We Can Rebuild Him and Her: Bionic Irony, Hysteria, and Post-Fordism's

We Can Rebuild Him and Her: Bionic Irony, Hysteria, and Post-Fordism’s Technological Fix in The Six Million Dollar Man Simon Orpana University of Alberta The working man’s crash landing Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis have observed that, when it comes to utopian visions regarding the societal benefits of space travel, it is not so much the alleged reasons for making a journey to Mars that matter but “what they can do to you on Mars when they get you there” (58). Pro- grams such as the Apollo missions or even current speculation about manned missions to Mars, whatever scientific benefits might be expected, simultaneously generate a host of less obvious outcomes that are nonethe- less useful from the point of view of social control, nation building, and ideological reinforcement. Collecting moon rocks might have added to the storehouse of human knowledge, but the Apollo missions were also immensely useful to the U.S. government for providing a unifying goal by which to capture the national imagination in the midst of such legitima- tion crises as those related to Vietnam, the Cold War, and environmental destruction. We might go further, with Caffentzis and Federici, and discern in the asceticism and other-worldliness required by space exploration a way of disciplining the terrestrial labour force: “The launch of today’s high-tech industry needs a technological leap in the human machine—a big evolutionary leap in creating a new type of worker to match capital’s ESC 42.1–2 (March/June 2016): 89–114 investment needs” (61). Just as a space program that trains only a handful of actual astronauts might have a much larger effect on the national imagi- nary, creating the utopian fascination needed to implement new disciplin- Simon Orpana is a ary structures, so too can popular culture about science and technology sshrc Postdoctoral provide the fantasy scenarios that help generalize new modes of control Fellow in the Department even while entertaining and stimulating our imaginations.1 of English and Film The popular 1970s television showThe Six Million Dollar Man (hereaf- Studies at the University ter Six) is a case in point. Celebrating technological aspiration in the face of Alberta. He is of sensational failure, the show’s opening montage uses historic footage of illustrator and co-author the 1967 crash of nasa’s experimental M2-F2 lifting body aircraft, in which of Showdown: Making test pilot Bruce Peterson was almost killed when his plane hit the ground Modern Unions, a at over 400 km/hr. The m2-f2 was part of a series of experimental aircraft graphic history of the that led to the development of the U.S. Space Shuttle program in the 1980s. 1946 Stelco strike in In Six, Peterson’s crash is used as the background for an opening sequence Hamilton, Ontario detailing the reconstruction of the fictional astronaut Steve Austin, a man (with Rob Kristofferson, literally reduced to “human scrap,” in the words of the government agent Between the Lines, who oversees Austin’s transformation into a cyborg super-soldier. Using 2016). His writing digital sound effects with computerized graphics superimposed on images on subcultures, film, of Austin receiving his robotic implants, the opening sequence famously and popular culture proclaims in voiceover: “gentlemen, we can rebuild him … we have the appears in journals capacity to create the world’s first bionic man.” such as Topia and The The show’s dramatic juxtaposition of high and low, of “human scrap” Review of Education, with $6 million of high-tech machinery, offers insights into the tensions Pedagogy, and Cultural faced by a largely white male American workforce confronting the con- Studies and the tradictions of capital in the 1970s, a decade that saw the fraying of post– book Skateboarding: World War II Keynesianism and the initial stirrings of the more turbulent Subculture, Sites, and and unruly neoliberal market that would replace it. With the escalation Shifts (Routledge 2015). of Cold War tensions, labour unrest, energy prices, economic and environmental crises, and an increasingly unpopular military entanglement in Vietnam, the value of American lives seemed under question in a more nebulously unsettling manner than the century’s two horrific but spatially and temporally circumscribed world wars (and the economic depression in between) had managed to do. The white male factory worker privileged by postwar Fordism was further confronted with threats of deskilling and obsolescence through technological innovations and shutdowns fero- 1 Jon McKenzie elaborates a similar argument in Perform or Else (2001) where he examines the imperative to perform as a central dictum of postindustrial societies. His treatment includes fascinating analysis of the how forms of “tech- no-performance” inform discourses surrounding the Challenger space shuttle disaster of 1986. 90 | Orpana ciously pursued by industrialists as a means of both “streamlining” the workplace and disciplining the workforce. In the midst of these tensions, like the fallen astronaut from the opening of Six, hegemonic American masculinity might have keenly felt the proximity of the “human scrap heap” confronted by Austin.2 At the same time as workers attempted to push back against these tendencies through collective action, the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s saw disenfranchised subjects such as women and racialized minorities challenging established hierarchies and gaining footing in realms of work and society previously denied them. Caffentzis char- acterizes this great refusal on the part of exploited sources of surplus value—insurgent industrial workers and the unpaid or underpaid work of women and minorities—as helping precipitate the unraveling of the Fordist compromise, whose “Oedipal wage” was grounded in feminized and unremunerated sources of value-production (40–41). This mounting pressure, Caffentzis explains, forced a shift in the strategies capitalists used to extract surplus, from one in which workers’ wages were indexed to productivity (with surplus flowing from the unpaid socially reproduc- tive labour of women and racialized service workers), to one in which an expanded service sector generates surplus through longer working days and increases to the price of basic commodities, like petrol. These changing strategies of exploitation at the beginning of the post-Fordist era were experienced by workers in the form of such bugbears as de- industrialization and “stagflation,” where rising unemployment rates were coupled with a rise in commodity prices. Simultaneously, the composition of the American working class was fractured by mounting internal divi- sions between “inflationary ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ ” (Davis 178). In the late 1960s and early 1970s, this destabilization of the white male wage earner generated alarming displays of bigotry and resentment, such as the mass “hardhat” demonstrations of construction workers against anti-segregationists and anti-Vietnam War protesters.3 Mounting con- cern over “blue-collar alienation” spurred a bevy of sociological studies about the newly discovered white working class and its attendant struggles, 2 Drawing from interviews conducted with American and Canadian workers, Steven High’s book Industrial Sunset (2003) provides a detailed portrait of the loss of work and community suffered by both men and women in the 1970s and 1980s as a result of de-industrialization. See especially chapter 2. 3 For an account of the “hardhat” protests and the construction of white masculinity, see Freeman. For an account that complicates the view of American workers as reactionary conservatives, see Lewis. We Can Rebuild Him and Her | 91 prejudices, and culture.4 The prime-time sitcom All in the Family, airing from 1971 to 1979, provided a caricature of this formation in the racist, misogynist, and homophobic patriarch Archie Bunker.5 This reactionary constellation—resurrected with fervour in the recent career of Donald Trump—posed a problem for politicians and capitalists of the 1970s, who struggled to instil a faith in social progress and The American Dream even in the face of aggressive new strategies to generalize precarity and under- mine many of the gains made by labour over the course of the century. Amidst well-meaning calls for a new pluralism in American society to ameliorate these social tensions, the New Right saw an opportunity to solidify its political base by strategically catering to them, a process that, gathering steam over the course of the decade, allowed for the Hol- lywood screen star Ronald Reagan to become president in 1981.6 Similar to the handsome, square-jawed Reagan, Steve Austin is presented as an all-American celebrity in his role as a former lunar astronaut from Cali- fornia. As we shall see, he and his counterpart Jaime Sommers provide fitting figures for consolidating and managing tensions regarding race, class, and gender that structured the disenfranchised white working class’ “silent majority” in this era and paved the way for the emergence of the New Right in the 1980s. Does the middle class exist? Before embarking upon this analysis, we must briefly disentangle a few issues of genre and audience. Peter Biskind and Barbara Ehrenreich com- pellingly read Hollywood’s “discovery” of the white working class in such 1970s films as The Godfather, Saturday Night Fever, and Rocky, not as genuine engagements with working-class culture but as the displacement of patently middle-class concerns over changing constructions of masculinity. For Biskind and Ehrenreich, these films’ representations of lean and ambitious “working-class” protagonists combine forms of parochial 4 See, for instance, Friedman; Sexton; LeMasters. 5 A fascinating study of viewers’ perceptions of the record-breaking All in the Family television show demonstrates that, while some viewers perceived the bigoted views of the show’s protagonist as satire, many actually identified with Archie Bunker’s prejudices, appreciating the show for what they perceived as its “tell it like it is” honesty (Vidmar and Rokeach).

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