Bodies and Machines (Routledge Revivals)

Mark Seltzer

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138829503
• eBook ISBN: 9781317570912
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Bodies and Machines is a striking and persuasive examination of the body-machine complex and its effects on the modern American cultural imagination. Bodies and Machines, first published in 1992, explores the links between techniques of representation and social and scientific technologies of power in a wide range of realist and naturalist discourses and practices. Seltzer draws on realist and naturalist writing, such as the work of Hawthorne and Henry James, and the discourses which inform it: from scouting manuals and the programmes of systematic management to accounts of sexual biology and the rituals of consumer culture. He explores other mass-produced and mass-consumed cultural forms, including visual representations such as composite photographs, scale models, and the astonishing iconography of standardization.

Part I

The Naturalist Machine

In these pages I will be concerned with a cluster of anxieties, at once sexual, economic, and aesthetic, that seems to be generated in the late nineteenth-century “naturalist” novel. More specifically, I will be considering an insistent anxiety about production and generation—generation of lives, powers, and representations—that marks this fiction. If, as the industrialist Cedarquist observes in Frank Norris’s. The Octopus, “the great word of this nineteenth century has been Production,” production, both mechanical and biological, also troubles the naturalist novel at every point.¹ I want to suggest that the achievement of the naturalist novel appears at least in part in the devising of a counter-model of generation that incorporates and works to manage these linked, although not at all equivalent, problems of production and reproduction. The counter-model is what might be called the naturalist machine. Although I would argue that such a model operates in a wide range of naturalist texts, I want for the moment to take most of my examples from the work of the American novelist who most conspicuously and compulsively displays both these anxieties about generation and the aesthetic machine designed to manage them—Frank Norris.

Production and Generation

Near the very end of. The Octopus, the railroad agent and speculator S. Berman is buried alive beneath a “living stream” of wheat, “this dreadful substance that was neither solid nor fluid” (2:353). The logic of such a fate is clear enough; it is explicitly represented as a productive or hyperproductive nature’s revenge on what Norris throughout presents as the unnatural and nonproductive abuses of the speculator. If Berman is bodily, as the speculator Curtis Jadwin in Norris’s. The Pit is financially, buried by a flood of wheat, this is a sort of turn of nature on the speculator who attempts to appropriate or corner her living produce. But such a homeopathic logic fails to account for a somewhat different sort of uneasiness that “this dreadful substance” presents.

Just before this “inevitable” (2:355) end of the speculator, Berman discusses the terms of his deal in wheat with one of his agents. “This deal is peculiar,” he observes, “it’s a queer, mixed up deal.” What is “queer” about the deal, it would seem, is its direct, unmediated character. “I’m not selling to any middleman,” Berman explains: “I’ve got to have some hand in shipping this stuff myself” (2:328). But this exclusion of—or what the rancher Magnus Derrick earlier calls “stranding” of—the middleman turns out to be a little more complicated. Berman claims that he is “acting direct,” but in fact, as he goes on to say, he’s “acting direct with these women people,” with a “lot of women people up in the city” who have contracted for the wheat as part of a project to relieve a famine in Asia (2:327).² What relation do the middlemen, on the one side, and the “women people,” on the other, have to the logistics of production in the novel?

The Octopus, as I have indicated, invokes a traditional “agrari-anist” opposition of producer and speculator or middleman, but such an opposition is not consistent with the account of production that the novel ultimately supports.³ Not surprisingly, this account is articulated by the railroad titan Shelgrim, the novel’s middleman par excellence. Shelgrim’s reply to Presley’s protest against the railroad’s usurpation of the ranches and their wheat is in part a self-exonerating appeal to an invisible hand guiding the economy: “Where there is a demand sooner or later there will be a supply…. Blame conditions not men” (2:285). The ideological character of such a defense is evident. But Shelgrim’s defense goes a bit further, in a manner that both more effectively threatens the opposition between producer and speculator that grounds Presley’s protest, and concisely enunciates what Norris ends by endorsing as the “larger view” (2:361). “Try to believe this—to begin with—that railroads build themselves…. Mr. Derrick, does he grow his wheat? The Wheat grows itself. What does he count for? Does he supply the force?” (2:285). Crucially, by the logic of this larger view, there are no producers at all: all are middlemen, equally subject to or carriers of uncontrollable forces. One consequence of such a view is, of course, a radical emptying of the category of production—the very category that the social-economic “protest” the novel might be seen to embody centrally requires.

Yet if production does not have a secure place in Norris’s economic theory, the novel does offer an account of the “enigma of growth” and “mystery of creation” (2:343). The Octopus offers in fact. two competing accounts of the force of production and generation. On the one side, and not unexpectedly, there is the mother, at once the “the crown of motherhood … the beauty of the perfect woman” and the mother-land, “palpitating with the desire of reproduction” in the “hidden tumult of its womb” (2:215, 1:122), “the great earth, the mother, after its period of reproduction, its pains of labour, delivered of the fruit of its loins, [sleeping] the sleep of exhaustion in the infinite repose of the colossus” (1:123, 2:342–43). On the other side, Norris represents the technology of the steam machine, “the jarring, jolting, trembling machine … [t]he heroic embrace of a multitude of iron hands, gripping deep into the brown, warm flesh of the land” (1:124–25). These twinned representations of generative power—the machine and the mother—are suspended in relation to each other in the novel, as linked but competing principles of creation.

Norris’s representation of steam power as generative, in. The Octopus and throughout his work, participates in a more general field of middle and later nineteenth-century discourses on the procreative force of the machine. As Perry Miller has argued, in the American representation of steam power in this period—“the pure white jet that fecundates America”—the “imagery frequently becomes, probably unconsciously, sexual, and so betrays how in this mechanistic orgasm modern America was conceived.”⁴ Such an association of steam power and generation—what writers of the midcentury described as “the marriage of water and heat” that inseminates the “body of the continent”—is part of a larger celebration of technology by which Americans viewed the machine, and especially the steam engine and dynamo or “generator,” as a “replacement for the human body.”⁵ More precisely, this “replacement” registers also a displaced competition between rival sexual forces, between what Norris, for instance, calls the “two world-forces, the elemental Male and Female” (1:125).

The nineteenth-century obstetrician and gynecologist Augustus Kinsley Gardner opens his lecture. The History of the Art of Midwifery (1852) by strangely coupling these two rival principles of generation:

From the foundation of the world man has been born of women; and notwithstanding that his inventive genius has discovered steam, the great Briareus of the nineteenth century, and harnessed him to his chariot, and sends lightning to do his bidding over the almost boundless extent of the world, yet we cannot hope that any change may be affected in this particular.⁶

Despite or “notwithstanding” the rhetorical disclaimers, it is not hard to see that Gardner’s purpose, here and elsewhere, is to “replace” female generative power with an alternative practice, at once technological and male. As Graham Barker-Benfield argues in his study of attitudes toward women and sexuality in Victorian America, one of the governing impulses promoting the medicalization of women and childbirth in the nineteenth century was the desire “to take charge of the procreative function in all of its aspects.”⁷ And one of the markers in this takeover was an attack on female midwifery and the substitution of the professional and male technology of obstetrics. This amounted to, in effect, not merely an increasing male management of procreation but also a revaluing of the midwife’s position in relation to reproduction. That is, if the obstetrician replaces the (female) midwife, his confiscation of the generative function places him as the governing middleman of reproduction, and governing precisely because of his position as middleman. And if Norris’s image of the earth-mother is centrally obstetrical—the mother “delivered,” after the pains of labor—this delivery, by the iron “knives” of the steam harvester, represents, I want to suggest, a collateral reassertion of the middleman—again, the position of all men in Norris’s account—in the process of production.

It is tempting to read this revaluation of the middleman as a compensatory male response to a threatening female productivity, and, as Barker-Benfield, among others, has suggested, this is certainly a significant part of the story. But the notion of, and promotion of, a rivalry between “male” and “female” forces, and the consequent underwriting of what appears as an absolute differentiation of gender powers and “principles,” may in fact function as ways of managing the anxieties about production we have been sketching. Put another way, we must consider the ways in which difference itself may be produced and deployed as a strategy of control and as part of a more general economy of bodies and powers. One of the narrative tactics that supports this economy is the displacement or rewriting of generative power, and one of the supports of such tactics is the resolutely abstract account of “force” that governs the naturalist text.

The passage on the earth-mother’s delivery is, in characteristic Norris fashion, repeated several times in the novel. The final repetition is quickly succeeded by two remarkable rewritings of the force of (re)production. The mother initially appears to extradite men from a place in what Norris calls “the explanation of existence”: “men were nothings, mere animalcules.” The negation of male power is evident.⁸ But through the double operation of negation and reinvestment that I have already noted in Norris’s explanations of production, a curious revaluation follows. If the titanic mother reduces men to “nothings,” “for one second Presley could go one step further”:

Men were naught, death was naught, life was naught; FORCE only existed—FORCE that brought men into the world, FORCE that crowded them out of it to make way for the succeeding generation, FORCE that made the wheat grow, FORCE that garnered it from the soil to give place to the succeeding crop. (2:343)

The colossal mother is thus rewritten as a machine of force that brings men into the world, “the symphony of reproduction” as “the colossal pendulum of an almighty machine.” And crucially, if the mother is merely a “carrier” of force, the mother herself is merely a medium—mid-wife and middleman—of the force of generation.

Such a capitalizing on force as a counter to female generativity in particular and to anxieties about generation and production in general may help to explain, at least in part, the appeals to highly abstract conceptions of force in the emphatically “male” genre of naturalism.⁹ More specifically, and despite the instabilities and contradictions in the naturalist conception of force, it does not take much interpretive pressure to see that this discourse of force, crucial to the naturalist style of power, is essentially the discourse of thermodynamics.¹⁰ I am referring not merely to the centrality of steam power in the naturalist text (preeminently Zola’s) but also to the “laws” that govern what I have called the naturalist machine. The two fundamental principles of thermodynamics—the law of conservation and the law of dissipation—operate, I want to argue, both thematically and formally in the naturalist narrative. The pertinence of the second law—positing the irreversible degradation of usable energy in any system and hence an inevitable systemic degeneration—to the naturalist doctrine of degeneration is immediately evident, and I will be discussing this “application” of the second law in the section following. But here I am more concerned with some surprising consequences of the first law for the naturalist problematic of production. Stated simply, the first law of thermodynamics, the law of conservation, posits that matter and energy may be converted and exchanged but can neither be created nor destroyed. As Henry Adams puts it in. The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, in which he details and applies a thermodynamic theory of history, there is “incessant transference and conversion,” but “nothing was created, nothing was destroyed.”¹¹ Conversion without creation is the thermodynamic conception of force.

The significance of such a conception of force is not hard to detect: the opposition of conversion to creation forms the basis of late nineteenth-century theories of production. In his. Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), for instance, Thorstein Veblen, not unlike Norris, offers essentially an agrarianist contrast between “industry,” which involves “the effort to create a new thing,” and the nonproductive or wasteful activities of what Veblen calls “exploit” and “conspicuous consumption,” which he defines as “the conversion to his own ends of energies previously directed to some other end by another agent.”¹² Such a difference between creation of a new thing and mere conversion of energy, Veblen immediately adds, “coincides with a difference between the sexes.”¹³ This “coincidence” figures centrally in what is certainly the most familiar American naturalist treatment of the relation between thermodynamics and sexual production, Henry Adams’s treatment of the virgin and the dynamo, in. The Education of Henry Adams.

Adams’s text repeats Veblen’s opposition of industry and conversion, but with inverse valuation. Adams’s meditation on the power of the Virgin takes place, of course, in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition at Paris in 1900. Adams relates that he “ignored almost the whole industrial exhibit,” attending instead to the steam engine and dynamo. What these machines perform is a conversion of matter and energy: “To him, the dynamo was but an ingenious channel for conveying somewhere the heat latent in a few tons of poor coal.” This power of “interconversion of forms,” “endless displacement,” and ceaseless “exchange” defines the “wholly new” force of the dynamo. This new power is also perfectly in line with what Adams represents as the final giving way, in the 1890s, of a “simply industrial” economy of production to a “capitalist system” and “machine” ruled by the laws of conversion and exchange.¹⁴

On the levels of the machine and the body both, Adams’s economy is thermodynamic. As he concisely states in his “Letter to American Teachers of History” (1910), “man is a thermodynamic mechanism.”¹⁵ And Adams’s treatment of the reproductive power of the Virgin offers not finally an alternative to but an extension of this dynamic. The Virgin “was reproduction,” Adams observes, “the greatest and most mysterious of energies.” She is also “the animated dynamo,” the living generator. If the dynamo is an “ingenious channel” of conversion, the Virgin is a “channel of force.”¹⁶ The Virgin, not unlike Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, who explicitly represents, at the close of the novel, a “medium” and “carrier” of force, and not unlike Norris’s “mother,” the conveyer of the force that brought men into the world, is a thermodynamic mechanism, a converter of power. In Norris’s formulation, “Nature was, then, a gigantic engine” (2:286).

This is enough to indicate, at least provisionally, part of what I suggest is at the back of Norris’s rewriting of production and some of the implications and effects of that revision. But as I earlier indicated, the logic of the passage I began by considering is yet more complicated. The translation of earth-mother into force is immediately succeeded by yet another explanation of generation, an explanation that goes even a step further. As if the leveling appeal to an abstract and disembodied “FORCE” fails to reinvest the role of men in production, this account of force is followed by a startling reembodiment. This new and miraculous body recovers not merely a male power of production but also projects the autonomy of that power. The “almighty machine” that displaces the colossal mother is a channel of energy. This machine, however, takes on a strikingly different form: it is a generator of “primordial energy flung out from the hand of the Lord God himself, immortal, calm, infinitely strong.” One might say that creation, in Norris’s final explanation, is the work of an inexhaustible masturbator, spilling his seed on the ground, the product of a mechanistic and miraculous onanism. The third term in Norris’s triptych of mother, force, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Case Studies and Cultural Logistics
• Part I: The Naturalist Machine
• Part II: Physical Capital: The Romance of the Market in Machine Culture
• Part III: Statistical Persons
• Part IV: The Still Life
• Part V: The Love-Master
• Notes
• Index