthly, and for some unearthly purposes, we have

machines and mechanic furtherances; for mincing our cabbages; for casting us

into magnetic sleep. […] [N]othing can resist us. We war with rude Nature;

and by our resistless engines, come off always victorious and loaded with

spoils.

In search of a defining term for “this age of ours,” Carlyle summarizes,

“we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional,

Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all other, the Mechanical Age. It

is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of the

word.”

Carlyle‟s phrasing is significant. Machinery “in every outward and

inward sense” expands his account of increasing reliance on technical

helpmates. The notion of the machine becomes the bridge to an analysis

of broader cultural, social transformations. A key “inward” turn of

machine use according to Carlyle concerns mentality. Both individuals

and collectives have come to value efficiency and flexibility above other

characteristics. Human values are thus molded to the standards of

industrial production: a development which concerns Carlyle and his

contemporaries as much as the new “outward” senses of machinery. In

this second turn, the machine model shifts into the larger social sphere:

forward-moving, productive, victorious, as Carlyle puts it, over time,

space, and natural forces. In conceptions of a social machinery, material

structures merge with less visible but no less determining constructions

of space and class in order to create a well-functioning whole. Not

merely the human body, but the social body could be understood as what

M. MICHAELA HAMPF AND MARYANN SNYDER-KÖRBER 26

the German scientist and graphic artist Fritz Kahn termed “an industrial

palace” (cf. Debschitz). Such a process potentially produces an efficient

citizenry and workforce. In its equation of the human subject with a

component part, however, the notion also veers to the dystopian. Not just

the work process, but the self and collective become Taylorized:

efficient, but reduced to a cog in the production machine. This is harder

to sing about ecstatically as “[y]ears of the modern […]//[…] leaving the

masses no rest!”11

In an essay of 1898 Woodrow Wilson approaches the turn-of-the-

century American city in the spirit of Carlyle‟s earlier critique. At the

time Wilson was certainly politically interested, but he was not yet fully

and professionally involved in the business of national politics. It is

rather as a Princeton law and economics professor that Wilson

underscores the importance and challenge of “The Making of the

Nation” under current modern conditions in a series of articles for The

Atlantic Monthly. He emphasizes the importance of adapting

governmental forms to create national cohesion, but also highlights the

dangers of the urban for creating cohesion out of human norming.

Reflecting “On Being Human,” he writes:

[T]he city curtails man of his wholeness, specializes him, quickens some

powers, stunts others, gives him a sharp edge, and a temper like that of steel,

makes him unfit for nothing so much as to sit still. […] It is a place of little

task, of narrowed function, of aggregate and not of individual strength. The

great machine dominates its little parts, and its Society is as much of a

machine as its business. (322).

It is not just America‟s regional diversity, but industrially induced forms

of homogeneity which, Wilson concludes, we have to take account of

when creating government and community in “our own age” with its

intersection of machinery and the “native forces” of man (329). Wilson

initially makes this point as an academic. That the text is reissued as part

of a bound collection in 1916, at roughly the mid-point of Wilson‟s two-

term presidency, tilts the opinion towards policy. The title page of the

1916 edition lists the author‟s qualifications as “Ph.D., Litt.D., LL.D,

President of the United States.”12

11

On the wider cultural impact of Frederick Winslow Taylor‟s notions of “scientific

management,” see Banta and Guillén. 12

Wilson earned his Doctorate of Philosophy degree in history and political science

from Johns Hopkins University. His Litt.D. (Doctorate of Letters) and LL.D.

(Doctorate of Law) degrees were honorary. For a useful biography that highlights

Breaking Your Historical Neck 27

This official coloring gives the Wilson example particular interest. Its

general tone and diagnosis, however, are typical. Culling The Atlantic Monthly (1857-), The North American Review (1815-1940, 1964-), or in

more popular registers, Scribner’s Magazine (1887-1939) or The Cosmopolitan (1886-) around the turn to the twentieth century yields a

plethora of examples that could be ranged alongside Wilson‟s

commentary, almost ad infinitum. In each instance, rapidly increasing

industrialization produced not only material goods, but presented social

observers, before and after Adams, with an analytical resource:

innovations like the electric dynamo and processes such as assembly-line

production which seemed to make the difficult differentiation between

older social conditions and new world orders perceptible and then, in

turn, the stuff of criticism or praise. These, however, are only the simpler

uses to which the analogy machine-modernity can be put. In his work,

Marx highlights a further potential function. The American studies

pioneer considers the cultural work performed by an understanding of

the modern age as the machine age in terms of national consolidation in

the nineteenth century. Developments such as the much discussed

intercontinental railroad both connect the country in a literal sense—

allowing for easier travel between distant coasts and thus transporting

people as well as goods, services, and ideas into a more intimate circuit

of exchange—and imaginatively by providing national ambitions with a

stirring symbol of forward motion, speed, and technical power. Marita

Sturken and Douglas Thomas have noted that technology and the future

are commonly linked, even synonymous, in the popular imagination (6).

Joel Dinerstein takes up and refines the point: “it is more accurate to say

that technology is synonymous with faith in the future—both in the

future as better world and as one in which the United States bestrides the

globe as a colossus” (“Technology and its Discontents” 569, emphasis in

original).

Even in the railroad, the most central faith and nation-building

technology in nineteenth-century America, ambivalence manifests itself.

Rail travel brought with it new illnesses caused by accidents or simply

by the “competitiveness and intensity of civilized life” (Ashley 183).

Ailments such as “railway brain,” “Railway spine” or “neurasthenia,” as

classified in 1888 by the American doctor George Miller Beard, were

characterized by exhaustion of the nervous system brought about by the

conditions of modern life itself: steam power, railway traffic, and

the interplay between Wilson‟s academic background and his political projects,

see Maynard.

M. MICHAELA HAMPF AND MARYANN SNYDER-KÖRBER 28

urbanization. Such responses do not contradict, but rather demonstrate

why the railroad is particularly suited to the function it takes on in

nineteenth-century US-American national discourse. The railroad

demonstrates and enables technological, economic, and future-directed

power, while its risks and limitations add a critical-reflective overlay to

discussions of these developments. Trains are bound to land routes; the

continental divide quite literally “brakes” the extension of track

networks and thus, in North America at least, keeps the rails largely

within national bounds.

This restriction does not apply to other key technological

developments in the nineteenth century: foremost among them the

telegraph. The medium reconfigured standing notions of time and space

within the contemporary technocultural imaginary. In reality it first, and

long foremost, reduced the distance between elites. Given its influence

on the global news market, it also altered the shape of the public sphere

more generally and globally than the continent-bound railroad. Improved

means of global transport and communication thus allowed “access to

events beyond people‟s experience” (Rantanen 499), under such

conditions, as modernism scholar Michael North has commented, “even

the sedentary might be mobilized” (qtd. in Ramazani 26). Between the

global cities of the time, wired communication is nearly immediate,

whether the message is sent between Boston and New York or New

York and London. This quality has sparked the highly problematic

description of telegraphy as “The Victorian Internet” (Standage).

International telegraphy has arguably had an impact comparable to that

of the invention of movable type printing by Johannes Gutenberg in the

fifteenth century. It was, however, never a mass medium or one that has

changed everyday social communication to the extent that the internet

has. Although Samuel Morse, inventor of the Morse code, speaks in this

context about a diffusion of ideas “with the speed of thought” which

widens, but also consolidates the public sphere, the cost of even a short

telegram limited this sphere to very few users in the globalizing cities

and marketplaces. Morse credits the telegraph with “making, in fact, one

neighborhood of the whole country” (qtd. in Czitrom 11-12).13

Considering the range of such technology, however, it becomes clear

that the American neighborhood is rather part of a “glocal village,”

simultaneously global and local, structured by communication

technologies still bearing the mark of older structures of social

interconnection.

13

On this idea, see also John (5-24).

Breaking Your Historical Neck 29

Writing in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the novelist

Henry James anticipates key points made by later theorists of

globalization: intensified trade, travel, communication, and consumption

has made “the globe small” (36), but not necessarily more harmonious.

In “An Animated Conversation,” a dramatically staged essay of 1899,

James states the case as follows:

Newspapers, telegraphs, trains, fast steamers, all the electricities and

publicities that are playing over us like a perpetual thunder-storm, have made

us live in a common medium, which is far from being a non-conductor. The

world has become a big hotel, the Grand Hotel of the Nations, and we meet—

I mean the nations meet—on the stairs and at the table d’hôte. You know the

faces at the table d’hôte, one is never enthusiastic about them; they give on

one‟s nerves. (81-82)

The passage glosses the general situation, suggests the economies of

privilege at work (Grand Hotel is not an international youth hostel), and

draws attention to the increased possibilities for strife which intimacy

brings. Important for these interactions, however, is not just the

“common medium” generated by shared information, but the more

fundamental commonality such networks generate. Becoming the

equivalent of hotel visitors means living under mobile rather than rooted

conditions. It also involves the apprehension of a standardized code of

manners and behavior. In a hotel world, it is not just the accommo-

dations which are set up in a similar way. The people who take up

residence in the hotel rooms are, in a certain sense, also standardized

subjects.14

This is a different homogenization than the one Wilson imagines

being ingrained through the impersonal assembly line and tenement

living, but is an important factor in creating the growing sense of world-

wide intimacy James underscores. Historian Christopher Bayly speaks of

rising “global uniformities,” visible at the level of institutions such as

churches or justice systems down to “bodily practices. The ways in

which people dressed, spoke, ate, and managed relations” (1, emphasis

in the original). These dimensions have to be taken into account if we

wish to grasp globalization, modernization, and the place of nation in an

intimately interconnected world.

14

On the hotel as a characteristic “fieldsite” of globalized modernity, see Clifford

(25, 30-36)

M. MICHAELA HAMPF AND MARYANN SNYDER-KÖRBER 30

Transnationalizing American Studies: Connections and their

Differentials

Strictly speaking, uniformity is something different than homogeneity.

Ideas and practices are inevitably altered as they are transported beyond

the cultural context of their inception. This is a point which Edward Said

has influentially made regarding theories, but which applies to almost

any other cultural product. Social science-focused research of the last

two decades offers a treasure trove of case studies in what one might

term “differential” globalization: the spread of global uniformities with

marked local differences.15

One classic example is Trobriand cricket.

This indigenous adaptation of a British sport combines pitching and

batting with dance, song, and feasting. It is a productive colonial cultural

collaboration in the eyes of Gary Kildea and Jerry Leach: the filmmakers

behind the documentary Trobriand Cricket (1979). Or, if we follow

Homi K. Bhabha and James Clifford, it is a form of post-colonial

mimicry. “The gentleman‟s game,” as Clifford reminds us, was “brought

by British missionaries about the time [cultural anthropologist

Bronislaw] Malinowski was on the scene.” It has since “been taken over

and made new. Now it is ludic warfare, extravagant sexual display,

political competition and alliance, parody” (qtd. in Oloruntoba 255).

The marketing of Barbie to the Indian subcontinent presents us with

another elucidative example. Mattel wraps the blonde California girl in

sari, adds a red bindi, and puts her in packaging that promises that

“Barbie is totally at home in India” (Grewal 81). This is, on the one

hand, a superficial re-packaging of a standardized product. On the other

hand, this repackaging does not simply signify Barbie‟s cultural

conversion. It can rather be read as a reaction to mimicry as a subversive

strategy. Here, adjustment serves the needs of neoliberal capitalism.

Barbie was “born” in Southern California. She is now, however,

manufactured in Asia for export to the rest of the world. The doll is thus

a global product both in terms of production and consumption. Yet she

preserves a national profile open enough for adaptation to the Indian

context. Inderpal Grewal comments: “Barbie in a sari […] suggested that

difference as a homogenized national stereotype, and as a marker of race

and gender difference, could be recuperated by multinational

15

For further discussions of these dynamics, albeit traveling under varying

theoretical headers, see Étienne Balibar‟s reflections on “differentiation” tending

to discriminatory practices in Europe as “borderland” and James Clifford‟s

discussion of “discrepant cosmopolitanisms” and diasporas (36, emphasis in the

original; 244-77).

Breaking Your Historical Neck 31

corporations: that the national and the foreign could exist in this global

economy” (82).

Given such dynamics, anthropologist and globalization theorist Arjun

Appadurai suggests that we think of global interconnection technologies

as “instruments of homogenization” (42). They do not create world-wide

sameness. Disjunctions mark both of the examples sketched out above.

For all of the differences such adaptations highlight, however, they also

generate tendencies among media users to not only know the same

things, but know them in the same ways, that is through repeatable

framings and consistent emphases. Cultural globalization, from this

perspective, is not simply a question of knowing and seeing in an ever

more regimented way, but perhaps even more significantly doing things

according to increasingly similar patterns which, in a further twist of

globalization logic, both override geographic distance and cultural

differences (whether one is in Cambridge or New Guinea everyone has a

cricket bat) and renders local particulars (starched white shirt versus bare

chest) more visible.

Thus what we have come to understand as globalization crosses

borders and for this very reason presents a field in which national

categories and their status can be deployed and negotiated. The World‟s

Fairs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offer one agonal

variant on this dynamic. The exhibitions displayed the characteristic

products and the most up-to-date developments which the international

community offered. And the fairs offered various international and

globally operating networks of scientists the chance to meet.

International cooperation could be coordinated and global standards of

science (such as electrical standards) could be discussed. At the same

time, these events became competitive spaces in which nations displayed

their national progress as progression beyond their competitors.

Dinerstein‟s point about technology‟s role in the negotiation of national

ambition—imagining national greatness and directly staking a claim

within global frames—quite clearly bears itself out at the fairgrounds (cf.

Greenhalgh and Rydell). The Chicago‟s dynamo exhibit might have been

more extensive and connected to the overall conception of the fair: it

provided electricity for the entire fairgrounds. The Galerie des machines,

however, had a bigger single dynamo and so on. The pavilions thus

functioned as technology exhibits and the fairs served as forums for

international cooperation. Both cooperation and exhibition, however,

M. MICHAELA HAMPF AND MARYANN SNYDER-KÖRBER 32

could become involved in performance of “national grandeur” and their

dramas of techno(national) competition (Buck-Morss 89).16

The last decades of globalization theory, newer modes not just of

American studies (cf. esp. Pease, Rowe, and, most extensively, Giles)

but also approaches to the so-called “new” English literatures have

honed our awareness of the crossovers between transnational flows and

national status (see, for example, Ashcroft).17

The World Fairs illustrate

these entanglements on a grand scale, Trobriand cricket and Indian

Barbie brings these dynamics down to the smaller scales of sport and

consumerism. The connection can, however, become even more

intimate: more specifically bodily in the sense of “bodily practices”

which Bayly underscores in his The Birth of the Modern World (2004) as

the most significant of the “global uniformities” brought about by the

“instruments of homogenization” which Appadurai identifies as the

ambivalent motors of globalization (Bayly 1, Appadurai 42).

In a speech given before the Société de Psychologie Française in

1935 and published the following year in the society‟s journal, Marcel

Mauss addresses these issues by reflecting on “Techniques of the Body.”

In the process, Mauss gives an account of uniformization through

globalization. He also, however, draws out the potentials such processes

hold for cultural hermeneutics. His inquiry begins with an anecdote.

Unexpectedly laid up in a New York hospital during his 1926 visit to the

United States, the anthropologist used bed rest as an opportunity for

observation and analysis. In particular, the nurses caring for him caught

his attention. “It was a kind of revelation,” as he recalled a decade later:

I wondered where previously I had seen girls walking as my nurses walked. I

had the time to think about it. At last I realised that it was at the cinema.

Returning to France, I noticed how common this gait was, especially in Paris;

16

For wider-ranging discussions of the competitive as well as cooperative dynamics

involved in national and global technopolitics into the twentieth century, see

Crawford/Shinn/Sverker; Edgerton; McNeill and McNeill; and Saraiva. In a

recent article, Simone Müller-Pohl shows how thoroughly entrepreneurs and

engineers engaged in submarine telegraphy transgressed the national framing,

even playing with it, when employing nationalist rhetoric to sustain a

transnational system of global communication. 17

Further discussions of such dynamics in the context of world literatures in English

(an arguably better header than “New English Literatures,” as the latter tends to

give this formation a far too short-term genealogy) include Boehmer, Brydon,

Gikandi, King and the 2010 essay collection Rerouting the Postcolonial put

together by Wilson, Sandru, and Welsh in which Bill Ashcroft‟s essay

“Transnation” can be found (72-85). We thank Kathy-Ann Tan for her insight into

these references.

Breaking Your Historical Neck 33

the girls were French and they too were walking in this way. In fact,

American walking fashions had begun to arrive over here, thanks to the

cinema. This was an idea I could generalise. The positions of the arms and

hands while walking form a social idiosyncrasy, they are not simply the

product of some purely individual, almost completely psychical arrangements

and mechanisms (80).

Mauss concludes his “generalisation” with the remark: “Thus there

exists an education in walking” (81). This idea of a training of corporeal

habitus through modern representation technologies refines his idea of

“techniques of the body”—the specific means and ways by which “men

know how to use their bodies” (78)—which is the underlying theoretical

concern driving his observations of walking women, swimming children,

and differing national styles of digging and marching as well as table

manners. In his cinematically “educated” nurses, he recognizes a habit

that crosses national, cultural bounds. The real observational payoff,

however, comes when this global uniformity allows him to make out

local difference: the very different walking style and, thereby, wider

cultural habitus of the “girl who has been raised in a convent” (80).

Mauss‟s anecdote, and the argument he develops from it, is interesting

for a further reason. His primary concern with technique brings his

observations into productive dialogue with Bayly‟s later reflections on

the uniformization of “bodily practice.” In the particular emphasis on the

body in relation to technique and technology, however, Mauss takes up

and constructively nuances the constitutive interconnection between the

body and technology. One can say that one “makes” the other.

Technology can most broadly be defined as the material attempt to

extend human, but most particularly bodily power (cf. McLuhan). The

results are specific, material innovations—machete, match, mobile

phone—as well as techné—ways of doing things with these objects and

our bodies in the world. The various “machineries” of modernity we

have touched on so far—the internet, the urban, the railway, telegraphy,

or cinema—do not so much extend the body. Arguable more important is

how they shape our bodily practices and awareness as a kind of feedback

structure. This is a process which carries implications beyond the

question of whether we walk with our hands placed firmly at our sides—

as visible sign of our convent upbringing—or swinging loosely—and

thus betraying time spent at the cinema instead of the chapel.18

18

Early twentieth-century historian Lewis Mumford underscores this difference in

his study Technics and Civilization (1934): “The tools and utensils used during

the greater part of man‟s history were, in the main, extensions of his own

organism: they did not have—what is more important they did not seem to have—

M. MICHAELA HAMPF AND MARYANN SNYDER-KÖRBER 34

Bodies: From Mechanic to Machinic, from Difference to Different

Materialisms

The body is more than material. The Western tradition has not

necessarily consistently valued the flesh, but in the last centuries come to

consider the body as a key site of identity production. Painting this

history in the broadest of strokes, one can point to the anti-authoritarian

turn of the Enlightenment. In the emerging discourses of anthropology,

anatomy, and aesthetics the body advanced to a central organon of

human knowledge. The drive to better understand the body in the

eighteenth century brought forth various analogies and oppositional

constructions. Drawing on empiricist tenets, materialists like Julien

Offray de La Mettrie envisioned the body as a quasi-mechanical

assembly of sensual triggers and emotional, cognitive responses.

Differences laid bare by the dissector‟s knife seemed to provide an

empirical, naturalized base structure for grasping and ordering the world,

particularly our own place in it.19

Difference has also been one of the central categories of twentieth-

century conceptions of the body. Despite the enormous proliferation of

body concepts across the disciplines which have relevance for the

question of bodily-technological intersections, we would like to

highlight a series of concerns that move us to the differences established

by the eighteenth-century anatomist to the debates on differences waged

in particular around the female body. Much ink has been spilled about

the end of feminism and/or “backlash” to the liberation movement‟s

advances, as Susan Faludi provocatively put it in the early 1990s.

Whether we deem the current stage “third wave,” “postfeminist,” or the

end of the feminist thinking line, theorization within this framework has

indelibly marked not only our perspective on gender but also the body.

There is a tendency to chart intellectual discussions either in terms of

succession or antagonism. The succession model offers a chronology

along the lines of “first, there was new criticism and then there was

an independent existence. […] they reacted upon his capacities, sharpening his

eye, refining his skill, teaching him to respect the nature of the material with

which he was dealing. The tool brought man into closer harmony with his

environment, not only because it enabled him to re-shape it, but because it made

him recognize the limits of his capacities” (321). We thank seminar participant

Florian Kernwein for drawing our attention to this discussion in Mumford. 19

On this dynamic, see the now dated but still highly useful analysis offered by

Stafford. See also Park.

Breaking Your Historical Neck 35

Marxism.” An antagonist narrative highlights turns, as in “the visual

turn” counters “the linguistic turn,” “the affective turn” challenges

visuality‟s preeminence, and so on. However, what one observes

particularly strongly in theorizations at the interstices of body, gender,

and (in varying degrees of prominence) technology are patterns of

overlay. Theorization does not so much turn away earlier work. There is

rather a progressive reworking of concepts and concerns as these

theories work through central questions pertaining to technological,

bodily, and gender interfaces. We thus highlight three central clusters—

”experience,” “discourse,” and “materiality”. As we move towards

notions of the “machinic” important to current theorizations of the body,

we would like to carry the “working” (and progressively reworked and

refined) concepts developed in various twentieth-century discussions

into our twenty-first-century dialogue. These are key elements in our

analytical “tool-box,” as Foucault phrased it (“Le Jeu de Michel

Foucault” 523). We offer them for other “users” to rummage through,

test and, if they like, retool further.

Let us begin with “experience.” Feminist critique of the private/public

dichotomy has placed the body and issues of power at the center of the

struggle for self-determination, political representation, and equal rights.

Roughly a decade after the publication of Simone de Beauvoir‟s highly

influential The Second Sex in 1949 with the English translation

appearing in 1953, women in the US began to organize around the

injustices Beauvoir identified and by the 1970s feminism had expanded

from activism to scholarship. Feminist approaches to the gendered body

and the question of difference have been manifold. With particular

energy in the 1980s, liberal feminist scholars and activists have shown

how the distinction between private and public realms has served to

uphold male domination of women by rendering power relations within

the household as “natural” and immune from political regulation. They

have argued for women‟s equal rights, access to political representation

and reproductive self-determination by means of contraceptive

technology and access to abortion. Radical feminists have pursued a

different approach that nonetheless places the body and bodily

experience at the center of their analysis of a power differential between

men and women. While for liberal feminists power is a resource that

ought to be evenly distributed, radical feminists saw in it a one-way

street of dominance enacted by male sexuality and heterosexual

intercourse. A further approach to feminist political philosophy also

locates the female body and its reproductive capacities at the center of

what has been called care or maternal ethics. Originally developed as an

M. MICHAELA HAMPF AND MARYANN SNYDER-KÖRBER 36

alternative to mainstream ethical theory based on universality, reason,

and justice, more radical feminist formations have launched intense

debates with liberal political theory and equal-rights feminists who deny

that women have, or rather, embody, any distinct virtues cultivated in

them by society and mothering.20

Since the 1990s feminists as a whole have distanced themselves from

ideas that women have any particular essence, choosing instead to see

femininity as social constructs, dispositions that result from culture and

conditioning, certainly not biological givens.21

The question now is not

of experience, but discourse. In this respect, the work of Judith Butler

has been most influential. Indeed, her name serves as shorthand

reference for this shift. Its broader base, however, lies in the reception of

Michel Foucault‟s work. For Foucault the body was a central category

described in wide-ranging writings since the mid-1960s as the site where

discourses of discipline and normalization manifest themselves. Bodies

are thus the effects of discourses, or, as he later specified, that of

dispositifs (“Le jeu de Michel Foucault” 299). According to Foucault‟s

non-linear concept of power, this determination occurs through various

technologies of power that structure every-day bodily practices. This

becomes most visible in epistemic shifts. In his lecture courses taught at

the Collège de France from 1975 to 1978—later published in English as

Society Must Be Defended (2003) and Security, Territory, Population

(2007)—he for the first time described the historical changes that

replaced the older concepts of sovereign power and disciplinary power

by the modern concept of bio-power. While the former were based on

the threat of death from a sovereign or the disciplinary measures

introduced by prisons, factories, schools, and the army, the latter mode

of power is no longer directed at the individual-as-body, but at the body

politic and at entire populations. It is justified and utilized by the

protection of life through the regulation of the body rather than the threat

of death.

Foucault first introduced the concept of bio-power as intricately

connected to issues of nation, or, as he called it in Society Must Be

20

Important early examples of activist-scholarly crossover include Firestone,

Millett, and Morgan, followed up by Jaggar, Jaggar and Bordo, and, more

recently, McAfee, and Blackman. For a radical feminist perspective on issues of

sexuality, see MacKinnon. Elucidations of care and maternal ethics are offered by

Gilligan and Held. 21

See, for example Butler and Scott; Cornell; Mouffe and Laclau; and Scott.

Breaking Your Historical Neck 37

Defended a “race struggle.”22

His analysis of power|knowledge

structures is, however, entirely male-oriented. The difference which

having a female body might make for bio-political regulation is a

question that, given women‟s role in reproduction and family work,

certainly poses itself in this context. Yet it is not a question which

Foucault takes up. Despite, or perhaps because, of this omission his work

has been extremely influential for poststructuralist and constructionist

feminist scholarship in the line of Butler. Central to this approach is the

performative account of gender introduced by Butler in which the

seeming coherence of the gendered, sexed, desiring subject is culturally

and socially constructed through the repetition of stylized bodily acts.

Following Foucault and Jacques Derrida in Gender Trouble (1990) and

Bodies That Matter (1993), she shows that it is the reiterative power of

discourse that produces the phenomena that it regulates and constrains.

This is not an argument that twentieth-century feminist theory makes

alone or makes solely with reference to continental philosophy. The

notion of the social and cultural constructedness of both gender and sex,

their performative character and the non-essential nature of desire and

identity are a key insight in histories of sexuality and gender differences.

In her Myths of Gender (1985) and Sexing the Body (2000) Anne Fausto-

Sterling has driven this point home for an academic as well as more

general reading public. This non-essentialist understanding of desire and

difference has also been at the core of queer and transgender theory, as,

for example, in the interventions of Leslie Feinberg (Transgender

Warriors 1996) and Judith (Jack) Halberstam (Female Masculinity 1998

and In a Queer Time and Place 2005). In addition, the intersection of

bodies and machines has been explored in studies on prosthetics and

with a more pronounced provocative edge in “dildonics.”23

Criticism of

the very category of woman as a unified identity has also come from

within feminism itself when, beginning in the 1970s, women of color

and working-class women pointed out that they did not feel represented

by white, middle-class women who understood their standpoint for a

universal one: a critique made with particular verve by bell hooks, but

22

Extended discussions of “race struggle” can be found in the lectures of January 22

and 28 collected in Society Must Be Defended (43-64, 65-86). 23

Carden-Coyne, Ott/Serlin/Mihm, Smith and Morra explore prosthetics in varying

context of modernity. “Dildonics” are particularly highlighted by Hamming

(2001) whose understanding of the dildo as a “technological extension which

mutates (rather than castrates) the lesbian user” (329) echoes earlier arguments

made by Doan and Preciado.

M. MICHAELA HAMPF AND MARYANN SNYDER-KÖRBER 38

also voiced by Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, and other activist

scholars. While those theories that conceptualize the body as discursively

constructed have been extremely successful in separating understandings

of the body from essentialist, naturalized, yet culturally constructed

confines, they have in turn been criticized for obfuscating certain

material aspects (that are by no means to be confused with an ontological

essence or biological substrate). The concept of habitus introduced by

the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in works such as The Logic of

Practice (1980/1990) describes how specific cognitive and somatic

dispositions or doxa—defined as collective, lasting, acquired schemes of

perception, thought and action—are embodied through practices that go

beyond cognitive-discursive structures. The body is thus both producer

and effect of practices that constitute the transposition of the socio-

cultural structures of class, gender, and the field into the habitus the

subjective structures of action and thought of the individual as social

agent.

It is at this point that the question of materiality comes to bear on

theorizations of the body. Body practices and the materiality of bodies

are central to the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Their theory, which has

been called an “embodied materialism” by Rosi Braidotti (Meta-

morphoses 5), proposes a body that is neither determined by a biological

basis nor solely constructed through discourse. Instead, as Claire

Colebrook writes in her lucid introduction to Understanding Deleuze

(2002), Deleuze and Guattari imagine “life as literally a machine” (xxii).

Desire, as these thinkers argue in Anti-Œdipus (1972/1977) in opposition

to Sigmund Freud and Jacque Lacan‟s psychoanalysis, is a positive

process that produces reality by engineering functions and connections

“before we imagine any produced orders, purposes, wholes or ends.” In

this model, whose consequences they further explore in A Thousand

Plateaus (1980/1987), desire is “machinic”—it does not “lack” its object

as psychoanalysis would have it. Instead it is about connections made by

bodies—”the mouth that connects with the breast, the wasp that connects

with an orchid [...] or a child‟s body that connects with a trainset”

(Colebrook xxii). Desire is thus inherent in the body and freed of

representation. It is a non-discursive machine that connects with other

desiring-machines that operate on the smallest molecular level. These

multiple connections are described by Deleuze and Guattari as a

“rhizomatic” (rather than “arborescent”) structure which makes non-

hierarchical, random, proliferating and decentered connections that are

natural.

Breaking Your Historical Neck 39

This affective and affected, conjunctive machinic body has recently

been re-read by feminist and other scholars and served as a starting point

for a critique of the hegemonial concept of discourse, representation and

difference being constitutive of the body (cf. Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects). Such approaches take up Deleuze‟s philosophy of difference

and body practices as summed up in the phrases “thousand tiny sexes”

and “what can a body do?” to address notions such as embodiment,

immanence, and the materiality of the subject. And raise other questions

as well, whether we look forward to new ways of grasping intersections

with other entities—organic or not, both can be part of the machinic for

Deleuze and Guattari—or look back to past ways of figuring connection.

What Can A Machine Do?

The dynamo, one recalls, offers Adams a stirring vision of sublime

modern force, but he undergirds his understanding of the new age by

writing it into a dichotomous, gendered structure. “The Dynamo and the

Virgin” is the title of the decisive chapter in The Education which brings

Langley and Adams to Paris (317-26). Mauss suggests something

different. He does not assume gender difference as a base onto which

other differences can be grafted. He rather emphasizes how the body

interacts with technologies and makes itself gender- as well as milieu-

and national-specific via techniques which can be described as education

or a technical process. From this vantage point, “my body, myself” is a

correlate for “my machine, myself.” Thought together, the phrases

package key dimensions of modern identity formation into reductive, but

arguably useful slogan sequence.

The catchphrase nevertheless has a further correlate: different

machines, different selves or, in the example used by Guattari and

Deleuze to elucidate their extended notion of the machinic, different

wasp, different orchid. At issue are the ways in which technologies

interpellate as well as effect us in the sensual-aesthetic as well as

cognitive sense. In his account of the “technological sublime” in

American culture Nye takes up the line of thought initiated by his mentor

Leo Marx and refracts it through an optic that merges thinking and

feeling. Specifically, he utilizes Immanuel Kant‟s account of the

subreption at work in our encounters with what seems to be the absolute

power of raw nature, but which draws our attention to quite other

powers. According to the model developed in “The Analytic of the

Sublime” (1790), in the face of the volcano or storm we are first

M. MICHAELA HAMPF AND MARYANN SNYDER-KÖRBER 40

overwhelmed with powerlessness and fear of injury. Pain cedes to

pleasure, however, when we realize that it is not nature but our

rationality which is most powerful. The stirring pleasure which is the

second phase of our encounter with natural forces is, thus, actually

pleasure taken in our thinking processes: a power ultimately greater than

nature‟s and capable of bringing natural forces under our control.24

In

Nye‟s reworking of this account to consider response to high-profile

engineering projects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,

rationality‟s potential to triumph over and productively utilize natural

forces is figured in a particular modern actor: the engineer. In the grip of

the sublime spectacle of the Hoover Dam, pleasure comes through

identification with engineering capabilities. Through opportunity,

education, and the framework of economic, industrial expansion the

ordinary citizen can master the environment.

A late twentieth-century example suggests how such an education is

potentially transformed when machines change in scale. They become

more intimate and ordinary rather than imposing and spectacular, their

uses are routine rather than heroically exceptional in what has been

called “the second machine age” (Kenner 48-49). And this can irritate

gender orders as well as the narrative of power and mastery that

undergird narratives of personal and collective mastery in the modern.

The 1985 pseudo-documentary film Pumping Iron II: The Women transports this logic directly onto the body of former power-lifter turned

bodybuilder Bev Francis who competes in the Caesars World Cup in Las

Vegas. In negotiating the “standard of femininity” as well as issues of

“radical self-refashioning,” to use the term Jasper Verlinden introduces

in this volume (107-136), director George Butler‟s follow-up to his

Schwarzenegger-starring Pumping Iron casts Francis in the role of the

hyper-muscular (read: masculine) freak competing against Rachel

McLish, a femme fatale bodybuilding diva, “muscular powder puff” Lori

Bowen, and Carla Dunlap, the only black woman represented in the film.

In the opening scene we see images of the already imposing Nevada

24

In Kantian nomenclature, nature is a Macht, but human rationality a Gewalt. §28

of the “Analytic of the Sublime” in the Critique of Judgment differentiates the two

terms as follows: “Power is a capacity that is superior to great obstacles. The same

thing is called dominion if it is also superior to the resistance of something that

itself possesses power” (143). The original reads as follows: “Macht ist ein

Vermögen, welches großen Hindernissen überlegen ist. Eben dieselbe heißt eine

Gewalt, wenn sie auch dem Widerstande dessen, was selbst Macht besitzt,

überlegen ist” (184).

Breaking Your Historical Neck 41

desertscape. Against this backdrop, the Hoover Dam so central to Nye‟s

account of the American technological sublime is set up as a first

machine age icon even more imposing than the natural spectacle. If that

were not enough, the director adds to the drama by filming during

thunderstorm. Lightning highlights power lines and illuminates a view of

the giant spinning dynamos of the Hoover Dam generating station.

Outside of the building, Francis is shown looking up at a bas-relief

figure inscribed with the word POWER. Her massive back corresponds

with the androgynous muscularity of the stone statues. Much like the

lightning and thunder in the opening scene, which signify the

unharnessed power of nature that is then transformed into electrical

energy by human control, Francis‟s “exploding” into the dead lift is

portrayed as a harnessing of natural energy into a more concentrated

form. The female bodybuilder does not require the mediation of an

engineer to identify herself with technical power. She has transformed

her own flesh-and-blood nature into a personal powerhouse. The sublime

has been cut down to human, hard-bodied size.

However, this empowerment comes with a dose of discomfort. In the

next sequences, Francis‟s body in the Hoover Dam scene is contrasted

with her artificially coded, more strongly technologically built body on

the stage in Las Vegas. The film depicts her as having gone “too far” in

her digression from “natural femininity,” which is still measured by the

body‟s visible reproductivity. Visually, this is already established in the

opening scenes of the film—at Hoover Dam and then in Las Vegas—in

which Francis‟s corporeality is repeatedly contrasted with almost soft-

core pornographic images of other contestants‟ female body parts in

tanning beds. The black goggle mask the individual women wear under

the blue UV light washes out any visible racial difference of the bodies;

skin color and hair become unrecognizable in this erotic spectacular-

ization of a generic female body. The camera here stands in for a

sexualized yet depersonalized gaze. “Breasts and buttocks still appear as

tits and ass,” regardless of how muscular they are (Holmlund 44, cf. also

Hampf).25

Similar issues of determination through technology and the “gender

trouble” incipient in empowering interactions with technology turn up at

a different time and with far less tanning oil at the beginning of the

century in discussions of, of all seemingly innocuous things, the

typewriter. Roughly at the turn of the century, the typewriter shifted

from an office-bound apparatus to a lifestyle good. It entered private 25

On the historical roots of bodybuilding in the United States see David L.

Chapman, Kasson, and de la Peña, The Body Electric.

M. MICHAELA HAMPF AND MARYANN SNYDER-KÖRBER 42

homes and traveled on trains, passenger liners, and motor cars as a

convenience for the amateur writer. The device also, however, became

the compositional tool of choice for professional writers under pressure

to produce ever more text at ever greater speed. In his late phase, Henry

James dictated the bulky multi-volume novels he is (in)famous for

directly to a typist. Mark Twain, more democratically, puts his own

hands to the keys to pound out A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), for example.

26 The newly portable writing machine

facilitated the efficient production of readable text, but it also can be

seen as influencing the composition process. This could be understood

positively. T.S. Eliot, to drop another prominent name, composed like

Twain on the typewriter and was what one might call a fan of the device.

Specifically, he waxes enthusiastic about the precise style which writing

with the keyboard, as opposed to the pen, produces: “short, staccato, like

modern French prose” (Letters 144).27

The minimalism which Eliot

values can, however, also be understood in terms of attenuation through

norming: the medial equivalent of the process which Wilson and Carlyle,

in different ways, link with dehumanization. In this context, the threat

can best be described as a representational impoverishment. Eliot

himself worries that the typewriter encourages “lucidity,” but not

necessarily “subtlety” (144). The typed page has, after all, a set number

of possible characters per line, lines per sheet, and tolerates only a

limited number of addenda. Sprawling, messing sentences are thus pared

down to black and white sequences with the simple sentence structures

26

An interesting discussion of Twain and the typewriter can be found in Michaels.

See also Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (8-12). For an insider account of James‟s

relation to the typewriter, see the memoir of his secretary Theodora Bosanquet

Henry James at Work (1924). The most general and extensive discussion of the

typewriter and the modern writing network is offered by Kittler in

Aufschreibesysteme (1985) and Grammophon. Film. Typewriter (1986), published

in English as Discourse Networks (1990) and Grammophone, Film, Typewriter

(1999). 27

To move the medial comparison up to the late twentieth, early twenty-first

century, composing on a typewriter keyboard differs yet again from writing typed

into an infinitely revisable computer document. Eliot‟s praise of the spare prose

typewriter composition affords is borne out by the fact that the most accomplished

of modern-day minimalist authors, Cormac McCarthy, types on an Olivetti

Lettera 32. After logging “about five million words over a period of 50 years,” the

portable typewriter was retired, auctioned for charity, and replaced with another

vintage Olivetti in 2009 (Cohen).

Breaking Your Historical Neck 43

that allow for composition at the keyboard; the more involved the

sentence, the greater the danger of errors and, thus, re-typing.28

There is, however, another danger lurking behind this spare

efficiency. Typewriter is a term both for the machine and its operator

who by the second half of the nineteenth century was generally assumed

to be female. The human typewriter is a typewriter “girl”: in the general,

popular imagination and in Eliot‟s own office at Lloyd‟s Bank, where

they tended to irritate him. In his private correspondence, which he also

generally typed, Eliot rails against female typewriters. These complaints

are not always neatly separated from his gripes against writers more

generally and female writers in particular. They both pose a threat

through their presumption to participation in office and literary matters,

respectively. Commenting on the editing work for The Egoist (1914-

1919) he did after banking hours, he writes to his father in 1917: “I

struggle to keep the writing as much as possible in Male hands, as I

distrust the Feminine in literature, and also, once a woman has had

anything printed in your paper, it is very difficult to make her see why

you should not print everything she sends in.” Witness, he continues, the

situation at the bank: “My typist is in a bad temper now because I gave a

couple of letters to do to someone else.” The likes of Virginia Woolf, the

poet H.D., and his secretary thus morph into one “Feminine” threat to

writing in “Male hands.” There is a familiar economic dimension to this

argument. As Eliot notes in this same letter, women in business do not

necessarily have to work. Men, in contrast, “are dependent on their

salary.” Women who are “independent” are thus “sometimes irritating”

(Letters 204, emphases in the original). Eliot qualifies this point slightly

in conclusion: the economy being what it was post-World War I, few

women worked solely by choice. That the irritation of the “Feminine”

persists beyond economic qualifiers suggests that its cause is not solely

job market competition. The writer‟s situation at this time offers a

potentially discomfiting overlay of roles and associations.

Eliot‟s hands might be “Male,” but the work they do does bring a

touch of “Feminine” threat with it. By day he might be a manager with a

(female) typewriting staff. By night, however, the poet is “his own

typewriter girl” (Snyder-Körber 76). After work, he edits for The Egoist, but also produces work for other periodicals that was very often paid by

the typed line. Eliot also develops a theory of the “impersonal” during

these late-night shifts that makes the writer into a medium for collecting

28

For accounts of the role new print technologies play in the increasingly visual

strategies of literary modernism, see the early discussions offered by Kenner and

McGann.

M. MICHAELA HAMPF AND MARYANN SNYDER-KÖRBER 44

and transmitting words rather than an original creator. In “Tradition and

the Individual Talent” (1919) Eliot uses the metaphor of the catalyst to

describe the writer‟s role in the reworking of literary tradition. A process

of “depersonalization” is necessary, the “poet‟s mind” is a “receptacle

for […] storing up feelings, phrases, images” to then be reproduced in

new combinations (40-41). The notion of the catalyst is drawn from

chemistry. The process being described, however, also recalls the

organizing, impersonal textual reproduction of the secretary operating, as

Eliot writes in The Waste Land (1922) with “automatic hand” (62, 255).

That Eliot uses a variation of automatic, depersonalized writing to

compose the entire poem suggests that his gripe against female writers

and typewriters has a great deal to do with the precarities of his own

position as a struggling, not yet established, and experimental writer.

From this vantage point, his typewriter irritations reveal gender troubles

with existential undercurrents.29

One can pursue this story of the writer‟s interaction with the machine

in two directions. One path is plotted medially. That is to say with

McLuhan that the medium determines the message. The other route

teases out the fact that this message is entangled with gender, class,

work, and other social orders. Material and imaginative work, this

second line of inquiry suggests, involves both the maintenance and

transgressions of such orders. Both approaches require us to think about

machines, but, as we would further propose, requires moving our

thinking outside of garden paradigms.

Leaving the Garden

In a 1948 letter to Henry Nash Smith, Marx laid out the key premises of

the project which was to evolve into The Machine in the Garden:

1. Isolate the use of industrial-technological themes, metaphors, images in

the work of the writer under consideration.

2. Examine the way in which these fit into the novel, story or poem,—the

way they are imaginatively assimilated, contribute to the total effect,

etc….

29

Important discussions of the typewriter girl as a central figure of modernity

include Keep and Rainey. For a suggestive analysis of dictation, stenography, and

other forms of voice-text transcription as a tactical practice that negotiates

constructions of superiority and inferiority, see Mary Chapman (985-93). On

intersections of class and gender in modern office structures, see the historical

account offered by Strom.

Breaking Your Historical Neck 45

3. See how the attitudes towards the emerging machine age are related to the

major preoccupations, themes, concepts of the writer; this involves both

his personal experience, his explicit statements on the subject as well as

on what happens in his work.

4. Returning to the works of art & reading into them all that is implicit, how

does our information illuminate the writer‟s work, & his relation to

society? (qtd. in Attebery 321)

The approach sketched out by graduate student Marx involves four steps,

but proceeds from tripartite interest structure. Imagery, author, and social

development, although this is a subordinate concern in this early phase,

come together in a reflection circuit akin, as Brian Attebery has argued

in defense of Marx‟s “method,” to continental understandings of the

“hermeneutic circle” (322). In the final print form of the project, the

machine becomes a key “symbol” as it is integrated into constitutive

narratives or “myths” about American collective character and

development. In the process, Marx drew on earlier work on technology‟s

place in American culture. Lewis Mumford‟s Technics and Civilization (1934) and John Atlee Kouwenhoven‟s Made in America (1948) are two

key predecessors. Marx‟s more academic approach created an

impression of national consensus, historical coherence, and exceptional

American development which, after the largely positive, initial phase of

the study‟s reception, drew critique from quite diverse sources. Tenuous

empirical evidence was an initial charge levied against The Machine in the Garden (cf. Kuklick). Another point of critique concerned the role of

personal, implicitly “presentist” interests, and “influence anxiety” in the

analytical models developed by Marx and Smith; both worked to the

detriment of objective analysis, revealing “more about the current

„philosophy of life‟ of American critics than about the specific

characteristics of American culture” (Fluck 110). 30

Arguably, however, the method‟s blind spots have proven most

productive for further thinking on the subject. This particularly holds for

the question of difference which Marx fundamentally elides. Marx not

only assumes a universalizing masculine “he” when staking out his

project‟s framework: “his personal experience, his explicit statements on

the subject as well as on what happens in his work” (Attebery 321). The

published The Machine in the Garden posits a self-contained subject

seemingly untouched by issues of race, class, or gender. Yet there is a

marked tendency in the argument and later statements to align this

subject with a white, upper-class, and male social positioning. Not 30

For an analysis of Marx‟s approach and key aspects of reception see, among a

multitude of accounts, Meikle.

M. MICHAELA HAMPF AND MARYANN SNYDER-KÖRBER 46

surprisingly, this is also the profile of the sublime engineer that Nye

highlights whose aura proceeds in part from the majesty of his creations,

but also, as historian Ruth Oldenziel would point out, the “masculine

mystique” central to Western perspectives on technology (11). The

assumption of a particular masculine affinity for technology and the

shaping of new technical worlds as male-inscribed domains are, as

Oldenziel argues, a recent but nevertheless critical discursive

development. The masculinization of the machine comes into full force

in the twentieth century but can be traced back to the nineteenth:

The public association between technology and manliness grew when male

middle-class attention increasingly focused its gaze on the muscular bodies of

working-class men and valorized middle-class athletes, but disempowered the

bodies of Native Americans, African Americans, and women. Similarly the

erasures of workers, Native Americans, African Americans, and women from

the technical domain was not accidental. This occurred when scores of

working-class women entered the labor market and confronted new machines

in their jobs as cigar makers, secretaries, switchboard operators, and

dressmakers. (Oldenziel 10)

From this perspective, phrases such as “women‟s work” or the question

of whether one “mans” the machine or if certain machines, like the

sewing machine or typewriter, “unman” the user have resonances which

rapidly leave the realm of metaphor. As the transformation of the

secretary from a male to female profession or the relegation of the

laundry industry to a Chinese-American niche in the United States

demonstrates, the gendering and/or racializing of technology have

concrete, socio-economic consequences as well as symbolic ones. As the

secretary becomes a female employment, the job decreases in pay and

status. The assistant position is no longer a rung on the career ladder.

Secretaries rather inhabit new “pink collar” ghettos.31

While there is no

immediate cause and effect-relation between the starching of shirts and

the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the association of the Chinese with

the “feminine” activity of laundering certainly does not work against

their exclusion from patriarchal privileges: the possibility of becoming a

pater familias arguably being the fundamental male patriarchal privilege

(cf. Chen and Wang).

The symbolic repercussions of thought figures such as “manning” the

machine are more subtle, but no less significant. According to Oldenziel

31

For historically inflected discussions of gender, technology, practices and

conceptions of work see esp. the analyses in Hopkins (17-97), Horowitz and

Mohun as well as Lerman/Oldenziel/Mohun.

Breaking Your Historical Neck 47

erasure of particular actors from common accounts of technological

achievement results in a kind of discursive haunting. Women and others

who disappear from technological discourse—if not from the often

grubby practice of making things in offices, building sites, and the

factory floor—return as a persistent, even uncanny “metaphorical

presence” (11). In Dinerstein‟s more radical phrasing, “[t]echnology as

an abstract concept functions as a white mythology” (“Technology and

Its Discontents” 570, emphasis in the original) which veils its privileging

of particular groups in a seemingly objective and inclusionary language

of progress and the technical.32

The revitalization of technology studies

within American studies which scholars such as Dinerstein, de la Peña

and Vaidhyanathan have called for, and eloquently enacted in their own

work, draws much of its vigor from a consideration of the so often

erased, haunting status of difference in discussions and representations

of technology.33

Gaps nevertheless remain. As de la Peña has recently observed, there

is still a discrepancy between the often claimed need for historians of

technology to pay attention to race and the widespread absence of the

category from technological histories actually published. While “gender

studies flourished following the first major publications during the 1970s

in the history of technology, […] we are now a decade past those calls to

take race seriously” (“The History of Technology” 921, cf. also Green

and Herzig on this point). Historians of technology interested in race

cannot rely on established archives or methods that have worked for

gender historians, namely, inserting women as innovators and consumers

of technology into their histories and meta-historical narratives. This

successful work of diversifying the history of technology rested on

successfully locating alternative archives and re-reading known sources.

Racial difference and whiteness are constructed through technology. De

la Peña suggests an intersectional account of “race as an epistemology at

play in all technological production and consumption. This concept

makes it possible to see the significance of the obvious: that white

people have race. And they make it, sustain it, and protect it in part

through technology” (923). If we fail to see these historical connections

between whiteness and technology we run the risk of buying naïvely into

ideologies of progress, universalism, or, to name a more recent

32

Interesting in this context is Bryan Taylor‟s analysis of Robert Del Tredici‟s

photographs as part of a “nuclear cultural iconography.” 33

Among the numerous studies published since the 1990s see esp. Banta; de la

Peña, The Body Electric; Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine; Green; Horowitz and

Mohun; Mohun; and Oldenziel.

M. MICHAELA HAMPF AND MARYANN SNYDER-KÖRBER 48

discourse, an all too celebratory posthumanism: one that does not merely

explore the possibilities concurrent with the blurring of human and non-

human borders that late twentieth-century texts such as Donna

Haraway‟s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985) underscore, but which

embraces any and all technological interface as a step towards

liberation.34

The title of our foray into this debate, Machine, gestures back to older

vocabularies for grappling with these questions. “Machine” is a key

nineteenth, early twentieth-century term designating what we now refer

to broadly as technology (Schatzberg 486).35

From Carlyle on, the

machine further serves as a cipher for modernity as a whole: designating

the condition‟s “enframings” in a Heideggerian sense, but also cutting

down to the everyday norming and uniformization which come with a

globally operating world. The title also, of course, references Marx: but

with a difference. The volume aims to approach the questions of

technology, literary expression, historical experience, and collective and

personal identity taken up by Marx a good half a century ago. Our mode

of inquiry, however, neither follows the circular pattern he initially

envisions, nor aims for the much critiqued exclusionary linearity of the

final published product. We would rather propose thinking of the

machine as an intersectional concept that cuts across and connects key

aspects of technological discourse and discussions of the modern. The

model is not the hermeneutic circle. We rather take our structuring cues

from the routes, loops, and interacting components that characterize the

circuit.

Circuitries: Contributions to this Volume

The volume unfolds in three blocks which we identify as three key

elements within the techno-cultural imagination of modernity: first, the

34

The most even-keeled overview of the formation of a theoretical discourse around

notions of the posthuman since the 1980s—from Haraway through notions of the

transhuman on the way to the posthuman—is offered by Cary Wolfe in his helpful

What is Posthumanism? (2010). See esp. xi-xxxiv. In his revised contribution to

the book version of Rewiring the “Nation” (2007) Dinerstein discusses these

issues with an eye to Americanist discussions. See his “Posthumanism and Its

Discontents.” 35

By most accounts technology, as our current blanket term for innovations,

developments, and behaviors as extension of our bodily capabilities, first entered

common vocabulary and became a central “keyword” in cultural understanding

during the 1930s. On this background, see Oldenziel (182-190).

Breaking Your Historical Neck 49

body as a basis and an effect of technological innovation as well as a

concept variously linked with notions of the technological; second, the

relation of body and machine to orders of difference, most prominent

among them, gender; third, the question of technology as material

development and symbolic resource. The division of the contributions

follows this conceptual floor plan, but hopefully without suggesting that

one can separate these three aspects so neatly. They rather mutually

implicate each other and at points become complexly entangled with

each other: a crosshatched interconnection which our overall framing of

the volume through the fact and figure of the machine aims for.

Beginning with Bodies means considering the physis in the wide field

of all its possible “extensions.” Is the “prosthesis” imagined as an

empowering or troubling supplement?36

The self might have “a

biological core,” as William J. Mitchell has written, but it is “surrounded

by extended, constructed systems of boundaries and networks” (7). Does

embracing Me+++, as the architecture and media theorist describes the

technically supplemented self, signal a new understanding of the body or

potentially move us into understandings of the self beyond the fixation

on the human, standard division of self|other, mind|body, organic|

technological? As these questions suggest, analysis of the body

inevitably involves looking at the organization of individual bodies into

groups and groupings from ethnicity and gender to people and nation as

well as the deployment of the “body” as a figure for the collective “body

politic” or the existential “human condition.”

This section opens with a re-reading of the cyborg figure central to

feminist challenges to essentialist notions of identity in the late twentieth

century. In “Apocalypse Not Quite Yet: Cyborg Variations, 1960-2000.”

MaryAnn Snyder-Körber traces the implications and affective rhetorics

of the figure from Haraway‟s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” (1985) back to

Cold War cybernetics and 1970s science fiction, on the one hand, and

forward to Bill Joy‟s millennial-dystopian recourse to cyborg discourses,

on the other. The provocative punch of the figure has weakened since the

original publication of Haraway‟s manifesto. For this reason, however,

we can now better observe the ways in which the figure draws out the

ontologies and, at times, the tautologies and anxieties of technological,

bodily and emotional orders in the modern.

Anxieties about the crossing not only of gender orders, but what still

seems to function as the last bastion of a “naturalized” understanding of

36

For a discussion of these issues in a late twentieth-century frame, see Bukatman

243-98. In his Bodies and Machines (1993) Seltzer tackles similar questions, but

in the late nineteenth-century context. See esp. 1-21.

M. MICHAELA HAMPF AND MARYANN SNYDER-KÖRBER 50

sexual difference are at the center of the next analysis in Bodies. Jasper

Verlinden considers “Transgender Bodies and Male Pregnancy: The

Ethics of Radical Self-Refashioning.” Verlinden looks at narratives of

male pregnancy in circulation at precisely the moment in which this

supposed “fiction” moves into the realm of mass-broadcast “fact.” On

April 3, 2008 Thomas Beatie and his wife Nancy “revealed” Thomas‟s

pregnancy on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Responses to Beatie‟s

pregnancy—on the part of the Oprah audience as well as conservative

and transgender publics—are instructive. Verlinden, however, moves the

framework of discussion beyond the Beatie case to the wider juridical-

medical discourses and self-representational practices determining (and

negotiating) male pregnancy. Verlinden argues that male pregnancy does

more than push established notions of gender and the body. It also

throws the established theoretical regimes by which gender, queer, and

transsexual studies interrogate these categories into critical relief. It is

not enough, Verlinden stresses, to read the transgender body as

transgression by the (gender-theoretical) book. Instead, he proposes the

notion of “radical self-refashioning” as a variant of “strategic

authenticity” (124-30).

Ruth Mayer and Brigitte Weingart conclude Bodies by expanding the

question of the body from microbody to body politic. Their “Discursive

Contamination: Terrorism, the Body Politic, and the Virus as Trope”

takes as its focus the mobilization of virus discourses and imagery in the

last decades, particularly honing in on the debates around terrorism

which, as perhaps the most lasting legacy of the Bush era, still strongly

shape our sense of the current world situation. It is these debates that,

after all, brought the term “homeland” into our vocabulary and a

transformed sense of self, place, and security into our consciousness (cf.

Kaplan). These discussions have also, as Mayer and Weingart point out,

brought attention to bear on the rhetorics of body politics. On the

surface, viral imagery distances and demonizes. The figure itself,

however, transports with it far more intricate models of interaction. “If

taken seriously,” they write, “biological metaphors complicate rather

than simplify the representation of social matters” (153).

The same complicating potential can be observed in the gender

metaphors applied to work and technological use. The next argu-

mentative block Genders offers four case studies that both converge and

contrast with each other as they interrogate the logics underwriting (as

well as undermining) notions of “women‟s work” or “manning the

machine,” respectively. Convergence shows itself in the fact that both

Barbara Antoniazzi in “„No Guidance in Regard to Herself‟: Immigrants,

Breaking Your Historical Neck 51

Workers, and American Womanhood in the Progressive Era” and Heide

Volkening in “Working Girls: Economies of Love and Work” look at the

phenomenon of the “girl” in modern industrialized society. Similarly,

Luis Longarela in “Body/Screen: Male Spectatorship in Buster Keaton‟s

Sherlock Jr.” as well as Olaf Stieglitz in “„Are We Not Men?‟: Sound,

Gender, and a Cinema of Change, 1930-1933” consider how film

experience negotiates the gender and class models involved in

technological interaction. The contributions diverge in the perspectives

their authors take on these common concerns.

Antoniazzi draws our attention to the emergence of a new type of

independent working woman in turn-of-the-century America. While the

Victorian ideal of “true womanhood” colored women subservient and

limited personal travel between drawing room, nursery, and club, with

occasional excursions to the door of the servant-run kitchen, conditions

in cities like New York and Chicago afforded a new kind of public

womanhood. The label “girl” distinguishes this emergent type of

working class, frequently immigrant subject from the idealized, upper-

class, and (implicitly) white ideal women of yesteryear. The category

also upholds a patriarchal alignment of wage earning and masculinity by

denying female workers full adult status. In the “grey zone” of this

distinction and the working girl‟s negotiation of the equally “grey zone”

of sexual economies, however, Antoniazzi identifies practices of self

fashioning and autonomy optimization. At the turn to the last century,

US-American anxieties about urbanization, industrialization, and an

increasingly heterogeneous population consolidated themselves around

the immigrant working girl. Thereafter, however, these women and their

tactics in questions of love and money have proven influential: shaping

American sexual values, patterns of courtship and sexual relations, and,

not least, conceptions of female agency in the modern.

Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that the “girl” is reimported

into the European contexts from which she initially came, at least

according to US-American progressivist discussions of wayward

immigrant femininity. Volkening considers response to the “working

girl” in Europe and, here, particularly in early twentieth-century,

German-speaking culture. Retaining the original English term instead of

translating “girl” to Mädchen or Mädel marks this emergent modern type

as an import. “Girl” signals awareness of a new international culture, but

at the same time keeps it distant. Fritz Giese deploys the term

“Girlkultur” in 1925 as part of a distinctly anti-feminist, right-wing

discourse critical of modernism. The “girl” from this vantage point is not

simply a younger woman, but, shades of Pumping Iron II, de-womanized

M. MICHAELA HAMPF AND MARYANN SNYDER-KÖRBER 52

through her toned athletic body and short hair (cf. Berghaus and Killen).

The “gender trouble” which emanates from the vision of an

economically and sexually independent woman who cuts her hair into a

bob, wears trousers, and cycles to the office is, thus, part of a wider

negotiation of differences in increasingly interconnected, normed

spheres of human action in the global modern. Like Antoniazzi,

Volkening demonstrates how such negotiations can offer potentially

empowering new models of subjectivity. Nonetheless, as Volkening

highlights with particular clarity in her investigation of transnational

“girlhood,” the figure can also be appropriated into advertising-

consumption machineries as well as instrumentalized for conservative

arguments against modernization processes which are envisioned by

critics like Giese as standardizing, defeminizing Americanization.

Ambivalence and appropriation are also key elements in Longarela‟s

account of male spectatorship in US-American reformist discourse of the

Progressive Era and in Keaton‟s 1924 film Sherlock Jr. Longarela

frames his analysis of the film with a longer exploration of discourses

surrounding the cinema as a “house of dreams” whose illusions

particularly imperil boys and young men. The appeal of the movies,

according to these longer-standing discussions, lies in the compensation

they offer for those ideals of masculine mastery compromised by modern

working conditions. The danger of the movies, in turn, concerns the new

models for masculinity which the picture shows offer or, in the stronger

terms used by the medium‟s critics, the models which the movies

veritably compelled viewers to adopt through dynamics of identification

and the assumption of imitation. Exhuming these discussions from the

archives promises insight into popular cultural histories and cinema

theories which are less often examined. The perspective also offers an

entry point into a longer-standing tendency to critique modern culture by

way of film culture critique. More importantly for Longarela, however,

these contexts open up perspectives on spectatorship able to move

discussions beyond the critical vocabularies of gaze and apparatus

which, long past the heyday of their application in the 1970s and 1980s,

still strongly underwrite current film studies readings.

Film is also put into a broader context by Stieglitz who grasps 1930s

movie production as a central negotiative stage in US-American culture

upon which claims for recognition and social change could be made in

the early twentieth century. While the introduction of sound into the

cinema is most commonly viewed as a medial innovation, Stieglitz

argues that sound “played a crucial role in opening, for a brief period of

time between 1930 and 1933, a window of opportunity for alternative,

Breaking Your Historical Neck 53

controversial, and at times even utopian ideas about society and

leadership” (236). Sound did not, as is again commonly believed,

eliminate the foreign element from film, thus paving the way for an

increasingly homogenized, tendentially Americanized acting mode, but

rather made unfamiliar, non-native, foreign voices “hearable” for

American moviegoers. “The appearance of sound,” Stieglitz argues,

“made the representation of counter-hegemonic masculinities and strong,

unruly femininities possible” (236). It is this potential which links films

as diverse as the science fiction horror thriller Island of Lost Souls

(1932) with the reactionary implicitly pro-fascist Gabriel Over the White House (1933), and the Marx Brothers‟ farcical Duck Soup (1933).

The third block of discussion offers the most concentrated instance of

disagreement in the volume‟s architecture. Technologies in a sense pits

the concrete, nut-and-bolts practical side of the technology-human

interface against its imaginative dimension. We have a historian arguing

for what one might call the “facts,” and a gender theorist highlighting the

transformative powers of what others could be tempted to classify as

“fictions” or “illusions.” What emerges from this juxtaposition is not a

clear winner, but rather an interplay of possibilities that the convergence

of bodies, genders, and technologies make available for different kinds

of cultural practice and varying modes of analysis.

In “Henry Adams, Nikola Tesla, and the „Body Electric‟: Inter-

sections Between Bodies and Electrical Machines” Norbert Finzsch

argues against tendencies to subsume the technological practices and

responses to them under the rarefied categories of aesthetic discourse.

Contra Nye as well as the more recent positions taken by Jürgen

Martschukat, who views the electric chair in the context of the sublime,

or Michael Gilmore and his argument for a “romantic electricity” in line

with American romanticist notions of transcendence, Finzsch hones in

on popular discourses and practices, patents, legal regulations, and court

cases. Looking at electrical innovation in a broader frame and lower to

the lived ground of human-technical interaction reconfigures our

perspective on the discourses which emerged in the nineteenth and early

twentieth century. It was not all shock and awe, dynamo and Hoover

Dam, but in many cases a matter-of-fact and highly pragmatic question

of use. As Finzsch laconically concludes: “Exit the sublime, enter the

lawyers” (273).

The concluding contribution to this section and the volume brings in

Deleuze who, one would imagine, could mix up any legal or aesthetic

discussion. Doro Wiese‟s “Interventions and Inventions: Dandy Dust and the Emergence of the Body-Image” uses the concepts developed by

M. MICHAELA HAMPF AND MARYANN SNYDER-KÖRBER 54

Deleuze in his work on the cinematic towards a reading of Hans A.

Scheirl‟s avant-garde, subculture film Dandy Dust (1998). Drawing on

Deleuzian thinking, Wiese grasps film as a medium to “express” and

“think” relations between the world and subjectivity in more open-ended

ways, to conceptualize beyond the narrower strictures of standard

philosophical theorization. A challenging film like Scheirl‟s impels this

richer kind of reflection on constructions of the body in general, but in

this way it can also according to Wiese open up a wider and less

combatively differentiating discussion between feminism, transgender

studies, and other formations theorizing and organizing themselves

around understandings of the body.

The final section is, to speak in the language of circuitry, a relay back

to the original context of the project: the classroom. We offer a

bibliography of pertinent resources which we recommend for continuing

the conversation on modern machinery in all the variants of

convergence, divergence, and productive disagreement they enable.

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