There are quite a variety of texts in unit three. How can we make sense of this variety, what are some possible meeting points for these texts? While you'll be exploring this question in the assignment for project three, I'd like to do what I can to give a con-text to the texts we've studied.
By juxtaposing Marx and Taylor, we establish the initial problem of man and machine; it is the problem of man as machine. Taylor wants to make men more efficient and, in doing so, to make them of greater benefit to the nation (199). In order to be more efficient, the elementary operations and motions of workers are developed so as to "[e]liminate all false movements, slow movements and useless movements" (Taylor 199). The "standard" method of operation and the stop-watch that times efficiency of any operating method become the means of making laborers more productive. Such productivity benefits the bourgeois capitalist, but does not--contrary to Taylor's claims (210-11)--aid the worker. Today, we see the benefit of efficiency to capitalists and detriment to workers in recent end of the year profits made by AT&T and GM while at the same time these companies drastically decreased the number of workers. "Downsizing" has become the buzzword for maximizing efficiency and gaining profit.
By moving toward greater efficiency in accord with Taylor's model, the worker becomes increasingly machine-like and less of an individual, "Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine" (Marx 96). Lets face it, workers are not the happy people seen on the Saturn commercials. In reality, the number of Saturn workers dissatisfied with their jobs has increased mainly because of demands that workers reach increasingly higher levels of productivity. Again, we see Taylor's efficiency model at odds with human freedom.
Man-become-machine is made into a dark parody in Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Workers slowly and mechanically move to elevators where they descend to work on the machines that run the city. Working on the machines, they take on a mechanical rhythm, they become "appendage[s] of the machine." How fitting that Madonna, the material girl, would choose to make a music video in the style of Metropolis. The video picks up on the mechanical rhythm of the machine labor but, in contrast to the film, the video has the workers dance, as if happy and enjoying their service at the feet of the material girl.
Brave New World takes mechanization of man to a new level. Rather than simply train men in standardized methods of production, the whole culture of the Brave New World is the training ground for productivity. From birth, indeed even before birth--in the artificial womb--humans are biologically and psychologically outfitted to meet the needs of society:
Hot tunnels alternated with cool tunnels. Coolness was wedded to discomfort in the form of hard X-rays. By the time they were decanted the embryos had horror of cold. They were predestined to emigrate to the tropics, to be miners and acetate silk spinners and steel workers. Later on their minds would be made to endorse the judgment of their bodies. (15)Our own society works on similar grounds. For example, after the Sputnik scare, large amounts of money went toward better math and science programs. And, inner city schools are much more poorly funded than suburban schools, with a difference as much as $1/inner-city child in downtown Dallas for every $5 for the suburban child in North Dallas. With a poor education, inner city kids are "predestined to emigrate" to low paying service jobs. And those of us who do make it to college undergo what James Bernauer calls a "humanist" training:
The prison that becomes the special target of Foucault's criticism is none other than the modern identity of man himself. This identity is the center of that humanism that is both a particular understanding of human reality and a technology for human development (such as the school system with its means of fixing, grading, and defining students or television as a means of disseminating the status quo and regulating public opinion). (116-17)Society gives us models to identify with. We want to be like the successful capitalist, we want to be the good citizens contributing to the economy and reaping its benefits. Such identification plays into psychological demands of the superego to be like the father (Freud 191-92). Society becomes our father figure (Freud 192).
The problem becomes how to break free, how to find a "line of flight" from the confines of a technological and capitalist system that has trained us to be at its service. Marx believe that freedom will come with a proletariat revolution, "But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons--the modern working class--the proletarians" (96). Metropolis also hints at this revolution but pulls back from having the revolution succeed. Marx and Lang created their works during early capitalism. Today, the possibility that the workers of the world will unit to overthrow the capitalist system seems less likely because multinational corporations have expanded global capitalism such that the fabric of life is closely wedded to the system. Some Marxists still believe in a revolution, and if you side with this line of thought, you can respond to project three using Marx's claims; however, I would like to incorporate Marx into other possible means of freedom developed in unit three.
Finding possible means of freedom is the most challenging part of project three. Each of us will develop our own opinions on how to find liberation. In this brief essay, all I can hope to do is to sketch out for you some possibilities that I see. Is it possible that our means of imprisonment can lead to means of liberation? Can man-and-machine-turned-cyborg be more than man as "an appendage of the machine"? Several texts lead us along this line of thought.
The futurists have a great optimism for the possibilities of man wedded to machine. Some of the optimism represses the harsh realities of labor and naively embraces commercial industry, hoping commerce will follow in the idealism of the futurists (130). Despite such naivete, what can be learned from the futurists is the new consciousness that evolves from the meeting of man and machine:
Futurism is grounded in the complete renewal of human sensibility brought about by the great discoveries of science. Those people who today make use of the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the train . . . the aeroplane, the cinema, the great newspaper (synthesis of a day in the world's life) do not realize that these various means of communication, transportation and information have a decisive influence on their psyches. (129, emphasis added)The problem, then, is to understand how technology has affected the way we think, and deeper than this, the way we live our conscious and unconscious lives. The futurists tell us that thoughts, feelings, desires, and imagination are all bound by or liberated by the technology we use.
Two models strike me personally as means of using technology toward a line of flight: the art of Jean Tinguely and the film Blade Runner. As we saw in the in-class film Shock of the New, Tinguely constructs sculptures out of machines. But his sculptures are not useful, not efficient, not what Taylor or Henry Ford would like to see. They are awkward machines in a self-inclosed sculptor. Sometimes they produce harsh mechanical sounds, other times they bang on key boards in an attempt to make music. Can we make something with the machine that does not serve the purposes of National efficiency and the Newtonian regularity of stop-watch time? Perhaps like Deckard, we will never be total free of the system, but in the complex labyrinth of the "brave new world," perhaps we can find hiding places. Perhaps we, like Deckard, can use our programed expertise to an-other end. (Like the Dadaists, we can use the newspaper cuttings of the real world and make from them something new.)
What would this other use look like? I can think of a few principles it could work on. There should be a lack of efficience, so as not to be co-opted by the system. If there is any efficiency, it should be the efficiency of inefficiency, the ability to avoid the regularly scheduled programming, to diversify rather than centralize. And there should be loose associative links. Flight away from logic brings new possibilities. This is Einstein's Dreams over Newton's ruler and clock. Using Freud's work on dreams, the surrealists produced art that has dream-like desires of a world not quite our own, but a world we ponder, desires we can pursue. In "How to become Paranoia-Critical," Dali fashions a new center of the universe at the Perpignan station. In many of his paintings, he juxtaposes diverse objects, and in accord with Marinetti, "The broader their affinities, the longer will images keep their power to amaze" (133).
The cyborg seems a ripe word for the loose associations and for high technology used not to benefit the system but for other ends. With technology, "Time and Space died yesterday" (Marinetti 126). Or, at least, we have new ways of curving time and space, being in several places at one time and traveling great distances in short lengths of time. Great distances come together--a weeping Buddha from Malaysia sits atop my cabinet full of files on classes. What a strange image, almost surreal. It is not an efficient image; rather, it is an image made from diverse objects brought together through associative links. What other worlds can I create around me by collapsing distances, using diverse objects, and using technology. Well, there's my William Blake tarot cards, the occult meets the Romantic visionary. I found the cards from a web site. Ed Buryn made simulations of Blake images and had them printed inexpensively using modern print technology.
Just as with my finding Ed Buryn, so too I can search out other like-minded people, establishing an assemblage of folks that are working on the fringe of the shinny, lucrative, business world. New forms of communication allow me to meet these people and discuss ideas, "The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination due to association" (Marx 99). Just as I found the Blake site, I also found the Women's History web site. Here I ordered a poster of "Rosie the Riveter." The poster was used during WWII to increase production for the American war effort. I've scanned the image and digitally changed it into a pro-graduate student union poster. The image is transformed from pro-war Nationalism to proletarian unionizing against problems in state funding for teachers.
Modern industrialization does not have to be a tool for imprisonment. From Marx to Lang to Huxley and Bernauer, there are plenty of warnings about the dangers of technology. We should avoid the dehumanization and systematic programming of good citizens that these thinkers warn us about. If art continues to open us to imaginative alternatives, then taking hints from Tinguely, the Dadaists, and Dali, we can create lines of flight. Such alternative visions would include inefficiency rather than clock work productivity, diversity rather than centralization, and loose associative links rather than rigid logical structures. My goal in this new method is "the emergence of a space of liberty," "an exchange [that] starts within" toward an "opening in a state of intense joy, of an electric quivering" (Bernauer 116).