Manifesto Technologies: Marx, Marinetti, Haraway
Steven Mentor
Department of English
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195
cybunny@u.washington.edu
June 1994
to appear in: Technohistory (Krieger Publishing)
The manifesto as monster
By what writing technologies are technologies represented? And
what are the politics of those writing technologies? These must
be important questions for technohistorians; no one genre of representation
determines the reception of technologies like electricity or automobiles,
and below any essay on technology lie buried assumptions of what
might constitute adequate and inadequate, normative and abnormal
structures of representation. I've chosen to look at the representation
of technology in manifestos because this genre appears to wear
its politics on its sleeve, and because it conflates a particular
view of technology with a highly self-conscious choice of stylistic
and formal representation. This representation is itself a kind
of writing technology built to shock as much as to persuade, to
sell as much as to argue. For example, consider the difference
between this paragraph and the following:
All manifestos are cyborgs. That is, they fit Donna Haraway's
use of this term in her own "A Manifesto for Cyborgs"
- manifestos are hybrids, chimeras, boundary confusing technologies.
They combine and confuse popular genres and political discourse,
borrow from critical theory and advertising, serve as would be
control systems for the larger social technologies their authors
hope to manufacture. Most include original ideas, but their aim
is rather simulation, duplication, reproduction; they long to
achieve the status of a rhetorical handgun passed out to masses
of readers rather than that of a judge's scales. They are monsters
of discourse, their de-monstrations reconstructing the audience
(and their cultural landscape) in a strange and monstrous light;
in Marinetti's famous phrase, they are made on the principles
of violence and precision. They enact violence while pointing
to the violence done by some Other/s; they use linguistic scalpels
sharpened on the whetstone of newspaper headlines to disassemble
and reassemble the body politic. Whether as homo faber and proletarian
(Marx), Futurism's New Man (Marinetti), or cyborg (Haraway), the
reader undergoes radical surgery, emerging with new prosthetics,
often technological, but always discursive.
The preceding sentences give a taste of manifesto language, as
well as some of the "body parts" of the manifesto as
a literary genre. In the paper below I want to explore ways in
which a manifesto is itself a technology as well as a discourse
about the politics of technology and instrumental reason. Marxism,
Futurism, and feminism have all attempted to theorize the role
of technology in the modern world, and in doing so have attempted
to disassemble dominant stories about technology and reassemble
them in utopian and material ways. Each attempts to remake political
identity, to retell history as the history of new techniques of
production, and to linguistically embody and enact this remaking
and retelling. In each case, language is self consciously a technique;
perhaps the manifesto is simply an extreme example of the ubiquity
of myth and narrative in all attempts at technohistories, and
part of the politics of any theory of technology.
The Communist Manifesto: melodrama of technology
A spectre is haunting the manifesto - the spectre of its double,
literature. A manifesto is never simply a call to action, but
is also a rhetorical construction of the proper scenes of action,
the roles taken by diverse actors, the script of actions hoped
for and believed in. Often the manifesto constructs such actions
in a way quite different from what is accepted or commonly practiced;
in that sense it must argue for its premises. But at the same
time it attempts to frame these premises, not as doubted or new
ideas to be analyzed, but as themselves obvious, evident, "manifest".
This framing allows the language of the manifesto to soar in its
denunciations and assertions, to transcend careful, hedged elaboration
of political or artistic "programs" for the more powerful
registers of rage and incitement.
The very origins of the word provide a glimpse at some of its
internal tensions and contradictions. Manifest means readily perceived
by the eyes or understanding, obvious, apparent, plain; its Middle
English antecedent manifestus is a variant of Latin manufestus,
that is, struck with the hand. Most of the early manifestos are
proffered by sovereigns and governments, agents with the material
power to strike physically in order to make their meaning apparent
and plain. And the root "manus" would provide a Foucauldian
with a treasure trove of disciplinary and authoritarian terms:
manage, manacle, manners, mandatory, mancipate (the power to sell
slaves and other property), manipulate, command, demand, manuscript
and manufacture. (Partridge, 378-9).
But we have come to understand manifesto in an apparently opposite
way: as emancipatory, a blow at some managing, and commanding
authority, a slap at bourgeois and literary manners. Manifestos
have come to signify the words of those outside the power to command:
avant-garde artists, small, marginalized political groups and
communities, individuals. They are metaphorical, rhetorical slaps
of the hand by those who do not have the social or political power
to proffer these slaps literally. As such, they are also attempts
to manifest something that is not obvious; even the most "materialist"
of manifestos thus shares something with the manifestation of
spiritualists: the bringing to light of something that is immaterial,
or immanent, in the consciousness or lived reality of humans in
a specific society and historical period.
Why probe such elements of the manifesto? I certainly do not want
to empty out the political contents or affective power of documents
like the Communist Manifesto, or pretend that they are "merely"
aesthetic constructions. In fact, this way of talking about value
itself reproduces the problem I want to investigate. Just as literary
productions have politics, have subversive or important effects
on the symbolic economy of a society, so too political rhetorical
productions have linguistic politics, and reflect important assumptions
(about the nature of the political order, the roles and values
of those opposed to it, right action) that have everything to
do with the nature of subsequent material actions, or as the French
say, "manifestations." Further, manifestos not
only make manifest certain kinds of actions and political organization;
they obscure or evade internal contradictions or difficulties
of the authors. I want to argue that these evasions or lacunae
too play themselves out in very material ways, in subsequent actions
and organizations engendered by the manifesto and its authors/signers.
In the Communist Manifesto, "materialism" hides its
own ghost, idealism and faith in the organic machine; the historical
narrative of proletarian victory hides the attempts of nonproletarian
intellectuals to shape and determine this victory and its means;
the apparently bald and naked shape of the manifesto as clear
argument and "realism" hides the equally powerful framing
discourses of melodrama and catechism. And all these, I argue,
play themselves out in the material nature of communist movements,
states, attitudes toward technology and science, and in the kinds
of political narratives and artistic movements they themselves
are forced to exclude and even destroy. Every manifesto has its
manifest, its bill of lading, which those unable to critically
read it are doomed to pay and repeat.
When the Communist League called on Marx and Engels to draw up
a manifesto in 1847, both wrote drafts. Engels' draft, titled
"The Principles of Communism," is a catechism of 25
questions and answers, and the catechism is one of the genres
rewritten here. But a catechism is a bald assertion of authority,
one often backed up by the slap of a hand, as many who have attended
Catholic schools can testify. Engels' catechistic hand can most
readily be seen in section two, "Proletarians and Communists",
where the need to differentiate communism from other sects is
most crucial. But most scholars agree that Marx is the main author
of the present manifesto, and that the substance of the manifesto's
narrative on history is his. The Marxian master narrative of history
and technology is set against the "nursery tale" told
about communism by its opponents; it is at the same time an argument
for and demonstration of what seems clear, manifest, about history.
Not only is this history told with simple, declarative sentences
void of any hedging or qualification; the narrative itself is
full of tropes of clarity, of the rending of veils and mystifications.
Ironically, much of this work is done in the text by the bourgeoisie;
in Marx's eyes, they perform the violent task, which he will continue,
of demystification:
[The bourgeoisie ] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of
religious fervor, of chivalric enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism,
in the icy waters of egotistical calculation...The bourgeoisie
has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored...The
bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil...
(Tucker, 475-6)
Before, exploitation was "veiled" by "illusions"
- now it is "shameless, direct, brutal." And this is
in fact the rhetorical aim of the manifesto: to further this work
by writing a "realistic" history. In case his readers
miss this, Marx takes pains to connect intellectual production
to material production and economy, and to point out that both
are in the interests of the ruling class. Because of the rule
of exploitation, "the social consciousness of past ages,
despite all the multiplicity and variety is displays, moves within
certain common forms...which cannot completely vanish except with
the total disappearance of class antagonisms." (Tucker, 489)
By implication, the present text attempts both a representation
of such disappearance, and also a linguistic act that escapes
these common forms that contain within them the traces of ruling
class ideas. Hence the final assertions that Communists like the
author "disdain to conceal" and "openly declare."
It is but a short step from this rhetoric to its stylistic predecessor
and model: the "scientific" style adopted by the Royal
Society as most appropriate for scientific inquiry and assertion.
Marx was keen to claim for his socialism the title of scientific,
and used this as a club with which to beat other forms of socialism
as unscientific, romantic, utopian nursery tales. And yet the
elements of the manifesto that go beyond mere catechism display
certain common "unscientific" forms of its age, which
shape its agenda and analysis. Coral Lansbury argues that the
manifesto is based more on 19th century melodrama than on economic
and historic discourses; I would add that melodrama is in fact
a ghost that haunts many discussions of science and technology.
How is the manifesto a melodrama? The Communist Manifesto begins
and ends with the signature: the Gothic ghosts that populate the
works of August von Kotzebue, Francois Rene Pixecourt, and 'Monk'
Lewis. In its first English translation the opening reads "A
frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe. We are haunted by
a ghost, the ghost of Communism." (Lansbury, 6) Ghost, hobgoblin,
"spectre" in the more familiar Samuel Moore translation:
seen as malign by most, these spirits invoke a spiritual authority
in 19th Century melodrama: "The idea of a ghost as the moral
conscience and protagonist comes directly from Gothic melodrama
where the occult resolved its destiny through the mundane events
of a historical present...the essence of the classic melodrama
[includes] its benign ghost, its violent action, and the final
social revolution, when the rightful heirs are restored to their
proper place in society." (Lansbury, 6-7). An important element
of melodrama is its manichean nature: all villains are aristocrats,
all heros and heroines are lowly born, noble peasants who are
revealed as the true aristocrats. Many of these heros literally
cast off their chains in the end, as villains are often stymied
at the last moment by the reappearance of the ghost; many heroines
are the object of lecherous and rapacious squires and lords; most
melodramas ended with sword play and the redistribution of spoils.
For each of these genre-based elements, Lansbury cites passages
from the manifesto: each element works on the emotions of the
audience, to justify the social violence that destroys the demonic
villain, to offer a world purged and restored to justice and order.
Lansbury's analysis is important for several reasons. First, it
sets the manifesto more accurately within its time, and serves
to deconstruct the status and class based antecedents often offered
for it. Traditionally texts are made into unified monuments by
citing the important and high status texts and authors on which
it apparently draws (for Marx, obviously Hegel and Schelling);
this analysis serves to counter this monumentalizing, to allow
for multiple readings by citing the lower status, but arguably
important antecedents that make a text popular or even conceivable
in its day. The text is ineluctably hybrid. Beyond this, Lansbury
offers another interpretation: the manifesto follows the melodramatic
"logic of the excluded middle" because Marx and Engels
attempt to avoid an obvious problem of being in the middle. That
is, how is it that men from bourgeois backgrounds come to identify
with the proletariat and speak for it?
Marx and Engels showed no interest in understanding how and why
intellectuals become radicalized...It was from the outset a problematic
situation, for if social economic conditions inevitably determined
historical change and human character, how was it possible for
two members of the bourgeoisie to become heralds and spokesmen
for the proletariat?..the process by which the bourgeois becomes
a revolutionary intellectual and a standard bearer for the Vanguard
Party relies more on faith than it does on factual analysis. (Lansbury,
3)
This evasion has had enormous effects on politics of the 20th
Century. Lenin addressed it by theorizing a vanguard party of
professional revolutionaries whose commitment to revolutionary
violence masked their bourgeois origins; these intellectuals later
became key players in purges of "bourgeois" intellectuals,
journalists, labor leaders, as well as internal purges. Marx's
guilt and resultant tale of purity is replayed in the Soviet Union,
and later within the ranks of the New Left, where the "politics
of guilt" allowed so-called revolutionaries from the Progressive
Labor sect to take over SDS from its "bourgeois" student
members. Both Marx and Engels, in the manifesto, are concerned
to discredit other forms of socialism, and especially the so called
"utopian" socialism of Fourier, Owen, and others by
labelling them unscientific, undeveloped, fantastic, indistinct.
Marx denounces their "castles in the air" based on "their
fantastical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects
of their social science." (Tucker, 499) Other sects are similarly
denounced. This "excluded middle" of activism and socialist
activity repeats much of the same rhetoric of religious sectarianism,
and a similar appeal to purity. If melodrama is "a mode of
compulsive seriousness seeing to restore a fragmented society
to a new and harmonious whole" (Lansbury, 4) then Marx repeats
on the revolutionary stage the same romanticism and naivete he
denounces in bourgeois society. Melodrama is the signature of
a powerful desire arising from material conditions, but few would
argue that it provides a realistic or scientific model of action
for a millennial proletarian revolution. And melodrama's obligatory
violence is transferred to the discourse of actual political change,
so that violence becomes a mark of purity, and its lack a sign
of 'bourgeois' decadence or armchair socialism. Hence notions
of revolutionary resistance that don't include revolutionary violence
or terror as integral elements are banished to the "excluded
middle."
One of the ghosts that haunts this rhetorical machine is technology.
Technology in the hands of the bourgeoisie is violent and vengeful:
it tears, drowns, and then establishes a new naked form of exploitation.
Yet for Marx it is absolutely necessary that technology play this
role: the violence of the Industrial Revolution, the internationalization
of capital, "the constant revolutionizing of production"
and "uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions,"
are crucial for a materialist epiphany that moves beyond religious
and feudal myths. This necessity is placed next to phrases on
the deskilling of craftsmen, enslavement to the machine, the devolution
of humans to commodities, "appendage[s] of the machine."
We are all familiar with the final lines of proletarians having
nothing to lose but their chains; however, most of the energy
in Marx's prose lies with the technological forces of production,
which burst chains (in the Tucker, fetters) repeatedly in section
l.
By making the bourgeoisie a revolutionary class, by lending forces
of production monstrous and unstoppable agency, and by constructing
a melodramatic analysis of technology, Marx paves the way for
the unquestioned Fordism of Lenin and Gramsci, and the precedence
of industrial power and statist control over the lived relations
of workers and their tools/machines. The Communist State and its
vanguard leaders will unfetter first and foremost technological
and industrial production; if it is true that bourgeois culture
for the worker is "a mere training to act as a machine,"
(Tucker, 487), how will State socialist culture, with its reverence
for the exact same industrial methods, be any different? All that
is solid - the worker's felt alienation and anger toward his commodification
and mechanization - is melted by the middle class Marxist rhetoric
into air.
Yet we should also acknowledge the enabling effects of Marx's
melodrama of communism. It certainly appealed to the audiences
of his time, and arguably to many audiences in the 20th Century.
It enacts on the rhetorical level the notion of drama, of conflicts
based on recognizable present day historical roles, events and
genres. And it serves as an affective gateway to a Marxian narrative
that includes truly radical and powerful revisions of history,
economics, technology, classes and the state. Whether consciously
or not, it blurs the boundaries between history and drama, economics
and the conventions of fiction, the familiar roles in art and
the unfamiliar roles of Marxian political landscapes. It also
serves as the Father against which later authors of manifesti,
including Marinetti, Breton, and Haraway, would both rebel and
measure themselves.
Driving in the dark: Marinetti's deus ex macchina
Marx's manifesto generated some strange and rebellious offspring.
In her book The Futurist Moment Marjorie Perloff produces
a narrative about manifestos as a literary genre, beginning with
the Communist Manifesto, reaching a kind of apex in the Futurist
works of Marinetti, Boccioni, Balla et al, and continuing
into Dada and Surrealist manifestos of the period. Perloff finds
in the Communist Manifesto's "curiously mixed rhetoric"
(which she sees as a prose poem) a model of what the manifestos
of the 20th Century will do: graft poetic onto political discourse.
(Perloff, 82). Other early 20th Century artists and thinkers such
as Saint-George de Bouhelier, Jules Romain, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,
anticipate themes of Futurist and later manifestos: the attack
on symbolism, the urge toward energy and violence, urban mass
art and the ever-present need to create a new art and literature.
But these manifestos remain formally similar: they begin with
generalizations about art, and generally follow a 19th Century
model of oratory and persuasions, marshalling arguments, balancing
emotional appeals with reasoned and extended discourse. And few
deal specifically with new technologies.
By contrast, Marinetti's 1909 manifesto (Fondation et Manifeste
du Futurisme) begins with a narrative that sings the body electric
and makes new technologies the key to artistic and political rejuvenation.
Marinetti and his friends have stayed up all night "arguing
to the last confines of logic" and scribbling. Thus the logics
of previous manifestos are exhausted within the first paragraph;
instead, like Marx's unfettered technologies, "the prisoned
radiance of electric hearts" is freed by the call of mechanical
sirens: great ships, locomotives, huge double decker trams, and
most of all, Marinetti's car (macchina). Just as Marx uses melodrama,
Marinetti marries a late symbolist aesthetic to technology: his
car is a beast, a dog biting its tail, a prodigy, a shark; and
presaging so many technophilic American movies, this 1909 piece
begins with a car crash and ends with the wholesale destruction
of the venerable city with its dead museums and academies. The
car crashes when Marinetti swerves to avoid two bicyclists "wobbling
like two equally convincing but nevertheless contradictory arguments."
(Fisk, 40).
Joy of the machine vs logic and paralysis; the feeling of having
avoided death. The reader is herself in a rhetorical machine that
uses the resources of the symbolist and prose poem to join human
virtues (courage, audacity, energy) to technology: "A racing
car...is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace."
Where Marx saw the worker enslaved by the machine, Marinetti puts
him at the wheel of a car; the reader is accelerated through violent
and extreme positions, not pausing to wonder whether or how artistic
revolution goes with glorifying war, or how "art in fact
can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice." Even
the most programmatic elements (numbered theses, for example)
are swept aside in a verbal vortex that performs its message.
Engels' catechism is jettisoned and parodied; not argument and
principle, but "de la violence et de la precision" will
be the principle of Futurist manifesti.
Of course, this is still a time when most workers are chained
to their machines, figuratively if not literally (as for example
many women seamstresses were); few could afford the new wheeled
machines of the millionaire Marinetti. Yet in some important ways
the Futurist manifesto is related to car advertisements and the
language of publicity. Marinetti figuratively says to his car,
"I love what you do for me", and like so much ad copy,
he uses a brief and dramatic visual story (a car crash) to set
the pace and tone of the pitch. Note that the pitch mingles the
new consumer item (cars) with images of vital industrial society
in general (railroad stations, factories, shipyards): it sings
"of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot"
as if the work of industrial society was homologous with symbolic
energy of "deep chested locomotives whose wheels paw the
tracks."
In fact Marinetti was a tireless promoter who travelled by rail
from agitation to agitation; he posed his followers for publicity
stills, managed to get his manifesti printed on front pages of
French and Italian journals, and perfected the public scandal:
attacking a Venetian orchestra, setting up mechanical altars to
the Fatherland in squares, insulting and then cajoling crowds
until fights broke out. Like the first Parisian performance of
Rite of Spring, which ended in a shouting match and riot, Marinetti
found a way to wed avant garde theories of art and writing with
new competencies at marketing, publicizing, and distributing his
message. The fact that technology and technophilia is at the heart
of this message is not surprising, since it is the technology
of publicity and movement that allows his small group to gain
such widespread notoriety and power. And this technophilia is
intimately wedded in Futurism to glorification of war (now itself
dominated by technology) and masculinist nationalism: "We
will glorify war - the world's only hygiene - militarism, patriotism...scorn
for women." (Flint, 42)
Each element of this publicity will be used by fascist and Nazi
movements to mobilize the masses and gain state power: not just
attacks on the bourgeoisie and the status quo, but the invocation
of a potent future based on the promises of technology and manifested
through the language and techniques of modern publicity. The technology
of advertising and the advertising of technologies combine to
form a powerful and exciting narrative of progress. Like Marx's
unfettered technology, the engines and aeroplanes of Futurism
stand for an almost magical force that counteracts the routinization
of modern life and labor. But where Marx saw this force as inevitably
international in scope, Marinetti and futurism tend to link technology
to the body of the nation-state, made strong by war's hygiene,
alive by state electrification grids, pleasurable by the speed
of highways, sublime by the power of gigantic industrial dynamos.
The aesthetizisation of technology hides its political uses and
the continuity of deskilled mechanized labor under fascism no
less than communism.
Gender Trouble: Keeping the Man in Manifesto
Marinetti's manifesti raise questions about the gender of political
rhetorical machines. Cinzia Blum has analyzed the rhetorical strategies
of Marinetti's futurist manifesto, in the process asking: to what
extent does the apparent revolution in style and genre signal
a parallel revolution in political action? Does the manifesto's
subversion of traditional codes, genre boundaries and expressive
registers mean also "the undermining of hierarchical, centralizing,
ordering systems predicated upon a unitary, authoritative speaking
and thinking subject"? (Blum, 197)
By looking closely at the language and binary oppositions of Marinetti
(in "Fondazione e Manifesto del Futurismo") and his
followers, Blum discovers a response to the anxieties of modern(ist)
fragmented identities and social codes that should not surprise
us: anxiety and self-doubt are erased, in futurism, by the demonizing
of feminized Others and a recuperation of phallic mastery via
fantasies of omnipotence and sexual aggression. The construction
of this "fiction of power" is a compensation for the
lack of such power in the modern world. She uses Kristeva's notion
of the abject to link strong separation of the sexes with fear
of that which traverses the boundary of the self; while Futurism
appears to theorize the destruction of the unitary self of previous
literary and political constructions, it recuperates this potent
self as the "multiplied man":
In fact, the scattering ("sparpagliamento") of the self
in the universe (brought about by the fast pace of modern life)
is presented as a means to a more powerful unity freed from the
limits of human nature...the Futurist subject disperses himself
to penetrate the molecular life of matter, and with aeropoesia,
rises as a super "I" propelled by mechanical wings to
control immense spaces in the totalizing...perspective allowed
by the airplane. (Blum, 204)
In the process of recuperating the virile and potent male subject,
various and sundry "others" must be overcome, indeed
penetrated and destroyed. The site of violent action is the manifesto,
but also women's bodies and the things they stand for: impotence,
disease, fragmentation and powerlessness, chaos and the undefined,
love and the limits of human/nature, the decadent, the organic;
parliamentarism, pacifism, academic culture, psychological writing.
In the face of so much experimentation by futurists, one barrier
remains policed: gender in language. One futurist, Francesco Canguillo,
actually argues that sexual perversion may result from linguistic
perversion, and that reducing ambiguous grammatical gender will
simultaneously fix meaning and deviance: "Although other
linguistic rules can and must be subverted in the name of artistic
freedom, or rather, of the artist's power, grammatical gender
is the object of reactionary, homophobic concerns, of an effort
to restore the oldest conception of language - that of the intrinsic
relation between signifier and signified." (Blum, 199) Blum
argues that the Futurist's emphasis on masculine culture managed
its undercurrent of homoerotic desire by displacing this homoeroticism
onto the machine, and, I would add, onto the literary product
as a machine and a site of mastery over feminized others. Ultimately,
"while the manifesto's hybrid nature instantiates the disruption
of codes in modern chaotic, fragmentary reality, the rhetoric
and thematics of gender strive to establish more rigid gender
codes which provide for the integrity of the subject and for an
unwavering code of authority and subordination." (Blum, 200)
The Futurist movement generated many opposing manifesti: Mina
Loy's feminist manifesto appropriated futurism for feminism and
attacked Marinetti's sexism using his own terms; Dadaists like
Tristan Tzara and Surrealists like Andre Breton used the manifesto
form to attack his militarist and nationalist views of technology
and his use of avant garde technique to defend reactionary and
fascist modes of social organization. Yet it remained for feminist
theorist extraordinaire Donna Haraway to bring gender, technology
and politics together in the cyborg mother of all manifestos.
A cyborg for manifestos: reading Donna Haraway
As I hope I have shown, the manifesto is already a cyborg; Donna
Haraway's 1985 "A Manifesto for Cyborgs" can be read
as a redundancy, a manifesto for manifestos, a guide for writing
politically charged histories of technology and feminism. If the
Communist Manifesto had remained Engels' catechistic discriminations
and a taxonomy of 19th Century socialisms, we would not be reading
it today; and if Haraway's 1985 article had limited itself to
a critique of totalizing feminist and socialist narratives, or
to a weave of feminist theorists and postmodern economics, it
might never have left the predictable orbit of Socialist Review
and its readership. Instead, Haraway rewrites Marx via avant garde
manifesto strategies of Marinetti, Breton and Guy Debord; like
Marinetti, she uses violence as well as precision to achieve a
powerful analysis of technology and politics in the late 20th
Century.
We have seen the rhetorical violence Marx deploys when he invokes
the rending and tearing of veils accomplished by the bourgeoisie
and their industrial technologies; in his manifesto, both the
vital force of technological progress and the coming solidarity
of the proletarians burst fetters, haunt a terrified ruling class;
and a dominant metaphor is war, the war of class against class.
This way of seeing social relations and technology is not hedged;
though other paradigms are possible, Marx performs the notion
of war by simultaneously claiming to describe and declare war.
Often, commentators have noticed the contradiction between a professed
state of war and a strategy that depends on building workers'
parties within the political structures of bourgeois society.
And we have seen the dilemma of maintaining that industrial methods
that enslave workers will ultimately free them.
A similar dilemma - Marinetti's two bicyclists threatening logical
paralysis - inhabits Haraway's piece. Beyond the Marinetti-like
witty insults (creationism for example is described as "child
abuse") Haraway describes a "border war" within
"racist male dominated capitalism" and its sciences:
a war over the borders of organism and machine, whose stakes,
like those of Marx, are production and imagination, and unlike
Marx, involve reproduction. Haraway both discovers and enacts
this violent border war; like Marinetti crashing the reader/passenger
into the industrial muck, like Marx disassembling the image of
the organic society and the craft worker, she forcibly situates
us: "we are cyborgs." On one level this simply refers
to the nature of late capitalism: she argues for a fundamental
change, "an emerging world order...a movement from an organic,
industrial society to a polymorphous, information system."
In this new world dis/order, the makers of material cyborgs -
the military, industry, medicine - all reduce the "human"
to parts within a larger cybernetic system that includes machines.
To give her readers the feeling for this reality, she ironically
deploys the language of engineers and systems:
In relation to biotic components, one must think not in terms
of essential properties but in terms of strategies of design,
boundary constraints, rates of flow, systems logics...Any objects
or persons can be reasonably thought of in terms of disassembly
and reassembly; no "natural" architectures constrain
system design...Human beings, like any other component or subsystem,
must be localized in a system architecture whose basic modes of
operation are probabilistic, statistical. No objects, spaces,
or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component can be interfaced
with any other is the proper standard, the proper code, can be
constructed for processing signals in a common language. (Haraway,
594).
This language performs its own violence; try as we might, it is
difficult to think of ourselves as bounded organic individuals
within such a field of discourse. And this is the discourse that
governs the political and technical world Haraway wants us to
inhabit.
Haraway deploys another type of violence: the violence of precision.
Her opening section relentlessly piles on multiple definitions
of the cyborg, refusing to change register or descend to illustration,
development, explanation. Like Marinetti, she knows the power
of speed and substitution. If "we are all cyborgs" then
these fast-shifting definitions all somehow apply to us, no matter
how diverse. It is exhilarating to imagine that a technological
shift, one which batters down socially constructed boundaries
of organic humans and mechanical machines, could have such futuristic
and utopian effects: "we" are thus in a postgender world,
beyond false unities and false origin stories, heterosexual and
patriarchal expectations, with a natural feel for united front
politics. And besides these laudable feminist qualities, we also
are monstrous, capable of bestialities, always multiple and incomplete.
These latter qualities are also effected by her language; it disassembles
us as organic and reassembles us as a proliferation of qualities
which do not easily fit any whole or synthesis or even politics.
We cyborgs are torn apart as by maenads, spread across a discursive
field, mingled with various technologies and discourses (C3I,
late capitalism/economics, feminism, socialism, poststructuralism,
literary theory) and thus capable of any number of assemblages.
If Haraway rhetorically reembodies us as cyborgs, she also makes
our cyborg selves visible. This is in fact a trope of manifesti:
metaphors of sight, of disclosure, of making the invisible visible,
run through Marx, Marinetti, and the others. "The ubiquity
and invisibility of cyborgs is precisely why these sunshine-belt
machines are so deadly. They are as hard to see politically as
materially." (Haraway, 584) In Haraway's postmodern melodrama,
cyborgs haunt not only Europe and its humanist legacy, but also
left and other oppositional groups who find it hard to confront
borderless transnational corporations, science always already
implicated in military research, political and technological maps
based on systems theory and invisible flows of data over networks
whose bodies are at once human and mechanical and electronic.
Haraway's point in violently resituating us: the tendency of progressives
to confront the "domination of technics" with "an
imagined organic body to integrate our resistance" misses
the increasingly hybrid, cyborgian nature of our lived bodies
and societies. Marx critiqued socialisms which failed to "see"
the ubiquity and dynamism of industrial techniques; Haraway critiques
oppositional groups (Marxist feminism and radical feminism) which
fail to take into account the "informatics of domination"
based on cybernetic and communication systems, neo-imperialism
and neo-colonialism.
The hybrid as hybrid: rhetorical feedback loops of reflexive
nontotality
Both Marx and Marinetti construct technology as a "vital
machine," hybrids of organic and machinic ways of looking
at the world. As David Channell writes, many post-Romantic 19th
Century writers revived an organicist mode of looking at the world,
including technology:
an opposing organic world view...used the symbol of an organism,
such as the body or a plant, to understand the world...For the
organicist the organization of parts into a whole result in qualitatively
new phenomena such as a vital spirit principle or force...In such
a world view there is also no conflict between machines and organic
processes since both will be thought to arise from some vital
organization. (Channell, 9).
Hegel's figure of the bud that flowers, and Marx's appropriation
of this type of image for the force of technology, are typical.
By constructing railroads, telegraph systems and other communications
technologies, along with industrial modes of organization that
allow new communication of misery and solidarity between workers,
the bourgeoisie unwittingly build an "organic machine"
on the scale of society, which will literally manufacture the
proletarian or Futurist class. And Marx's manifesto is also such
an organic machine: the sum of its analytic parts are greater
than bourgeois society, greater than any demonstration or proof.
The melodramatic ghost in the technological machine breaks all
mechanistic fetters, all attempts by bourgeois society to contain
it.
Haraway replaces the notion of holism and organic machine with
the figure of the cyborg; in this she is joined by theorists such
as Channell and Bruce Mazlish. Mazlish sees the human/machine
boundary breaking down and providing a fourth great discontinuity
to our conception of the human ; Channell suggests that artificial
intelligence, genetic and biomedical engineering reflect a watershed
merging of mechanism and organicism into a bionic world view:
Unlike the reductive approach of the mechanical view or the holistic
approach of the organic view, the bionic world view is consciously
dualistic in its understanding of the world...[which] emphasizes
the role of interactive processes or dualistic systems in understanding
the world. (Channell,10)
If the organic machine circulates through Marx and Marinetti,
it also circulates as a narrative of holism and necessity. Thus
Marinetti can call war "hygiene." Thus Marx can with
utter assurance give us an etiology of socialism that rejects
amputated or excessive bodies of knowledge as literally diseased,
while retaining health and bodily coherence for his own ideology.
By contrast, Haraway deploys the cyborg to do more than point
at new intimacies of technology and human; she attacks the discursive
claims to holism and to vitality, to totality and total explanatory
and motivating power, of organicist narratives. She does this
partly by using familiar poststructuralist arguments, but also
by demanding that we see her manifesto as both fictional and "real",
both constructed and in some important sense vital, alive.
Calling attention to the fictional and assembled nature of her
production, framing her manifesto with notions of myth and story
and fiction, Haraway theorizes technology in similar fashion,
not as organically developing but as assemblable and so disassemblable
and reassemblable. Humans are part of and parts of social technologies;
to the extent that the cyborg figure makes visible the blurred
boundary between biotic and mechanic, between individual humans
and technical systems, it allows humans to tell different, multiple
stories about technology. And it gives those stories potential
feedback loops and prosthetic rhetorical limbs: we might replace
Haraway's discussion of science fiction with newer or different
texts, or add an entire section on bioengineering and gender.
One important feedback loop in this manifesto concerns the figure
of the cyborg and the limbs of analysis. If the organic machine
centers Marx's text and gives it coherence, the cyborg both centers
and decenters Haraway's text. In true manifesto form, she enacts
"the" cyborg, in all its utopian, violent, monstrous
possibility; yet the excessive list of qualities could easily
continue. The cyborg is a defining figure, one which dramatizes
our imbrication within technical systems and allows us to rethink
dualisms about humans and technology; but it is itself inherently
capable of many transformations. Marx proclaims his theory of
technology inevitable and scientific; Marinetti ends his masculinist
manifesto "Erect on the summit of the world" and sees
from airplanes, the God perspective. Haraway rejects this God's
eye view and forces us as readers to negotiate the blurred boundary
between science fiction and fact, myth and analysis. This rhetorical
cyborg for example involves the cybernetic discourse systems of
feminism and materialism; we could as easily build a "central"
cyborg out of military or medical discourses. The latter might
similarly confuse gender constructions, but with arguably different
effects.
This feedback has discomfited more than a few readers. How can
Haraway describe what "the" cyborg means with such confidence,
and yet make statements like "who cyborgs will be is a radical
question"? Or how can a reader understand "the"
cyborg if she is asked to take two perspectives, one "the
final imposition of a grid of control on the planet...the final
appropriation of women's bodies in a masculinist orgy of war"
and the other a lived experience of partial identities and kinship
with animals and machines? The key is in the notion of performatives
and textual machines. Haraway indicates that the figure of cyborg
works for seeing many elements of 20th Century technology and
politics; if indeed a cyborg is product of variable systems, then
Haraway persuades us to inhabit more than a couple of cyborg bodies
during the course of the essay. None is "necessary";
none makes everything whole or complete; the multiple shifts make
a mockery of all consuming taxonomies and inevitable trajectories
of technical development.
Thus Haraway's cyborg manifesto contains a cyborg writing that
joins the reader to different prosthetic rhetorical machinery.
She imagines the aeropoetic pleasures of a Marinetti joined to
the social responsibility of a Marx, while inviting the reader
to see technologies and rhetorics as discursive, narrated, rewritable.
Her manifesto implicitly critiques all manifesti that attempt
to hide their discursive and mythic status, while arguing for
the engaged and political nature of all representations of technology.
Conclusion
"The cyborg is the figure born of the interface of automaton
and autonomy."
Donna Haraway, Primate Visions (139).
If writing is a technology, then writing about technology, writing
technohistories, demands a doubled vision. Cyborgs and other technologies
as discursive, chimerical, mythical objects circulate in the least
likely places: government policy statements, military research
and development reports, medical journals. They carry with them
narratives, perspectives, genres, that belie the staid generic
prose of their textual bodies. Even a cursory look at the history
of attempts to represent technology and its social implications
must surely reveal that all such attempts are always already mythical,
narrated, fictional; bringing these ghostly figures to light in
current technohistories must be a prime goal. This is not to enter
the slippery slope of relativism, in which all texts are equally
false or suspect; rather, it is to suggest that nuclear power
plants, waste management systems, and medical cyborgs all escape
any one genre of representation, comedy or tragedy, romance or
farce. We must look at the institutional and political interests
embedded in such generic representations, as well as our own framing
stories and technologies of representation. Initially, this may
be giddy, unfamiliar business, rather like the figure/ground reversals
of avant garde collage, the fragmentations of cubism.
Artefacts indeed have politics; technologies can be agents. We
want to think of organic humans making autonomous decisions about
humane uses of technologies, but instead we must learn to think
of humans and machines linked in multiple, often invisible, networks
and systems of power. The discursive systems used to represent
such systems are part of the system, but they are not the whole
system; human bodies, wills, and stories do not consciously rule
these systems (autonomy), but neither are they absent (automaton).
Every technohistory constructs what it pretends to discover, performs
what it pretends to demonstrate; Haraway's great gift to both
political and technological history is to acknowledge that this
is always so. Humans are radically constrained and constructed
by the technological systems developed up to now; as John Christie
points out in his "A Tragedy for Cyborgs," the future
is in certain ways already written. Yet as I write this, technologies
like the Internet, bioengineering, genetic research, and expert
systems are undermining basic tenets of political bodies/technologies
like nation-states and their governmental apparatuses. These organic
machines and their legitimizing stories will be transformed in
ways impossible to imagine now; more manifesti wait to be written.
In questions of whether or to what extent the resultant bodies
are authoritarian or liberating, socially just or more unequal
and oppressive than today, theorists of technology and writers
of science/fiction will have a good deal to say.
References
Blum, Cinzia. "Rhetorical Strategies and Gender in Marinetti's
Futurist Manifesto." Italica, vol. 67(2), Summer 1990,
pp. 196-211.
Channell, David. The Vital Machine: A Study of Technology and
Organic Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Christie, John. "A Tragedy for Cyborgs." Configurations,
vol. 1(1), Winter 1993, pp. 171-196.
Clynes, Manfred and Nathan Kline. "Cyborgs and Space."
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Flint, R.W., ed. Marinetti: Selected Writings. Translated,
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Haraway, Donna. "A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology
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Haraway, Donna. Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in
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Mazlish, Bruce. The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-Evolution
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Partridge, Eric. Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of
Modern English. New York: Greenwich House Press, 1983.
Perloff, Marjorie. The Futurist Moment. Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre,
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Sale, Kirkpatrick. SDS. New York: Random House, 1974.
Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies. Translated S. Conway,
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