MECHANICS AND THE ESSENCE OF TECHNOLOGY

William J. Emerson III

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

May 2014

Committee:

Ellen Berry, Advisor

Monica A. Longmore Graduate Faculty Representative

Radhika Gajjala

Clinton F. Rosati

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© 2014

William J. Emerson III

All Rights Reserved

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ABSTRACT

Ellen Berry, Advisor

The mechanic is a worker of contested meaning in American popular culture. The cultural significance of mechanics reflects technological trends throughout American industrial history. Mechanics have been revered and reviled, vilified and deified at various points in our national experience. This study will view the mechanic through same lens which our society has viewed technology, and in doing so will reveal a more intimate, essential relationship between the mechanic and technology.

During the Industrial Revolution, mechanics were highly regarded as industrial workers and it was implied in radical fiction that they could repair social problems with the same acumen with which they fixed machines. The cultural significance of mechanics shifts definitively within popular consciousness after World War II. Later as the cultural capital of mechanics declined, there was an increasing trend for mechanics to destroy machines in popular literature to correct technology which was viewed as pathological.

The shifting modalities surrounding the mechanic illustrate the trajectory of skilled information workers in the Twenty-first Century. Much like Henry Ford, the founders of Apple Computers worked out of a small shop (a garage in both instances) independently designing, assembling and engineering their products. The once insular and esoteric world of computers opened up to the public, however not all computer training was equally accessible to all parts of society. After the wave of mystery surrounding a technology breaks and recedes along with the promise it brings there is often a descent

iv into mediocrity which then afford the possibility for a cooptation by the subversive elements of society. This may come in the form of highly skilled machine breakers in relation to mechanics or it may be dirty bombs with regard to nuclear technology.

Computer hackers provide such direction because they have the skills to actively oppose an emerging class of information capitalists. Hackers can liberate information from corporate control and they, like the mechanics who preceded them, need only their acumen and a few tools to do so.

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This dissertation is dedicated to my wife Emelia and to our three children: Alex, Joey,

and Ruby Lee.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Framework ...... 7

Questions to Be Addressed ...... 10

The Able Bodied Worker ...... 12

American Culture Studies ...... 13

Why does Mechanics and the Essence of Technology matter? ...... 14

Theoretical Construction ...... 15

The New Factory System ...... 17

Technology and the Common Man ...... 20

Machine Breakers and Computer Hackers ...... 23

CHAPTER I. CONCEPTUAL VISIONS OF TECHNOLOGY AS THEY PERTAIN TO

MECHANICS ………...... 28

Defining Technology ...... 28

The Technium or Technological Organism...... 31

Leo Marx ...... 36

A Question of Essence ...... 38

CHAPTER II. THE MECHANIC AND THE NEW FACTORY SYSTEM ...... 48

Clock Time and the New Normal ...... 57

The Increasingly Standardized Worker Necessitates A New Kind of Factory ...... 66

On the Development of Mass Production ...... 67

Henry Ford, Clockwork and Memory ...... 69 vii

Greenfield Village as Nineteenth Century Simulacrum ...... 76

CHAPTER III. TECHNOLOGY AND THE COMMON MAN ...... 79

Industrialized Agriculture ...... 81

Revolutionary Mechanics in European Literature ...... 84

Mechanical Skills and Wanderlust...... 88

The Railroad and Modernity ...... 92

Technology and the Dust Bowl...... 95

Race and Class ...... 102

Masculinity…...... 107

CHAPTER IV. THE MECHANIC AS MACHINE BREAKER AND HACKER ...... 112

Luddites………...... 114

Deep Ecology…...... 116

Fight Club…… ...... 120

Y2K, Survivalism and the Coming Apocalypse ...... 124

Hackers……… ...... 129

Technology: Agent of Order? ...... 133

WORKS CITED...... 137

APPENDIX A. ENDNOTES ...... 145

1

INTRODUCTION

During the last few generations mankind has made an extraordinary advance in the

natural sciences and in their technical application and has established his control over

nature in a way never before imagined. The single steps of this advance are common

knowledge and it is unnecessary to enumerate them. Men are proud of those

achievements...this new won power over space and time, this subjugation of the forces of

nature.

-Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

Is man, then, a defenseless and perplexed victim at the mercy of the irresistible superior

power of technology?

-Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology

This study is the story of how mechanics have had the hopes of revolutionaries pinned on them; of inventors who have changed history; of capitalists and socialists who benefitted from the mechanic’s ability to fix machinery. This ability to fix machinery was key in the time when machinery was the essence of the modern world. This essay will also investigate the mechanic as a worker of contested meaning in American popular culture. It is an investigation into the cultural significance of mechanics and how they reflect technological trends throughout the

American industrial history. Mechanics have been revered and reviled, vilified and deified at various points in our national experience. This study will attempt to view the mechanic through same lens which our society has viewed technology, and in doing so will reveal a more intimate, essential relationship between the mechanic and technology. It is a relationship which transcends the turning of wrenches and long hours spent repairing complicated machinery. 2

Henry Ford said, “Everything can be done better and faster.” As a mechanic Ford had an

intimate, and some might say intuitive, grasp of how technology could change the work place,

workers and work itself. By contrast, at roughly the same cultural moment the anarchist Peter

Kropotkin stated that he “understood the poetry of machinery.” These two different views of technology, pragmatic and poetic respectively, illustrate the associative poles to which the mechanic was yoked. Kropotkin wanted to appear in synch with the industrial age by affecting the posture of the industrial proletariat. However, in the United States during the years surrounding the Great Depression these two disparate world views (industrial capitalism and anarcho-communism) would momentarily converge. Together Ford and Kropotkin existed in a moment when the public perception of having a relationship to the world of machines was paramount to being seen as understanding the world for what it was.

During the late Nineteenth century the utopian impulse in the United States was a reaction to the perceived failure of capitalism to maintain prosperity for the American people during times of economic upheaval. Many socialists thought that industrial technology would provide greater opportunities for the masses and an amalgamation of socialism and technology could correct society’s ills. This teleology was born from a revolutionary vanguard which was good with its hands; a revolutionary who would fix the machines as well as the social problems of a broken society. However, by the end of the Great Depression, the figure of the proletarian revolutionary and the technology this figure represented had significantly declined. This shift in public opinion was due in part to a failure of overt socialist movements in the United States, the success of the New Deal, and a growing suspicion of technology which resulted from the use of atomic weapons against Japan coupled with the application of mass production techniques for the purpose of mass murder in the Holocaust. 3

Socialism enamored with technology resulted in some instances in a utopian impulse

which was partially recycled from mid-Nineteenth Century utopian movements. This hybrid vision consisted of a machine aesthetic combined with radicalism reminiscent of utopian movements extant in the late Nineteenth Century. However, in the Twentieth Century it was no longer necessary to follow the obsolete model of establishing a colony outside mainstream society; instead, the material promise of mass production and industrial farming techniques seemed to promise increased prosperity for all.

The new types of work surrounding industrialism were accompanied by a new perception of workers writ large. During the Nineteenth Century, the industrial need for standardized products and work schedules necessitated the conceptual development of “able bodied” workers who possessed idealized bodies which were as standardized as the machines they built and repaired. This connection between the “normal body” and its industrial utility was established in the Nineteenth Century factory. Lennard Davis in his article Davis “Constructing Normalcy” posits that “Marx actually cites [the] notion of the average man in a discussion of the labor theory of value. In retrospect one of the most powerful ideas of Marx – the notion of labor value or average wages – is based largely on the idea of the worker constructed as an average worker”

(Davis 28). It can also be argued that Marx’s idea of the able bodied worker was both reified and exceeded by a vanguard of revolutionary mechanics that are portrayed as simultaneously fixing machines and repairing the industrial society which was dependent on them. The revolutionary mechanic needed to be stronger and more skilled than the average worker to fulfill their destiny as Socialist vanguard.

During the Great Depression this revolutionary would take to the road in search of his

Utopia. This new hero is a classic American character; rugged, determined, and idealistic whose 4

actions are a recapitulation of the American dream, which transcend the static frontier. In the

mechanic’s search for Utopia the frontier is the road itself, eternally moving and always out of

reach, it is the meta-Uutopia, the technological Xanadu. Moving on the road, repairing machines

and spreading a socialist message is in itself a revolutionary act. The road became revolution.

Within this American vision of Utopia the car represents freedom. The concept of freedom becomes a journey on highways beyond the bounds of eastern capital. This new revolutionary takes industrial knowledge on the road. They are a traveling storehouse of industrial know-how and mechanical means. In this context the car is totally unlike the tractor which was sometimes portrayed is a symbol of industrial power being misused for war against the land, as was shown in the Depression era film The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and against the people, as in The Grapes of Wrath (1938).

The mechanic is an embodiment of the modernist teleological ideal because of his

symbiotic relationship to the machine. Following the Industrial Revolution, mechanics came to

embody the pinnacle of skilled industrial workers. As I will illustrate, the mechanic is imbued with

heroic qualities (such as profound endurance) while performing difficult and dangerous repairs in

technology centered popular literature. These mechanics are willing to put their safety on the line

both for the machines they repair and the people who operate them. They challenge the authority of

those who hold the keys to industrialism, while fixing the equipment that makes industry possible.

The connection is commonly made between political revolution and mechanical skill.

The American perspective of the mechanic as revolutionary figure emanates from a radical

European literary tradition, of which Emile Zola’s Germinal (1885) is the penultimate example.

Etienne, the novel’s protagonist, introduces himself as a mechanic to unequivocally assert that he

has the ability to fix things, literally and figuratively. As the novel progresses, this ability is 5 extended to social problems such as the poverty and the inhumane conditions in the coal mine where he works. This tendency to politicize the mechanic was picked up in the United States by

Jack London in his novel The Iron Heel (1908). From the optimism of The Iron Heel’s radical blacksmith to the down and out railroad mechanic in Jack Conroy’s Depression era novel The

Disinherited (1933), the mechanic’s views on technology mirror those of society at the time they were written, but do so with greater intimacy and passion due to their protagonist’s proximity to the machine. In this manner the mechanic acts as the agent of industrialism’s achievements and failures. As London says in The Iron Heel, “They were not land-serfs like the farmers. They were machine serfs and labour serfs”(168). Within these novels, industrialism functions as a dynamic ideology and this dynamism is not lost on mechanics of the age.

Skilled industrial workers such as mechanics were deprived of the status and accompanying privileges normally afforded to them during the Great Depression. The failure of whiteness to sufficiently privilege working class whites (as embodied by mechanics) resulted in the mechanics turning to counter-cultural revolutionary ideologies. For example, in John

Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, Tom Joad’s stint in a state prison couples with the Joad family’s crushing poverty to form a compelling argument of the general failure of whiteness to sufficiently privilege them. Socialism offers an opportunity to fill the rift created by an absence of privilege among the unemployed, the marginally employed, and the working poor during this absence of white privilege. This being said, it is because of their whiteness that these revolutionaries, who are primarily male, are allowed the opportunity to learn a skilled trade and move freely about the country spreading their radical ideologies. Furthermore, their status as revolutionaries revitalizes their sense of being masculine. In the world of industrial labor, men without work are seen as emasculated and bereft of dignity. 6

While the mechanic retains his revolutionary position in radical literature, it is also true that

mechanical skills sometimes lead to dead end jobs, with the protagonist trying to “find something

to take hold of beside the ambition to rise above this factory” (Conroy 171). This change in the

social position of the mechanic correlates to the growing view of heavy industry as distasteful and

anachronistic. The mechanic is dynamic and manages to retain his position as an actuator for social

change. Despite deskilling1 mechanics have retained a substantive portion of their skills and

knowledge, but have lost their social standing due to changing perceptions of industrial labor.

While the mechanics of American labor literature were derived from European and, to a lesser

extent, Russian literary sources they lacked the indecision of their old world counterparts. Unlike

the Soviet revolutionary workers they had the freedom to travel. Also, unlike Germinal’s Etienne who eventually left the revolution for a job with his union, American revolutionary mechanics were unassimilable. Many revolutionary mechanics live transient lives, yoked to the troika of poverty, technology and revolution. In this manner the industrial mechanic is a distinct departure from the idea of American exceptionalism.

Mechanics and the Essence of Technology explores the re-imagining of the American dream and the re-articulation of the American utopian vision while simultaneously investigating the relationship of the American public and its relationship to technology. The mechanic as revolutionary is a figure wrought with contradiction. The mechanic was white, but at times lacks the privilege of whiteness. The mechanics addressed in this study are male and the manner in which their masculinity manifests in these works is addressed and deconstructed. He is a revolutionary vanguard who retains a portion of his skill set during a period when other industrial workers suffer from the oppression of total deskilling. The mechanic in this sense was a socialist conceit, which after the reforms of the New Deal no longer had much of a place in 7

American society. These contradictions, along with a growing ambivalence toward technology,

led to the demise of this archetype at the end of the Great Depression and its reemergence as a

machine breaker and iconoclast in the post war years.

Finally, the industrial age mechanic provides an indication of how other technological

specialists will evolve in the popular consciousness throughout the coming century. Much like

the mechanics before them, computer programmers, hackers and hardware engineers have been

interpellated in various ways over the years, from the subversives (hackers) to innovators (genius

software designers), these new technicians occupy a contested space within the popular

consciousness. Much like mechanics they have undergone an evolution from lone technicians

developing a new product in their garage to having their skills co-opted by university

engineering departments.

FRAMEWORK

This project is an effort toward developing a technology centered theory of culture. It

illustrates how technology is a vector for all human endeavors and as such functions to make its

own meaning. The concept of technology is the starting point for an exploration of language,

tools and culture. While some theorists of technology (such as Alan Batteau and Kevin Kelly)

find the designation of language as a technology to be non-problematic, other theorists may not

view language as a technology at all. For the purpose of this study, language functions as a

technology of communication and memory (stories, instructions, history, etc. in both oral and

written traditions). Technology is broadly defined to include steel mills and hammers, rifles and

sewing machines along with language, marriage, social organization and culture.2 Technology can be an artifact, technique or human practice developed by the human mind. 8

It is important to examine the similarities between overt technologies and more ephemeral technologies such as kinship systems. Clearly, there is a material difference between a steel nail and a wedding vow; both have a utilitarian function and both are used for drawing together of two separate entities. Much like the nail, the wedding vow can be bent or broken, it can be sharply withdrawn or it can last for ages. Both are conceived through eons of trial and error. A world of concepts surrounding them have been tested, replaced, forgotten and upheld.

Ultimately a nail is only marginally more real than a vow in that both are conceptual at their core and require skill to successfully employ. In this manner both industrially manufactured items and kinship function as technologies. Technology as it is defined in this context begins to resemble the concept of “culture” in its breadth and scope. It encompasses physical artifacts as well as ideas. It is both the song and the instrument which it is played on. However within this paradigm culture becomes a form of technology. Mechanics and the Essence of Technology will examine the term “culture” as a representation of the whole of all human endeavors and as a type of meta- technology, which is similar in scope to what Kevin Kelly calls the “technium” in his book What

Technology Wants (2010).

All technologies suffer from unintended consequences and drawbacks. The written word resulted in the decline of the oral tradition. This shift from the oral tradition to the written word necessitated a change in the location of memory, from the individual mind to the collectively accessible; from memory to pictographs, from books, to terabytes of digital files. The human memory, which is in itself is not a technology as it exists in the temporal lobes, but the language it employs is clearly a technological in nature. Knowledge which had been spoken from the lips of one individual to the ear of another was supplanted by the written word which could be transmitted over millennia, from an ancient mind to a modern one. Since the age of Gutenberg 9

written text has been easily reproduced and disseminated to large spectrum of people across a

broad span of time. The span of time within which the written word can exist easily exceeds the

lifespan of the author.

Mechanics and the Essence of Technology will focus on technological signifiers and the manner in which they manifest semiotically as a reflection of popular trends and perceptions.

Throughout this document the oscillating biases surrounding the mechanic will be examined,

while technology will be used as the lens through which to view popular culture. In the way that

virtually no technology ever becomes completely extinct (with the exception of some ‘dead’

languages with no existing written component); all technology is in a state of flux. Thus there is

a temporality surrounding technology which is both fleeting and eternal. As I examine various

texts within The Mechanic and the Essence of Technology, I will reveal each author’s

understanding of technology; its mechanisms, drives and forms of transmission. In this manner

each of these texts provide an ethnographic or “techno-graphic” thumbnail sketch of their world

view. Melville’s emphasis on the technology of the Pequod and the methodology of the various

tradesmen aboard the whaling ship reveals a great deal about the state of technology at the time

and the manner in which was used, valued, and discarded. However, Melville’s need to describe

this phenomenon illustrates another layer entirely concerning the beliefs surrounding whaling

technology in the middle Nineteenth Century. These descriptions typically concern the essence

of the device more than actual operation and maintenance, although on some occasions the

technical descriptions can be quite complete .3

These days the mechanic is hardly “contested terrain” (to use Matthew Denning’s term),

but the mechanic does establish a precedent for changes surrounding the information revolution.

Understanding the mechanic has implications for the information age. The mechanic has become 10 so common place as to be invisible, much like the technology which he repairs. Much like the electric motor he has become invisible in his ubiquity. The technician, much like the equipment he maintains, grows mundane over time. “Usually what happens to a ubiquitous technology is that it disappears. Shortly after their invention in 1873, modern electric motors propagated throughout the manufacturing industry. Each factory stationed one very large, expensive motor in place where a steam engine formerly stood…One hundred years later, the electric motor has seeped into ubiquity and invisibility. There is no longer one motor in a household; there are dozens of them, and each is nearly invisible” (Kelly 300-302). The term “contested terrain” indicates a postmodern point of view on the part of Denning. The terrain does not exist under a fixed understanding, rather it operates under the forces of multiple and conflicting truths which pull at it from different ideological and philosophical perspectives, teasing out various meanings and potential uses. However, what can be seen on the part of technology is an essential nature, an underlying truth which begs to be revealed, what Heidegger calls “enframing” of the essence of technology. Through bringing together disparate theoretical approaches to the study of technology, I will look at the manner in which the mechanic is representative of trends in our culture regarding technology and illustrate how these trends reveal the larger implications of technology in human experience.

QUESTIONS TO BE ADDRESSED IN MECHANICS AND THE ESSENCE OF

TECHNOLOGY

What does the mechanic mean to our understanding of technology? The trajectory of the mechanic from skilled tradesperson, to revolutionary vanguard, and then ultimately to the lowly grease monkey or, conversely, machine breaker provides clues for how we tend to view 11 technology as mysterious, then wonderful and life changing to ultimately as mundane. The electric motor is an example of the shifting perspective surrounding a given technology. These days there are very few people who would make the effort to witness a functioning electric motor as they did in the Chicago World Exhibition of 1893. At that time an electric motor was a revolutionary machine, it had the ability to change how people lived by electrifying the homes of common people and allowing greater manufacturing capability for industrialists. However, as

Kevin Kelly mentions in What Technology Wants electric motors have become so ubiquitous as to have slipped beyond recognition. Virtually no one thinks about the electric motors which power the air conditioning in their cars or run the disc drives and fans in their computers. In the same manner, computers have gone from strange and powerful machines of the military and industry to being ubiquitous in our culture. Most people never think of the intricate crunching of numbers which takes place in their engine control unit (ECU) as their car rolls down the interstate. However, without it fuel would not effectively make its way into the combustion cylinders and they would be left waiting for roadside assistance.

The evolution of cultural capital surrounding various technologies points to the bigger question of what technology signifies to our culture and how that significance is manifested. At the heart of this discussion of the mechanic specifically and technology in general is a societal ambivalence surrounding technology. Major technological innovations are generally only vaguely understood as they first enter the public sphere. As a result the innovation may be perceived as dangerous or only marginally beneficial. If the innovation is widely accepted, then it gains in stature, possibly receiving notice and praise. In time this same device may take on a great deal of cultural capital (Facebook, for example, is seen as a powerful actuator of cultural change which is redefining the way in which we interact with each other and our relationships), 12 however as the technology is copied and modified it may lose its luster and significance. The miracle of space flight is an example of this. It is difficult for most people to name a contemporary astronaut or describe a recent mission to space, whereas at one time space flight was a national obsession. Over a period of time most inventions will become mundane and escape the attention of the vast majority of people. It is at this time that some inventions will be co-opted by do-it-yourselfers who may or may not intend to use the technology for its intended purpose. As a result some technologies “go underground” and again take on an air of mystery and uncertainty in the public mind. Thus, the invention goes full circle, from mystery to acceptance and wonder, ultimately growing painfully ordinary, and then disappearing from the radar where it can again germinate and take on new and surprising characteristics.

THE ABLE BODIED WORKER

There is an enduring relationship between people and the technologies which they use.

Although there are many writings, which suggest a relationship exists between the factory and the social construction of the so-called normal worker (i.e., able bodied workers), little of this scholarship has been conducted in the field of science and technology studies. This study will approach the question of the able bodied worker from the perspective of culture and technology rather than from the traditional standpoint of disability studies, where this line of research typically manifests.

Within the confines of this study the mechanic functions in contrast to the development of the “able body” within the factory system. The mechanics possess a counter-standardized self: a persona which is not determined by the larger tendency toward standardization of production and culture. They tend to be exceptional rather than interchangeable. The mechanics which this 13 study examines use their technical prowess to reveal the revolutionary potential inherent in the circumstances in which they find themselves. These skilled tradespeople fulfill a unique role as working persons who are self-empowered through their revolutionary endeavors and industrial skills. These characters fail to conform to the siren song of mass production; their ability to function beyond the norm makes them counter to the cookie-cutter needs of Ford’s assembly line. 4

AMERICAN CULTURE STUDIES

Before I endeavor further on investigating technology and American Culture Studies it is important to reflect on the origins of this area of inquiry. The study of technology and culture is born from roughly the same moment as American Studies; a time when scholars first began to look at American Literature in the context of American History. Prior to the Twentieth Century,

American Scholars who were investigating literature would explore the work of English rather than American authors. During the early years of the Twentieth Century American Scholars increasingly took a greater interest in American Literature. Writers such as Walt Whitman, Ralph

Waldo Emerson and Edgar Allen Poe grew in stature while developing an aesthetic which was distinct from and of equal quality to their European counterparts. By the 1950's this interest grew into what would become known as American Studies, a field which sought to illuminate its history and literature. These American Studies scholars (as they would later be known) sought to cross examine American literature and history with an emphasis on societal trends and biases.

Interestingly, the manner in which they did this was largely predicated on the interplay between technology and the American culture. The finest example of this is Leo Marx’s book, The 14

Machine in the Garden (1964), which is considered a classic of both American Studies and

Science and Technology Studies (STS).

The Machine in the Garden comes from a historical moment when many Americans were

trying to understand where we had been as a people to better determine where our nation was

headed. It was the early 1960's, an era of great social change and a time when the discussion of

the American character was paramount. Conversations surrounding science and technology were

an important facet of this period. Technology was at the forefront of important discussions

ranging from "back to nature" communes and the bombing of munitions plants in the U.S.

counterculture, to the space race between the U.S. and the USSR. Scholarly works such as Virgin

Land (1950) by Henry Nash Smith defined the academic investigation into technology and culture, while the counter culture hero Abbie Hoffman discussed the use of technology in his revolutionary manual Steal This Book (1971).

Scholars from many different backgrounds contributed to the development of technology and culture as a field of study. Anthropologists, English professors, sociologists, economists and many others forged the study of technology and culture with their own unique approach and questions concerning how people interact with technology. In this manner the study of technology is concerned with expanding the conversation of our American character and is born of the same cultural moment as Ethnic Studies and Women's Studies and other nascent disciplines.

WHY DOES MECHANICS AND THE ESSENCE OF TECHNOLOGY MATTER?

Mechanics and the Essence of Technology is an intensive examination of the culture

surrounding the maintenance of automobiles, trains and tractors. The genealogy of the mechanic, 15 the development of mass production and the manner in which the factory system affected everything from economics and employment to temporal perception will be part of this effort toward understanding technology as being the axis on which all human endeavors rotate. It will illuminate the tradition of passing down technological information from one technician to the next and examine how essential philosophical questions concerning technology are revealed through this transmission of knowledge. Ultimately the unseen workers, the handmaidens of machines and the industrial revolution are at the heart of Mechanics and the Essence of

Technology. Industrial workers exist within a continuum of technological innovation, celebration, apathy and rebirth and this life cycle of technology says a great deal about our technology and the human condition.

Mechanics and the Essence of Technology is about novelty and proximity, it is about luster and lithium grease; the cycling nature of machine and American character. It will illustrate how a revolution in machines often coincides with a revolution in culture such as the revolution in contemporary information technology.

THEORETICAL CONSTRUCTION

In investigating technology, it is essential to begin with an examination of various, but thoughtfully delimited, definitions of “technology.” This is perhaps never more important than in a theoretical discussion of what technology signifies for a culture writ large. As a result, various definitions of technology will be scrutinized alongside mechanization, deskilling, mass production, and other technological processes. Perspectives on technology will be derived from contemporary thinkers such as Matthew Denning and Kevin Kelly, while also paying close attention to the classic theorists of technology, Leo Marx and Martin Heidegger. This chapter 16 deals with limited number of seldom linked theorists to illustrate common themes and approaches from various corners of the study of technology and culture.

Kevin Kelly of “Wired” magazine and the “Whole Earth Catalog” coined the term

“technium” to describe his ideas concerning the symbiotic relationship between technology and human kind. Much like “culture” the technium is a concept which is widely holistic. Language, tools, kinship systems, antibiotics, numerical systems, and even culture itself are all elements of the technium. Kelly describes the technium as an organism which exists in a symbiotic relationship with humanity. As such, his concept is not exactly a case of fervent technological determinism, rather he is arguing that the technium works in symbiosis with humanity for the ultimate betterment of both parties; although the costs inherent in advancing technology can be great, Kelly argues that the benefits of technology manage to outweigh the costs even if only marginally. While Kelly posits that technology is its own organism which lives in symbiosis with humankind, it is important to note that technology has real world consequences. Technology does not always get the final say in human affairs, and people drive technology as often as they are driven by it. This argument that technology is an essential part of what makes us human leads to a larger discussion of technology and its essence as defined by Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger’s concepts of “enframing” and the “essence of technology” are fundamental to this discussion of techno-cultural theory. According to Heidegger “The essence of modern technology lies in enframing…enframing is the gathering together which belongs to that setting upon which challenges man and puts him in a position to reveal the real, the mode of ordering, as standing reserve” (23). Any serious discussion of the Industrial Revolution will call steam power to mind. The power of harnessed steam can drive massive engines, pump water from mines, run looms in a mill, or move locomotives across vast expanses of rails. Steam power symbolizes 17

Nineteenth Century Industry. Steam power works within the context of Heidegger’s conception of technology because steam power and its commanding motive energy reveal the standing reserve of coal and water. It reveals the essence of that which is hidden without the application of technology.

This discussion of technological essence will lead to an examination of the dichotomy surrounding the American character and a pioneer of Science and Technology Studies, Leo Marx.

The Ur document of both American Studies and Science and Technology Studies, The

Machine in the Garden (1964) will be examined in contrast to Heidegger’s thoughts on technology. Marx’s early emphasis on technology and nature, as the poles of a dichotomy within the American Character, will be juxtaposed with his much later essay, “Technology: The

Emergence of a Dangerous Concept” (1991). By bringing together disparate elements and illustrating common themes and tendencies within various theoretical constructs, this study will begin to develop an approach toward a technology centered theory of culture; a way of making meaning by examining how technology functions in our culture as a vector for all human endeavors.

THE NEW FACTORY SYSTEM

This central chapter examines the origins, trajectory and industrial significance of

“mechanic” and will lend weight and substance to this study of mechanics and the essence of

technology. The genealogy of mechanic as a skilled trade will be illustrated as a nexus for

various trades such as the blacksmith, machinist, and engineer. The changing nature of

mechanical work throughout the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries reflects changes

which were occurring as a result of improved manufacturing techniques such as standardization

of parts and mass production. While it is true that the mechanic is an example of a skilled 18

tradesperson who retained skills throughout the mass production revolution, it is also the case

that the range of skills attributed to the mechanic was substantially eclipsed during this period.

Previously mechanics would often have had skills, which included fabricating their own parts

(blacksmithing), designing components (engineering), and using tooling to insure precision

(machining). However, as American industry developed in the Twentieth Century the mechanics

were less apt to forge their own parts, to engineer new designs, and operate precision tooling.

Instead mechanics became workers who would act in a maintenance capacity; replacing broken

parts, performing lubrication, and making adjustments to existing components to prevent future

breakage.

Within the scope of this chapter the social class of mechanics will be investigated to

observe their changing significance in our society. The genealogy of the term mechanic will illustrate the evolution of the word and its relevance. The trajectory of other, related, information age trades (such as programmers and network engineers) will be explored as a means of identifying similar patterns between those who work on computers in the Twentieth Century and those who turned wrenches in the Nineteenth. Ultimately, the cycle of mystery, wonder, apathy, and subversion is as present in the Information Age as it was in the Industrial Era.

Expendability and standardization are categorical imperatives of the Nineteenth and

Twentieth Century factory system. However, historically it has been less common for these terms to be associated with workers then with the factory and its machinery. Much like capitalism, the development of disability as a concept occurred in conjunction with the Industrial Revolution.

Therefore the intersection of industry and the construction of normalcy occurred in tandem with, and provided a preference for, one type of laborer. “Clocks, department stores, ready-made clothing, catalogues, advertising, and factory items sculpted the prosaic toward sameness, while 19 increased literacy and the reiterable [sic] nature of a burgeoning print culture fortified the impulse toward conformity” (Thompson 12). The “normal” body shaped the factory system as well as being shaped by it; i.e., in the types and sizes of clothing being produced in mass quantities.

Within this chapter the mass production system will be examined as an outgrowth of the

American system of production. A greater emphasis on speed and efficiency throughout the

Nineteenth Century coupled with increasing standards of precision to become the norm in the arms industry during this period (specifically around repeating rifles such as the Winchester

30/30). Furthermore, Ely Whitney’s advances in interchangeable parts provided the impetus for new techniques of production predicated upon ease of assembly and maintenance. The interchangeability brought on by standardizing parts and increased precision amounted to a categorical imperative for production forms which would capitalize on these developments. All this new form of production needed was to be brought into being.

Henry Ford was a self-taught mechanic from the Detroit area who had repaired watches as a boy. His clockwork sense of order and sequence would give meaning to his world and influence his practices on the shop floor. Ford began his third attempt at starting an automotive manufacturing company by utilizing components from other manufacturers (most famously drive trains bought from the hard drinking Dodge brothers). Ultimately, he would build his own components and realize complete integrated manufacturing in his behemoth, the Rouge

Complex. By the time he died in 1947, The Rouge was the world’s largest industrial complex.

As an integrated manufacturing site raw components came in one end (coke, iron, sand, and so on) and emerged as complete automobiles on the other end.

Ford reached this point of technological dominance by using existing production technologies from the grain industry, such as the use of gravity slides, and the disassembly lines 20

of Chicago stock yards wherein a cow carcass would move along a conveyor and be

systematically rendered into various parts by workers who would repeat their assigned steps as

the cow passed them. He integrated these two elements, along with many others, as fundamental

elements in his mass production environment. Ford began his foray into mass production by

experimenting with his flywheel magneto line wherein each worker along the line would remain

in a fixed location and perform a repetitive task as the flywheel magneto passed by them.

Previously Ford had experimented with precision and standardization while tweaking the overall

production process by keeping track of how long each task took to complete and by subsequently

simplifying that task to make it faster. In this manner, Ford appears to have been replicating the

Scientific Management techniques of Edmond B. Taylor, a charge which Ford would deny

throughout his lifetime. However, a major difference between Ford and Taylor lies in the fact

that Taylor was interested in changing and improving the behavior of the worker, whereas Ford

was solely interested in improving the process.

TECHNOLOGY AND THE COMMON MAN

Chapter III includes a brief section on the history of American utopianism as it pertains to industrialism and the hopes of a world increasingly reliant on machines and machine culture.

Trends in early American utopian movements will be examined while establishing a precedent for the mechanic as revolutionary. For a moment could embody the spirit of the age; a machine tender who was the vanguard of the era. The utopian vision which the mechanic represented and the forces which lead to the decline of utopianism will also be investigated as the end of the utopian dream extant in early Twentieth Century America heralds a new era for the mechanic. It

is at this moment when the mechanic evolves from an agent of wonder and change to a steadfast 21

occupation of the wrench turning grease monkey; a job for drop-outs and those unsuited to make

a making a living with their minds.

The fourth chapter will introduce the topic of the revolutionary mechanic in popular

culture, stating its origins in European literature and the relevance of this figure in American

fiction. It is in the context of American Literature that Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and

Conroy’s Disinherited will be discussed. Because Tom Joad is not normally thought of as a mechanic it is important to explore the manner in which his mechanical ability manifests itself as an essential, if often ignored, aspect of the novel. Specifically, The Grapes of Wrath is John

Steinbeck’s novel about the plight of the Joad family and their forced westward migration at the moment of capitalism’s most profound failure, the Great Depression. The story’s protagonist,

Tom Joad, has spent time in prison. While he was incarcerated Tom learned about diagnosing and repairing machines. Tom saves time, money, and the ultimately the family vehicle by doing the extensive roadside repairs as they travel across the country. As a result, he makes it possible

for his family and their friends to continue westward toward an imagined land of jobs and

opportunities. Without Tom’s mechanical abilities his family would not have been able to make

the journey and without traveling westward Tom may never have experienced his revolutionary

epiphany.

Unlike earlier incarnations of the mechanical revolutionary, Tom was not fixated on a

specific ideology at its onset (as was the case with Otto Trupp of MacKay’s The Anarchists), nor

was assimilated into the collectivist bureaucracy like Etienne at the conclusion of Germinal. As a

result of his ability to move westward on newly constructed highways, Tom was certain that he

would confront injustice vigorously with direct action. In this way the road becomes revolution

rather than just a means to an end. The importance of the mechanic as a symbol of industrialism 22 and the hopes and fears surrounding the machine age will also play an important part in this section of Mechanics and the Essence of Technology. The mechanic as a force for social change will be examined as will the question of what mechanic means to our understanding of technology, along with the larger issue of what technology signifies to our culture and how that significance is manifested.

Proletariat writers of the early Twentieth Century were following a model which was established by European authors in the late Nineteenth Century. Jack Conroy’s novel, The

Disinherited, also uses proletariat trope of an abused worker who is exposed to a revolutionary ideology and subsequently fights to elevate those within his social class. Interestingly, The

Disinherited is a semi-autobiographical account of Conroy’s life. Conroy trained as a railroad mechanic and also worked “at Willys-Overland in Toledo and the Ford plant in Detroit. [As such he was] poised between the workers’ world and his own literary education” (Conroy 21). He apprenticed at 13 years old under a master mechanic with the intent of becoming a master car repairman in the Wabash Railroad car shops. It is significant that Larry works as a mechanic on the railroad as opposed to laboring in another industry. “The locomotive, associated with fire, smoke, speed, iron, and noise, is the leading symbol of the new industrial power” (Marx 87). As stated in

Chapter III, the steam train is a prevailing symbol of the industrial age. Conroy was influenced by the dime novels of the early Twentieth Century whose “main characters are tramps and outlaws produced by economic depression and strikes after the civil war” (Conroy 20). Conroy was attempting, if only to a small degree, to emulate the figures from his childhood reading when faced with similar circumstances in his life. Thus Conroy’s life as well as his work embodies the ideal of the mechanic as revolutionary. 23

MACHINE BREAKERS AND COMPUTER HACKERS

The need for working class heroes to correct society’s problems had reached its

conclusion with the New Deal and the onset of World War II. The revolutionaries of the interwar

era had largely been rendered irrelevant due to gains made through concessions to organized

labor. The threat of revolution had represented a great enough threat to the status quo to prompt

conciliatory policies such as social security and a milieu of labor regulations. Naomi Klein drives

this point home in her book, The Shock Doctrine. “The 1930s through to the early 1950s was a time of unabashed faire: the can-do ethos of the New Deal gave way to the war effort, with

public works programs launched to prevent growing numbers of people from turning hard left”

(Klein 65). Thus, social revolutionaries were no longer needed in an era of social reform and

regulated big business. Revolution was no longer necessary in an era of high corporate taxes and

a federally mandated minimum wage. As a result the mechanic became the vanguard of a

revolution which never came to be.

The cultural significance of mechanics to machines began to definitively shift within

popular consciousness after World War II. At that time the Holocaust and the destructive capacity

of atomic weapons lead to an increasing uncertainty about the tendency for technology to function

exclusively for the betterment of humanity. This tendency to view machines with skepticism was

not new, it manifested in the early years of the Industrial Revolution with the Luddite rebellions.

The Luddites were weavers in the early Nineteenth Century who sought to resist the automation of

their trade (and thus preserve their traditional lifeways) by breaking machines which were designed

to replace them. In his book Rebels Against the Future (1995), Kirkpatrick Sale argues “it was not

all machinery that the Luddites opposed, but all machinery hurtful to the commonality” (Sale 261).

The Luddites rightfully feared the social consequences of employing machines which under the 24

care of a single operator could do the work of many people. While the fear of being replaced on the

job was only one part of work place dissatisfaction in the post war era, it illustrates the manner in

which a device which is a boon to some can be seen as a menace to others.

During the Industrial Revolution, mechanics were among the most highly regarded

industrial workers and it was often implied in radical fiction that they could repair social problems

with the same proficiency with which they fixed machines. Later as the cultural capital of

mechanics declined, there was an increasing trend in popular literature for mechanics to destroy

machines to correct a culture they viewed as increasingly pathological. Nevertheless, whether they

were fixing or destroying machines, the presence of mechanical prowess was fundamental to

mechanics on both sides of the Luddite question.

Mechanics embody a trade tradition that stems from a “pre-industrial epoch, [where] production techniques and technology embodied a gradual accumulation of empirical knowledge, handed down from generation to generation through apprenticeship in the skilled trades” (Bairoch and Levi-Leboyer 16). This tradition of passing down technological information also entails the transmission of essential philosophy concerning the mechanics relation to machines and industry.

The shifting modalities surrounding the mechanic illustrate the trajectory of skilled information workers in the Twenty-first Century. In this era where, as McKenzie Wark has argued, information rather than property is the new capital (32), the transition of mechanic as representative of modernity to lowly grease monkey has implications for the information age.

Much like Henry Ford, the founders of Apple Computers worked out of a small shop (a garage in both instances) independently designing, assembling and engineering their technological product. Much as mass assembly displaced knowledge from the worker to the manufacturing process the computer has alleviated the need for certain types of knowledge, i.e., the knowledge 25 of phone numbers, addresses and so forth. Just a decade ago it was important for someone crafting a written document to possess exacting grammatical knowledge to appear competent; however, word processing programs have now circumvented the need for such knowledge.

Unlike the autoworker who experiences anomie doing work bereft of skill (or at best semi-skilled work) the information worker is willing to allow the computer to assume responsibility for small details. No longer must late evenings be spent crunching numbers: computers do the labor of creating spread sheets and graphs, thus allowing workers to focus on other tasks. As Michael Denning has argued, “The capitalist dream of complete automation never dies—robotic assembly lines, desktop publishing and money breeding on an eternally rising stock exchange” (Denning 432). Thus much like the laborer of the industrial age, those working with new machines are often freed of knowledge and skill while being required to generate more and more capital through increased levels of productivity.

The once insular and esoteric world of computers became open to the public, but not all computer training is equally accessible to all parts of society. Computer training has been attractive to young people looking to better themselves since at least the Regan era. Just a few decades later, the demarcation between programmers, computer repair people and computer engineers has taken place. Computer repair is now taught in vocational centers alongside automotive diagnostics and welding. Programming is learned at the community college level, while computer engineering is largely the province of the academy. Thus, this trend in the information age reflects that both engineering and machining used to be skills possessed by mechanics whereas now engineering is taught at the college level, while machining instruction is principally given at trade schools and community colleges. 26

Ultimately the computer, like the lathe, will become passé in the popular consciousness, but what of those who labor with hard drives, bits and data? The risk of becoming a techno-serf

in “our post-Fordist, postindustrial cybereconomy” (Denning 432) is an increasingly real one.

With the computer now as ubiquitous in our culture as the factories were in the past we may soon

look to those who write code as being “just programmers.” However, there may be a different

direction; they may morph into the embodiment of a new social direction, a new teleology based

on a yet unrealized technological imperative. There are some who say that computer hackers

provide such direction because they have the skills to actively oppose an emerging class of

information capitalists. Hackers can liberate information from corporate control and they, like

the mechanics who preceded them, need only their acumen and a few tools to do so.

So what is all this about? Why all the discussion of Iron Age technologies and mechanics,

social construction and survival types? What does this really say about technology and the

human condition? Well, the point is to illustrate that while the particulars may change with

regard to people and technology, there are trends which can be observed, understood, and

perhaps even predicted. There often is a forth cycle of reaction to technology in our culture.

After the mystery surrounding a technology, along with the promise it brings, and the descent to

mediocrity there is the possibility for a cooptation of the technology by the subversive elements

of society. This may come in the form of highly skilled machine breakers with regard to

mechanics or it may be dirty bombs in relation to nuclear technology and so on. These

technologies have become ubiquitous or at least familiar enough to be appropriated in a do-it-

yourself manner. This forth cycle of major technological innovation illustrates how a technology

can evolve into a force for subversion. In this manner, the Unabomber is a DIY maven,

Survivalism becomes an outgrowth of rugged American Individualism, and Steampunk is the 27 new embodiment of sentiment expressed by Henry Ford in his dream of a sustained Nineteenth

Century simulacrum known as Greenfield Village. 28

CHAPTER I: CONCEPTUAL VISIONS OF TECHNOLOGY AS THEY PERTAIN TO MECHANICS

Among the words that now occupy a central place in the discourse of American studies,

there are few whose meaning is less clear or stable than “technology.”

-Leo Marx, “Notes on Heidegger’s Conception of “Technology”

This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on one hand.

It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature.

-Don DeLillo, While Noise

What does the mechanic mean for the understanding of technology? This question brings to mind the larger issue of what technology signifies to our culture and how that significance is manifested. The concept of technology is indeed contested terrain.5 It is a term loaded with

cultural capital and power. Much like the concept of culture, what “technology” entails implies a

great deal about how it will be manipulated, used and reified by a given theorist. In order to

understand the breadth of this term it is important to examine various definitions of technology

to observe how they agree and where they are in conflict. The flexibility surrounding

“technology” makes it a highly dynamic term, rich in potential and ripe for contention.

DEFINING TECHNOLOGY

This is a general introduction to the concept of technology and the various ideas which

surround the meaning of technology in the social sciences and to some extent popular culture.

Technology is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as “The application of science, esp.

in industry or commerce” (American Heritage 4th 841). This post Enlightenment understanding

technology largely ignores the idea that historically technology has preceded the science needed 29

to understand it. Similarly, the common understanding of technology as the practical application

of science fails to realize that for much of human history, technology has been ahead of science.

For example, the builders of Medieval Cathedrals were powerless to explain the vector calculus

behind the curvature of stone naves and flying buttresses, but they were able to build them

nonetheless. The techniques used in constructing cathedrals were the product of generational trial

and error, centuries before the scientific method was developed. Similar to cathedral masons, the

stained glass artists at England’s Canterbury Cathedral used materials and techniques in the

Twelfth Century which are only now being understood and explained by nanotechnologists. The

laws of thermal dynamics and material science were unknown to ancient metal workers who still

managed to make strong alloys such as bronze and steel, and so on. An interesting aside is that in

the ancient world where accurate scientific knowledge was often lacking little attention was paid

to understanding technology and its role in the world. “Technology could be found everywhere

in the ancient world except in the minds of humans” (Kelly 7). While technology was essential to

the development of the ancient world (agriculture, aqueducts, and the city states themselves),

there was little interest in viewing technology as a cohesive whole, as a thing to be intellectually

examined and understood. Technology was largely the domain of working people, those who

toiled with their hands, the underclass.

In What Technology Wants (2010) Kevin Kelly goes to great lengths to illustrate the

extent to which technology was a concept that hardly was dealt with in the ancient world. 6

Kelly, who is both a founder of “The Whole Earth Catalog” and “Wired” magazine, addresses

Plato, “because of his contempt for practical knowledge, Plato omitted any references to craft in his elaborate classification of all knowledge. There is not a single treatise in the Greek corpus that even mentions technelogos –with one exception. To the best of our knowledge, it was in 30

Aristotle’s treatise Rhetoric that the word techne was first joined to logos (meaning word or speech or literacy) to yield the single term technologos” (6-7). However, in our contemporary era technology has become a standard area of cultural investigation.

It is evident from a cursory investigation of the definitions surrounding technology that there is little consensus regarding its specifics as an area academic investigation. A peculiar aspect of this linguistic fascination with technology is that while academics have widely varying positions on the topic the average person on the street believes they have a firm understanding of

“technology.” This is in part because technology is a term which is very commonly used and is not specific to the study of culture. In Matthew Denning’s article titled “Work and Culture in

American Studies” he explains how the term “culture” has gone from being primarily used in the social sciences to a term which is used by a wide milieu of scholars, and has ultimately become a ubiquitous part of the popular vernacular. Nevertheless there is a great deal of contention within the academy concerning the specific meaning of culture. Denning uses the concept of culture as it was understood and defined by the anthropologist Edmund Taylor and poet T.S. Eliot as a jumping off point for his study of culture and labor. When speaking of the evolution of culture as a term which has been embraced by scholars Denning states, “The modernist notion of culture is largely the product of a crisis in religious thinking” (421); he goes on to argue that Taylor and

Eliot “imagined culture as an ideal whole that incorporates the social cement of religion without its doctrinal controversies” (421). Thus in the context of this argument “culture” replaces “God” as the phenomenon from which everything is derived or is in some manner a part of. It is a monotheistic approach to understanding the world. Curiously, if Denning’s logic is utilized, and

“God” is replaced not with “culture,” but with “technology,” then Kevin Kelly’s understanding 31

of technology is realized. Kevin Kelly equates the use of the term “technology” to the

anthropological use of the term culture.

Kelly’s definition of technology is remarkably broad, so broad that he feels the need to

invent a new term to express the entirety of his concept. For Kelly the definition of technology

extends far beyond the definition of culture, which in anthropology is the all-encompassing term for human endeavors including religion, clothing, politics, language, technology, kinship systems, and so on. When addressing the issue of technology as it is broadly expressed within

What Technology Wants Kelly poses both the question and his response: “Why not just call this vast accumulation of invention and creation culture? Some people do. In this usage, culture would include all the technology we have invented so far, plus the products of those inventions, plus anything else our collective minds have produced…But the term culture falls short in one critical way. It is too small” (Kelly 11). Kelly argues that technology has a symbiotic relationship to humanity in which neither technology nor humanity can exist divorced from the other. Agency is not given to technology; rather people interact with technology in a manner which is mutually beneficial. Kelly’s sees his world as a place where Moby Dick is a whale who exists to give the

Pequod a reason for innovation, a world where technology despite its drawbacks is as reliant on us as we are on it. For Kelly, technology is an all- encompassing organism known as the

“Technium.”

The TECHNIUM OR TECHNOLOGICAL ORGANISM

To codify a description of technology that encapsulates all technology including all human culture Kelly states that he, 32

somewhat reluctantly coined a word to designate a greater, global,

massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us. I call it the

technium. The technium extends beyond shiny hardware to include culture, art,

social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types. It includes intangibles

like software, law and philosophical concepts. And most important, it includes the

generative impulses of our inventions to encourage more tool making, more

technology invention, and more self-enhancing inventions (11-12).

What is clear is that while Kelly wants to include everything encapsulated by the term culture, he

wants to distinguish culture as an aspect of the technium, rather than the technium being one of the many facets of culture. This is an inversion of the normal approach to culture which states that all human endeavors are part and parcel to it. Moreover, while technology is normally considered a single facet of culture, in this case culture is understood as an aspect of the technium which according to Kelly is an organism as big as humanity itself. However, by affording a great deal of agency to technology, Kelly potentially grants leeway to those who might misuse technology for their own ends. If technology is an organism which lives in symbiosis with humanity, then it should be responsive to our needs for privacy, autonomy, and leisure.

Much like Leo Marx and Martin Heidegger, Kelly turns to etymology to shore-up his argument regarding the technology. When addressing his neologism, “Technium,” Kelly reveals the basis for the term and how it exceeds the previous terminology surrounding technology.

As a word, technium is akin to the German word technik, which similarly

encapsulates the grand totality of machines, methods, and engineering processes.

Technium is also related to the French noun technique, used by French 33

philosophers to mean the society and culture of tools. But neither term captures

what I consider to be the essential quality of the technium: this is idea of a self-

reinforcing system of creation. At some point in its evolution, our system of tools

and machines and ideas became so dense in feedback loops and complex

interactions that it spawned a bit of independence. It began to exercise some

autonomy (12).

This is where Kelly begins a point of argument he returns to again and again throughout What

Technology Wants; specifically the idea that if technology is self-reproducing then it constitutes

a new domain of living organism. This invariably leads to a discussion of what it means to be

alive. For an organism to be alive it must have the following attributes:

1) It must eat

2) It must move

3) It must breathe

4) It must reproduce

A result of the rigidity of these qualifying elements for defining a living organism is that there are philosophical arguments about how certain seemingly not alive things such as viral phages or, for that matter, fire, being considered as living beings. For example, fire is known to eat; it consumes what it burns, it moves, it needs oxygen to survive and it will certainly reproduce itself; i.e., the proximity of a fire to combustible materials such as tinder will often result in the spontaneous combustion of those materials, thus a new fire born of the old.

To Kelly’s benefit, there is a debate within the scientific community as to what characteristics are required in order for a thing to be considered alive, so the list is sometimes more or less specific than that which I provided. This leeway provides Kelly with an opening to 34

place technology, via the technium, within this debate of living vs. non-living objects. Many

scientists state that the presence of cells is a necessary facet for something to be living: but what

in the case of the technium what constitutes a cell? A bit of information? A morpheme? Kelly is

never entirely clear on this point.

Despite Kelly’s assertion that the technium is a form of complimentary technology which

exists alongside Homo sapiens he lists several ways in which it is different from, and primarily superior to, other “living” organisms. According to Kelly, one manner in which it is different from other living organisms is that “by far the greatest difference between the evolution of the

born and the evolution of the made is that species of technology, unlike species in biology,

almost never go extinct. A close examination of a supposedly extinct bygone technology almost

always shows that somewhere on the planet someone is still producing it” (52). In this manner,

What Technology Wants tends toward sensationalism. The argument in favor of technological

immortality is further supported by evidence which shows that new technologies are in some

manner improvements of old inventions or, at the very least, based on existing ideas. For

example, the tendency for machines to do work formerly performed by skilled workers is,

Sometimes thought of as a part of “industrialization,” a transformation which can

be seen outside the factory in the areas of agriculture, construction, and similar

productive activities. In all these areas, however, it was seldom true that new machines

and processes entirely displaced the old. Instead, as in other areas of technological

change, the new joined the old as part of a menu of available practices (Pursell 55).

Thus, what Pursell is saying is a less overt version of what Kevin Kerry says in What Technology

Wants, that technology never dies; older technologies continued to be produced, albeit in smaller

production quantities, alongside newer, more advanced technologies. He does not go far enough 35

to assert that individual technologies never go extinct, but Carroll Pursell is certainly of the

impression that modes of production remain in practice after they have been supplanted by

newer, improved methods. By contrast, Kelly is saying that there is an essential element of

technology which transcends all technologies, general and specific, which refuses to retreat into

oblivion.

Further complicating this discussion is the elasticity of the term “extinct.” If we are to

believe that extinction can only be applied to groups of tools or types of tools, then the argument

against extinction has greater validity than if every mutation of every proto-type of every species

or tool is taken into consideration. Within these parameters it is impossible to imagine that a

tinker’s prototype, which never went into production, would still be used, in some form, in some

place. A reaction to What Technology Wants came in the form of a discussion on National Public

Radio in which Kelly reasserted his argument that technologies rarely, if ever, go extinct. The subsequent article “Tools Never Die. Waddaya Mean, Never?” by Robert Krulwich questions the validity of this assumption. It points to a fundamental problem with this discussion which is the flexibility of the term “technology.” Krulwich was unable to find tools or machine components which were no longer available in any form. “I tried carbon paper (still being made), steam powered car engine parts (still being made), Paleolithic hammers (still being made), 6 pages of agricultural tools from an 1895 Montgomery Ward & Co. Catalogue (every one of them still being made), and to my utter astonishment, I couldn’t find a provable example of a technology that has disappeared completely” (2). Krulwich also invited his readers to put forth tools which they were certain had gone extinct (meaning they were no longer manufactured anywhere). “If

you honestly think there is a tool or invention from any century, any culture, any time (no

science fiction please, we are trying to be real here) that has gone completely extinct, please send 36

it in. Just mention the tool in the "comment" section” (3). Over the next week he received over

800 comments in response his query for examples of “extinct” tools. The types of tools and the timeframes from which they came varied greatly and represented a spectrum of all manner of seemingly useless or out of date tools. On February 7th a reader named Bill Welch wrote,

“Computer punch cards, the key punch machines that punch the cards, punch card readers.”

Surprisingly, both punch card computers, and punch cards are still in use according to PC World magazine.

LEO MARX

By asking his readers to accept that technology is an autonomous organism which acts in a heavy-handed symbiosis with humanity it is clear that Kevin Kelly rests at the far end of the technological determinist end of the dichotomy between those who posit that technology drives culture (technological determinists) and those who believe culture drives technology (social constructivists). In sharp contrast to Kelly’s assertion that technology is an unrecognized life form, Leo Marx argues that technology has too much agency. For Marx it is dangerous to hold as self-evident that technology has its own will, desires, and destiny. Furthermore, Marx is concerned that by assigning human attributes to technology we are divorcing ourselves from the responsibility of controlling it. Although Marx begins his career with an ambivalent stance toward technology, he later found technology to be “a dangerous concept” which was needlessly empowered.

The work of Leo Marx is important because he contributed to the development of both

Science and Technology studies along with the growth of American Studies. Marx has taught at

MIT since the early 1960s, where he still maintains emeritus standing. He has chaired the 37

American Studies Association and published alongside such visionaries as Aldous Huxley in the journal, “Technology and Culture.” American art and literature throughout the Nineteenth

Century provided a focus for his examination of technology in the American experience. Marx’s interdisciplinary bias made him almost ideally suited for the nascent world of cultural studies.

“Marx remains important not for the debate over myth and symbol—which in any event soon dissolved into the more fully theorized dialog of poststructuralist epistemology—but for the latitude his work opened up for those who followed him in exploring the presence of technology in the larger culture” (Meilke, 157). In his seminal book, The Machine in the Garden, Marx argued that the extremes of industry and naturalism exerted competing and conflicting tensions which manifested in the American character as an essential dichotomy, with industrialism at one extreme and the “pastoral ideal” at the other. Carroll Pursell, author of The Machine in America:

A Social History of Technology stated of Marx’s influence on the technology and culture community that “Most of us have been lucky enough to have spent our careers drawing inspiration from Leo Marx’s 1964 book The Machine in the Garden” (718). Marx’s view on the competition between those who would grow industry and those who wish to maintain the natural beauty of the land later took a more cynical turn. By the early 1990s, Marx was questioning a tendency toward technological determinism in our society as he grew increasingly skeptical about the role of technology in our lives. According to Marx it is commonly thought that the emergence of a given technology, such as the automobile or personal computer, provides direction for growth of the culture in which it is produced. This concept, known as technological determinism asserts that we are being driven by technology rather than being the drivers of it.

When addressing the role of technology in our contemporary experience Leo Marx expresses idea that “technology” as a concept has grown progressively dangerous due to the 38

cultural dominance of technological determinism. Marx is highly skeptical of social engineering7

and the “thoroughly technocratic idea of progress of the sort that would be espoused, early in the

twentieth century, by men like Frederick Winslow Taylor and his followers…Taylor’s theory of

scientific management embodies the quintessence of the technocratic…” (649). Leo Marx is

concerned that we are divorcing ourselves from the responsibility of controlling technology

when we give it the human qualities which Kelly attributes to it. For Kelly, technology is seen as

having its own will and desire. In Marx’s mind, the machine is consuming the garden.

A QUESTION OF ESSENCE

It is hard to imagine two less similar intellectuals than Martin Heidegger and Leo Marx:

one a former Nazi sympathizer and the other a liberal minded Ivy League scholar. Despite their

differences, both wrote highly influential monographs concerning the essence of technology.

Despite their differing backgrounds, these two scholars wrote their most influential works on the

subject of technology during roughly the same era and addressed many of the same ideas: what is

the essence of technology; what does it symbolize; what is encapsulated by the term “technology” and what does this mean for us? Marx was interested in how the essence of technology was distilled through simultaneous deification and denial in American culture while Heidegger made to broad, sweeping, and ultimately ephemeral statements about technology. Martin Heidegger’s thoughts on the merits of technology are characteristically ambiguous.

Martin Heidegger’s essay “The Question Concerning Technology” provides a lens of

analysis which is useful for the study of revolutionary mechanics. Much like Marx, Heidegger is

not an expert on technology; instead he situates the term technology in a manner which allows

him to focus on his areas of expertise, namely philosophy and the classics. The types of 39

technology which are examined by Heidegger are ultimately of little consequence because

Heidegger’s argument deals with technology at its essence. “The essence of technology will open

itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth” (12). For example, Heidegger uses silver

and the silversmith to illustrate the manner in which technology is typically understood within

his philosophical construct. By contrast, the silversmith has been occluded from this study of the

mechanic because silver-smithing fails to have the industrial functionality of the mechanic’s

trade and its closely related occupations.8 Moreover, unlike the machinist, locksmith, blacksmith

and others, there is no direct line of descent from the silversmith to the mechanic. Despite this

distinction, the argument which Heidegger makes is equally true to both mechanics and

silversmiths along with the technologies they utilize.

The clock’s essence is the precise measurement of temporal duration. The technology of

the clock allows time to be parsed into discrete units which can then be observed and measured,

thus revealing the emphasis on efficiency as a categorical imperative of industrial culture.

According to Kevin Kelly, “the philosopher Martin Heidegger suggested that technology was an

“unhiding” –a revealing—of an inner reality. That inner reality is the immaterial nature of

anything manufactured” (68). What is revealed is not just an order in the universe, but also, and

perhaps more importantly, a desire for order. While the reality of machine time can be revealed,

as per Heidegger’s argument, it can also be produced. As the early Twentieth Century public intellectual and critic of technology Lewis Mumford argued in Technics and Civilization (1934),

“the clock, moreover is a piece of power-machinery whose “product” is seconds and minutes: by its essential nature it dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences” (15). Similarly the assembly line, which is born of clock logic, is a technology which reveals its essence as speed both measured 40 and harnessed, thus the precision of the clock and the speed of the assembly line are essentially linked. Mumford said of the clock,

In its relationship to determinable quantities of energy, to standardization, to automatic

action, and finally to its own special product, accurate timing, the clock has been the

foremost machine of technics: and at each period it has remained in the lead: it marks the

perfection to which all other machines aspire. The clock, moreover, served as a model for

many other kinds of mechanical works, and the analysis of motion that accompanied the

perfection of the clock, with the various types of gearing and transmission that were

elaborated, contributed to the success of quite different kinds of machine (15).

If we are to take Mumford’s argument at face value, the expression “it runs like a clock” bears witness to the clock’s supremacy as a machine of efficiency and precision.

Figuratively speaking, in the period prior to clock logic and mass production, technology was equivalent to time. More specifically, the technological processes necessary to make state of the art tools, weapons, and buildings took an enormous investment of time. When looking at a machine produced prior to mass production it is easy to see that a large amount of time and effort went into its creation. Reproducing a single book might require years of work for monks laboring in a monastery. To generate a technological artifact such as a book, a large amount of time would be involved. A blacksmith might require an entire lifetime of skill, utilizing every metal working technique he had learned to forge a complicated item such as a musket. Forging, pounding, shaping, bending, annealing, tempering, polishing and finishing would be required in order to complete an item as complicated as a firearm. A lifetime of technical knowledge, combined with a large number of hands-on labors, is required to manufacture a single item of advanced design and function. 41

While duration has always existed, it was the clock and its essential precision which

revealed the “standing reserve” of clock time. According to Heidegger, “The essence of modern

technology lies in enframing…enframing is the gathering together which belongs to that setting

upon which challenges man and puts him in a position to reveal the real, the mode of ordering, as

standing reserve” (23). The clock was essential to the birth of the industrial age, being born of

gears and giving creation to seas of machines: a clockwork universe of ideas and imperatives. In

its simplest form a gear is a toothed wheel which assists in turning other wheels or actuating

similar mechanical change. The clock exists in relation to the motor (the precise timing of

crankshafts, pistons, valves, camshafts and ignition being integral to the proper performance of

the internal combustion engine) in much the same manner as the clock exists in relation to

scientific management and the assembly line, both of which rely on logistical precision wherein

everything aligns at the right place at the right time.

The locomotive presents another opportunity to explore Heidegger’s enframing.

Remember that “what enframing itself actually is? It is nothing technological, nothing on the order of a machine. It is the way in which the real reveals itself as standing-reserve” (Heidegger

23). The order imposed by the railroad is “revealed” in standardized time which is then saddled on the culture in the form of “time zones,” but in doing so it ultimately reveals an imperative of the culture: a need for precision. Precision is built into the system: locomotive movement requires precision. Mechanical speed requires precision. In the case of the locomotive as it emerged as a technological phenomenon, time and space could be traversed more quickly than had previously been imagined. Clock logic and the standardized time of railroad timetables, production schedules in the factory, and the regime of class periods in high schools reveal a system fixated on standardization and precision. 42

Speed and precision are the essence of the rail, mass production, and the modern era. The train’s essence, speed, is ordered by steam and rail. The train is more than a means of transportation; there is an underlying essence which is revealed by this technology. The train’s essence is speed and the result of that essence is that time is eclipsed by traveling on a train which relates to the clock and the parsing of duration. One technology leads to another. The set of ideas or conceptions surrounding a given technology influences the development of future technologies. A steam engine reveals the need for greater speed, itself a cultural imperative.

Standardized time lends itself to the factory by way of Taylor’s time studies as they were applied to manufacturing in the form of mass production. Speed and precision are the essence of mass production. Technology, by its essence, has a tendency to impose order on that which it reveals and, conversely its order is determined by what is being revealed.

The rail necessitates the development of “standard time” in which all the clocks of a specific geographic area will show the same time. By having a standard system of time trains can run at higher speeds on more complicated schedules with a decreased chance of collisions. Prior to the standardization of time it was not uncommon for trains to collide with each other because the clocks they were using were non-standardized and therefore were incapable of indicating with any certainty if another train would be on the same track at the same time. Standardized time allows trains to travel the rails at faster speeds and arrive at their destinations with greater precision. Decades after the introduction of standardized time, cars moved on rails in the mass production assembly lines, with the rails insuring that components moved swiftly through the production process at a rate which could be easily predicted.

It is impossible to speak about the philosophical implications of technology without addressing the work of Martin Heidegger. In speaking of the essence of technology Heidegger 43

expands this line of thinking with the following illustration: “When we are seeking the essence

of “tree”, we have to become aware that which pervades every tree, as tree, is not itself a tree that

can be encountered among all the other trees. Likewise, the essence of technology is by no

means technological” (Heidegger 4). In this manner technology is not delimited by a specific

machine or contrivance. In his essay, “Notes on Heidegger’s Conception of “Technology,” Leo

Marx responds by saying, “although I did not then grasp (and perhaps still don’t) exactly what he

believes that essence to be, I nevertheless found the proposition enormously suggestive” (Marx

639). What Heidegger is doing is illustrating how technology reveals an essence which was

previously hidden; i.e., a steam engine reveals the power inherent in coal and steam. Capitalism

is a technology which reveals “surplus value” in production.

Early in his essay, Heidegger seeks to dismiss rudimentary responses to the seemingly

straightforward question, “What is technology?” He states that, “everyone knows the two

statements that answer our question. One says: Technology is a means to an end. The other says;

Technology is a human activity. The two definitions belong together…the current conception of

technology, according to which it is a means and a human activity, can therefore be called the

instrumental and anthropological definition of technology.” However, Heidegger goes on to

explain that he finds these definitions to be insufficient because they fail to reveal much about

the essence of technology. The first definition sees technology as a tool, such as a hammer, a

screwdriver, or a loom. Although the first definition is quite limited, it is true that older

technologies are instrumental for the development of state of the art technologies. For example,

mid-Twentieth Century technologies such as punch card computers (i.e. the UNIVAC) were based on the Jacquard Loom which used punch cards to rapidly and consistently produce intricate patterns in cloth destined for military uniforms. The Jacquard Loom had been 44 commissioned by Napoleon Bonaparte in the early Nineteenth Century for the purpose of rapidly producing uniforms with consistent ornamental stitching. For his efforts Jacquard received a substantial reimbursement from Napoleon. French weavers were less sanguine about Jacquard’s invention and viewed his machine as the end of their cottage industry. They subsequently tried to drown him in a river.

If Heidegger’s two definitions of technology are investigated closely, then it becomes clear they are part of a single concept. Saying they “belong together” implies they are separate entities involved in symbiosis, or are at least very dependent on each other. However, the distinction between the two becomes less clear when examined with greater scrutiny. The second definition put forth by Heidegger is one which is commonly accepted in the social sciences; human activities such as the formation and maintenance of relationships are technologies. These relationships allow the pursuit of larger, more involved societal works such as schools, cities and public works which are a “means to an end” i.e., they specifically allow formal education, shared resources, and running water, respectively.9 Moreover, it would be impossible to create increasingly sophisticated tools without social bonds which link people together. To create large, complex societies it requires the efforts of many people using a profound milieu of tools, techniques, and ideas, all of which can be viewed as independent technologies. Clearly there are human activities which do not involve technology, but these tend to be involuntary and biological in nature. Respiration is an example of a “human activity” which does not involve technology. By contrast, eating involves the careful selection of known edible foods and the preparation of those foods. “Cooking” is a pre-digestive process which allows humans to consume foods which would be indigestible without culinary technology. 45

It is noteworthy that while Heidegger is making observations concerning modern

technology he bases his work on ancient philosophical principles. Heidegger drew, to a large

extent, from Aristotle and his bias in favor of Aristotle may be indicative of his Catholic

upbringing and his education at the Freiberg Jesuit Seminary. Heidegger’s sectarian training was

in part what qualified him for the Position of Rector at the University of Freiburg.10 “From 1929

to the mid-1940s, Heidegger conflated the favored motifs of Nazism with his own philosophy”

(Collins and Selina 99). Nevertheless, Heidegger’s interest in technology and empathy for war in

some ways illustrates a line of thinking which is similar to that of the Italian Futurists.

Heidegger’s tendency toward fascism puts him staunchly in opposition to Marxist material

analysis, however, like the Futurists, Heidegger was predisposed toward a reverence of

technology and the acceptance of warfare.

Futurism was F.R. Marinetti’s dream of technology deified. It was a violent and short lived philosophical phenomenon. In the Futurism Manifesto (1909) F.T. Marinetti states that

“courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.” This manifesto, from

which all other strains of futurism are derived, emphasizes immediacy and experience. However,

it was also a sexist, nihilist, and ultimately proto-fascist ideology. The futurists advocated war,

book burning and the destruction of museums. Curiously, futurism lacked a specific destructive

focus, i.e. they weren’t opposed to a certain group of books, instead they wanted them all

burned, even their own. To this end Marinetti said, “When we are forty, other younger and

stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts—we want it to

happen!” Thus, in the spirit of nihilism the futurists extended the argument in favor of

destruction to their own work. 46

Perhaps the greatest discontinuity of futurism came from its tendency to celebrate militarism while simultaneously embracing rebellion. Due to their fixation on war and commitment to the futurist ideology, several futurists were killed in World War I. Futurism was developed at the nexus of anarchism and fascism and it was influenced to some degree by the

Italian anarchist Ericco Maletesta and his one-time friend, Benito Moussolini.

Sadly, the post-war relationship between Marinetti and the Fascists was one which diminished the influence of Futurism as Marinetti became an apologist for “Il Duce.” Nevertheless, the raw power of the futurist vision was enough to propel them in the popular consciousness.11 The

Futurist Manifesto breathlessly describes car crashes and fire-bombings. Other creative minds would embrace futurism’s angst in their own creative endeavors.

Marinetti was obsessed with movement and mechanical speed in particular. Because we live in an era of high-speed communications wherein space (and therefore time) is lessened, a neo-futurist adoration for speed could come in the form of adoration for high-speed information exchange. Marinetti’s sexually explosive car crash provides an impetus for a host of aspiring philosophers to take up the call, exploring the manner in which futurism could impact their artistic and literary endeavors. While Marinetti and Heidegger both worked to further fascist causes, in the case of Nazism “Heidegger may not have held to the party’s programmatic anti-

Semitism, but he supported its other trajectories. Labour, war and education became a binding threefold imperative, a primordial spiritual mandate of the German nation” (Collins and Selina

99). However, Heidegger’s emphasis on education put him in direct opposition to Marinetti’s assertion that futurists should burn books and “be free of the smelly gangrene of professors”

(Marinetti). As a university Rector, Heidegger had a vested interest in higher education; even if the goals, philosophy, and staff of the University of Freiburg had changed under Nazi rule. 47

During his period as a national socialist, Heidegger was noted as saying, “University study again became a risk, not a refuge for the cowardly. Whoever does not survive the battle, lies where he falls” (Collins and Selina 99). Again, this emphasis on battle and courage is reminiscent of the

Futurists, but Heidegger places the locus of contention within university rather than possessing the free floating oppositional nature of futurism. It must be mentioned that Heidegger’s reluctance to defend his ostracized colleagues could hardly be categorized as risky behavior.

48

CHAPTER II: THE MECHANIC AND THE NEW FACTORY SYSTEM

“Under the spreading chestnut tree

The village smithy stands;

The smith a lonely man is he,

For his shop is in other hands;

And before the door a puffing Ford

Now oil and gas demands”

“The Village Blacksmith,” author unknown

The mechanic, much like the machines he tended, was a figure of complicated and occasionally conflicting significance in the early industrial world. The mechanic functioned to symbolize the trajectory of American culture during the age of industrialization. As Americans became increasingly fascinated with the machine, the prestige of the machine tender expanded.

Similarly, as modernity failed to fulfill its utopian promise, the people who repaired and operated machines became increasingly mundane in the popular consciousness. The demarcation of mechanical skills into specific trades (such as machinist, engineer, and so on) mirrors the movement of American workers away from the period of traditional manufacturing techniques known as "American system of production" toward the implementation of a deskilled mass production system. The mechanic had an important function within the “American System of

Production” (Hounshell 12) throughout the Industrial Revolution, but was of declining importance in mass production environments. Thus, the prestige of mechanics and the skills they utilize are intimately tied. This chapter will investigate how cultural forces altered the meaning of mechanic from symbol of modernity’s promise as proletariat vanguard to the common grease monkey. 49

Although its exact date of origin is a matter of some dispute, the Industrial Revolution

began with James Watt’s 1763 improvement to the Newcomen steam engine which allowed

steam power to be used for weaving and mining applications. No longer were horses or mules

needed to power the pumps which kept mines from flooding in this period. Steam engines

provided a means to run the pumps more reliably and more efficiently. Similarly, mills no longer

needed to rely on water power or, less frequently, wind power. Textile mills would no longer

need to compete for available mill races (river or stream run-offs with currents strong enough to move their waterwheels) to power their looms and machinery. Certainly water was essential for the generation of steam and the operation of steam machinery, but from a techno-historical perspective the waterwheel became as outdated as Roman Aqueducts during this period.

Similarly, work procedures changed during this time as machines appropriated some of the skill previously possessed by tradesmen. Labor subsequently moved out of the cottage and into large manufacturing facilities where machines were housed and operated. As a result, many artisans relocated from rural areas to urban centers to continue practicing their trades; albeit in a form which required less skill while simultaneously obliging conformity to production quotas and the scrutiny of management.

Although the auto industry was non-existent at this early stage, it is significant for the purpose of this study to investigate automotive production as a locus of changing production paradigms and workplace imperatives. Initially, auto workers would produce horseless carriages in a stationary fashion, working on one individual car from beginning to end. Essentially a team of mechanics would assemble cars from components which had been produced by blacksmiths and machinists. However, due to a lack of standardization among automotive components the mechanics would often have to perform machining or blacksmithing to make everything fit 50 together. As a result, the tendency for these subsequent altered parts to fit together in an irregular fashion resulted in greatly varying quality of the finished products. The increasing irregularity which accompanied modifying each part was known as dimensional creep and it prevented components from being interchangeable from one completed unit (such as a rifle or loom) to the next. The Industrial Revolution experienced a moment of punctuated equilibrium with the introduction standardized parts and regimented quality control. Standardized parts existed prior to the invention of the auto industry but were integral to the development of mass production techniques. This shift in production was predicated on the invention of the moving assembly line in 1908 and its product the Model-T Ford. While none of the techniques surrounding mass production were new, their application to the manufacturing of industrial products had a remarkable impact on industry writ large. Prior to mass production the disassembly lines of

Chicago’s stock yards utilized conveyor systems. Sewing machines, rifles, and bicycles had standardized parts prior to the auto age. Grain mills in Minnesota were already employing gravity slides at this time, but it was Henry Ford and his engineering team who integrated these processes into a new production technology.

As a term “mechanic” originally encompassed a multitude of trade crafts including machining, engineering and blacksmithing. Mechanic described a range of industrial skills and talents. Because mechanic, machinist and blacksmith were at one time synonymous it was common for trade unions to include more than one of these titles in their name. For example,

“the first machinist and blacksmith union was formed in Philadelphia in 1857” (Smith and

Featherstone 20). This was significant because trade unions, unlike labor unions, were organized along skill sets within the trades they represented. Similarly, the Detroit Mechanics’ Society was

“founded in 1818… maintained a library of 4,000 books for members drawn from dozens of 51

trades and professions” (Babson 1984). The earliest usage of mechanic I utilize dates to the

period of the American Revolution.12 However, by the late Nineteenth Century the mechanic was

becoming delineated into a skilled trade in and of itself while engineering (and to a lesser extent

machining) were increasingly seen as independent occupations with disparate social significance

and prestige. It was during this period that blacksmithing was becoming obsolete.

Throughout the Industrial Revolution continuities existed between blacksmiths,

machinists, assemblers, engineers and mechanics. Originally blacksmith was a title reserved for

people who forged iron into tools and other mechanical components. Blacksmiths would “forge

weld” two pieces of metal by literally heating and beating them together using a hammer, forge

and tongs. Welding and filing mechanical parts was a fundamental portion of the blacksmiths job. “Welding is the trickiest of all basic blacksmith operations. It involves bringing two pieces of iron to a semi-molten heat and hammering them together so the two pieces flow together and become one” (Pehoski 31). In the introduction to his handbook, Blacksmithing for the Home

Craftsman, (1973) Joe Pehoski states that “For a while blacksmiths were the cornerstone of the crafts” (Pehoski 2). With the onset of industrialism in Europe some blacksmiths concentrated on the operation of machine tools (lathes being the predominant form of tooling, but milling machines and drill presses were included as well) as a new means of working metal. In the case of the early auto industry, machinists “produced engine blocks and other parts by grinding, drilling and buffing the rough castings from the foundry. Each machinist could operate and repair most of the machines in the shop” (Babson 21). The machinist’s ability to repair as well as operate the machines further illustrates a continuity of skills between machinists and mechanics during this period of intense specialization. Those who operated lathes and other tooling became known as machinists, while blacksmiths who acclimated to the assembly and maintenance of 52 machines were referred to increasingly as mechanics. Blacksmiths who dealt with the design of machines as well as their operation, were called engineers. Even until the early automotive age,

“an era where craft skills and traditions still survived, little delineated the tasks of the college- educated engineer and the shop-bred mechanic” (Meyer 25). This trend would continue as the most overtly cerebral technological endeavors would be (and still are with relation to computer technology) relegated to those with university training and credentials.

In the world of automobile manufacturing, where mass production was first developed, skilled artisans were no longer needed to do automotive assembly. The process of building a car was broken down into a system of repetitive steps wherein an automotive component was assembled as it moved along an assembly line rather than being built by autonomous craftsman.

These components would be assembled in succession, with each assembler adding their individual parts until the finished product reached the end of the assembly line. The reduction of highly complex industrial techniques to simple, repetitive work by unskilled laborers is known as deskilling. Deskilling is the process in which trade skills are no longer required by individual workers because they’ve either been transferred to machines or deconstructed by the production process. Rather than requiring a specific worker to know how to make a product in its entirety, individual workers would only need to know a specific set of steps. Each worker in turn would perform their specific task in conjunction with other deskilled workers to produce the finished product.

Under a deskilled manufacturing paradigm nearly anyone could perform the steps required to mass produce a product. With mass production, workers no longer needed to have any previous trade knowledge to function within the factory system. By contrast, prior to deskilling, “mechanics assembled the engine, transmission, and finished car at stationary work 53 stations. Since many parts were cast and machined by the dozens of outside contractors, the mechanic had to re-file and grind the ill-fitting components to produce a working machine”

(Babson 21). The filing and grinding of components are skills largely associated with the machine trades and thus with machinists, thus further illustrating that in the period before mass production the mechanic and machinist possessed many of the same skills.

Norbert Wiener has argued that the locksmith is the ancestor of the contemporary machinist in his venerable book, Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas (1994).

Unfortunately, he failed to cite historical evidence to support his argument. However, the following passage anecdotally illustrates the crux of his argument in favor of the locksmith as parent to the machinist’s trade.

Why should the machine tool operator trace his spiritual ancestry to the

locksmith rather than to the bellfounder or the blacksmith? It is because the

locksmith’s art is that ancient craft in which metal is shaped by removing parts

of it. What the file did in the old days, the arts of the cutting tool on the lathe or

the planer or of the lapping of metal by abrasives had done in later ages. Yet

these modern cutting or grinding tools had to wait until richer sources of power

were available…(38-39).

By extension, this same argument could be made for clockmakers and gunsmiths due to the extensive filing needed in order to build locks and have them function smoothly and with precision. Nevertheless, the need to forge the blanks needed to make screws would often have been the area of the blacksmith. In citing Moxon’s 1693 book, Mechanic Exercises, Rybczynski mentions that the section on blacksmithing, Moxon “describes a screw-pin and screw-plate, crude taps and dies used to make nuts and bolts to attach strap hinges to wooden doors. The bolts 54 have square heads and are tightened with a wrench.” Producing nuts and bolts, using taps and dies are all enduring functions of machinists, both then and now, despite that Moxon was referring to these skills as being those of blacksmiths more than 300 years ago. A final criticism of Weiner’s stance on the machinist’s ontogeny is that while locksmithing remains a stable occupation (meaning that it has yet to realize obsolescence) it has failed to integrate machine tooling to a greater degree than gunsmiths, blacksmiths and woodworkers.

The exhaustive micro-history titled, One Good Turn: A Natural History of the

Screwdriver and the Screw (2001), was developed out of a “New York Times” assignment to find and research “the best tool of the millennium.” After deciding to investigate the screwdriver, author Witold Rybcznski discovered that virtually no research had been done on the ontogeny of the tool. He then worked backward through archival records investigating the earliest historical record of screws and screwdrivers. One assertion of One Good Turn is that clearly there was a time when screws were new enough to be uncommon, but they were simple enough to be produced by a number of craftsmen including blacksmiths, gun smiths, locksmiths and so forth.

Perhaps more importantly, prior to the Industrial Revolution, such endeavors were considered banal enough to be beneath the need for overt documentation. But it is certain that the overlapping of technical skills sets was commonplace in the era prior to mass production.

The range of skills attributed to mechanics such as machining, welding, and engineering declined precipitously due to the introduction of mass production techniques. Welding in particular became easier due to great innovations in field. It was no longer necessary to forge weld, metal could be joined using electric arc welding methods which could be taught very quickly compared to the lengthy apprenticeship required for blacksmithing. This point is illustrated in the following 55 passage from Mike Davis’ City of Quartz (1990) concerning the construction of “Liberty Boats” at

Kaiser Fontana Steel.

Recognizing that a Pacific War would make unprecedented demands on the

under-industrialized California economy, Kaiser proposed to adapt Detroit’s

assembly-line methods to revolutionize the construction of merchant

shipping…to simplify welding, huge deckhouses were assembled upside-down

and then hoisted into place, helping reduce the traditional six-month

shipbuilding cycle to a week. In the absence of a skilled labor force, Kaiser

‘trained something like three hundred thousand welders [at Richmond alone] out

of soda jerks and housewives’ (387).

This certainly would not have been possible in the era prior to arc welding and mass production.

“Forge welding remained as the primary welding method until Elihu Thompson, in the year 1886, developed the resistance welding technique. This technique proved a more reliable and faster way of joining metal than did previous methods” (Jeffus 3). Mass production was therefore made possible by advances in metal joining because electric arc welding was faster and workers could easily be trained to do simple welding and joining operations.

Despite these advances, a small number of machinists, mechanics and other trades people continued to function under the craft production paradigm in mass production facilities. These skilled workers became known as “skilled trades” within auto factories and their suppliers. As skilled trades workers they needed to retain their skills and as a result did not succumb to de- skilling. Much like “the craft producer [they functioned as] highly skilled workers [using] simple but flexible tools to make exactly what the consumer [asked] for” (Womak 12-13): in this specific context the consumer was the automotive industry. These skilled workers despite “an increasing 56 division of labor and an increasing technical sophistication still retained sufficient skill and knowledge to maintain some degree of functional autonomy” (Meyer 14). A result of this was the development of a class structure, so insular as to virtually be a caste system within the factory, between those who were allowed to retain and cultivate skills and those who were not. This in- shop class structure proved highly divisive when labor unions tried to organize these industries because skills were recognized as having monetary value and cultural capital.

In the mass production factory the shop floor became a space not only for production but also for lessons in the discipline of the time-clock. Time studies were done to find out which workers were most efficient; then other workers doing the same task would be required to work to that standard. The factory became a location where the dominance of engineers and managers was very firmly established in the minds of new industrial workers. Similarly, as factory skill acquiesced to dedicated machines (machines which were built to have one invariable function such as drilling the holes in flat head V-8 engine blocks) the engineers who previously possessed a mechanic’s acumen now imbued their skill to the machine, thus removing the need for machine operators to perform skilled work. “In the tool-making department, engineers and mechanics transferred skill from human to mechanical form in the design of machines and their attachments” (Meyer 25). Fewer skilled machinists were needed in the period of mass production because machine tools were often designed to do a specific task without the need for highly skilled labor. The down side of dedicated machines was that much like the skilled workers they replaced, these devices now were capable of fewer operations, performing the same routine until obsolescence.

By this time, engineers were spending more time in the drawing room then on the shop floor despite the fact many of them had begun their industrial training as mechanics. With the 57 development of the university system in the United States the conceptual aspects of blacksmithing became delineated to engineers and designers. “Graduate programs in science developed at major universities and specialized schools of engineering…engineering thus transformed itself from its earlier empiricism and artisanship in order to mediate the vast structural changes in mechanical production” (Trachtenberg 64).

Mechanics, while required to retain some of their skills, had been forced to abandon others. Certain skills such as disassembly, diagnostics, and repair were retained by mechanics; thus while it cannot be argued that the mechanic was entirely deskilled, it is clear that the range of skills possessed by mechanics was severely curtailed. This meant later generations of mechanics had less overall industrial value than the mechanics of previous eras that had possessed a greater multitude of skills. Ultimately, those whose mechanical abilities were better suited to the maintenance of machines were increasingly referred to specifically as mechanics rather than as blacksmiths or engineers.

Despite the skills they retained, mechanics were gazed on by a public eye which was increasingly ambivalent toward machine technology. This was due in part to the failure of modernity to realize its utopian potential. Instead of Utopia, mass production was married to genocide in the form of the Holocaust. Similarly, machines of mass destruction emerged, such as the atomic bomb, and gave birth to the Cold War.

CLOCK TIME AND THE NEW NORMAL

From the middle Nineteenth to early Twentieth Century, it is well established that the

American system of production with its emphasis on standardization and interchangeability affected everything from economics and employment to temporal perception. However, the 58 manner in which the factory system impacted perceptions of the human body typically receives far less attention from historians of technology. During the Industrial Revolution, factories required increasingly standardized parts as well as standardized workers. During this period, workers were physically standardized to accurately predict the amount of work they would collectively do in a given day. With the worker as part of the factory process it was essential to know exactly how much product a worker could produce to accurately know how much stock to purchase and how many customer orders could be filled. Antonio Gramsci argued, “The capitalist entrepreneur creates alongside himself the industrial technician, the specialist in political economy, the organizers of a new culture, of a new legal system, etc.” (Gramsci 5), but paramount to this was the need for a new kind of worker, workers who would be standardized and of equal value; a new form of labor, able bodied, predictable and expendable. It is noteworthy that Gramsci failed to mention the regular body as an important element of capitalism given that his antipathy to capitalism as a known political dissident who had been imprisoned by Mussolini and his own physicality. Gramsci was a dwarf.

Hand-in-hand with the normalized worker is the idea of disability. In “Constructing

Normalcy” Lennard Davis asserts that “the social process of disabling arrived with industrialization” (24). Thus, as factories became the dominant locus of production the requirements to work in them became the standard of measure for all workers and, by extension, for all people. The connection between the development of the “normal body” and its utility in the Nineteenth Century factory was established by Karl Marx. “Marx actually cites [the] notion of the average man in a discussion of the labor theory of value. We can see in retrospect that one of the most powerful ideas of Marx – the notion of labor value or average wages – in many ways is based on the idea of the worker constructed as an average worker” (Davis 28). Thus Marx’s 59 libratory predication is founded upon the idea that a physical norm exists by which the value of labor can be weighed.

Marx’s discussion of the normal worker is encapsulated in the following passages from

Das Kapital: Value in Use and Exchange Value The Socially Necessary Labour.

The exchange value of a commodity thus only exists because, and in so far as

abstract human labour is embodied in that commodity. How are we to measure the

amount such value? According to the quantity of “value-creating substances,” i.e.

of labour, contained in it. The quantity of labor itself will be measured by its

duration, and working time is, in turn, measured according to the definite time-

standards, such as hours, days, etc. [and later] the labor which constitutes the

substance of the values is homogenous human labor, expenditure of the same

uniform human labour… (31).

Marx put forth the idea that by standardizing the amount of work which was done in a given day, he could standardize production, then standardize profits, and ultimately standardize the manner in which surplus value was distributed back to the workers.

This emphasis on the factor-centered construction of ability vs. disability indicates that power was being generated through an arbitration of which specific types of bodies could or could not participate in the industrial world. Thus, some types of bodies (those which were deemed properly able) would be capable of operating within the new economy. This endorses

Foucault’s assertion from his debate with Noam Chomsky that, “from the Seventeenth and

Eighteenth Centuries onward, there was a veritable technological takeoff in the productivity of power” (Foucault 61) meaning both the productivity of productive power, as well as a cultural capital of those who could work in industry. In this context the factory worker becomes the new 60

normal. In tandem with the idea of the normative factory worker there is the standardization of

human beings by science and culture. According to Davis, “fingerprinting pushes forward the

idea that the human body is standardized and contains a serial number, as it were, imbedded in

its corporeality. (Later technology will reveal this fingerprint to be embedded to the genetic

level)” (31). Other efforts to categorize human beings took place through the processes of

eugenics, racial taxonomies (which were all the rage during this period of rapid

industrialization), and in the emerging social sciences.

E.B. Taylor wanted his managerial model to be implicitly scientific. Within scientific management, itself the meta-narrative of mass production, there was the overt idea that

delineating a job into individual steps was inherently superior to the individual performance of

all the steps of a production process. It is of interest to note that Saussure, whether by accident or

design, followed the logic of the factory and scientific management when he parsed language

into minute units. Saussure, much like Taylor, broke down his subject into a discrete set of

elements which could then be examined and manipulated. Rather than an industrial process, he

broke down and deconstructed language “scientifically.” It is of interest to note that Taylor’s

observations on production where not created in a vacuum, rather they were produced as a result

of pressures at that time to make workers more efficient and thereby greatly increase the flow of

capital. The pressures for increased productivity were, by and large, a result of corporate power,

standardization, and interchangeability being applied to industrial endeavors.

Expendability and standardization are categorical imperatives of the Nineteenth and the

Twentieth Century factory system. Historically it has been less common for these terms to be

associated with workers than with the factory and its machinery. Much like capitalism, the

development of disability as a concept occurred in conjunction with the Industrial Revolution. 61

Therefore, the intersection of industry and the construction of normalcy occurred in tandem with and provided a preference for one type of laborer. Those workers thought unsuitable for factory labor were coded as disabled. The designation of abnormality was an ironic result for those who, after having been selected as fit for industrial work, were maimed by the manufacturing process.

Subsequently, those who were seriously injured would often be seen as unfit for the type of labor which had maimed them. During the Industrial Revolution it was clear that “with the increasing mechanization of industry and accompanying loss of workers’ control over their working conditions, workplace injuries increased substantially” (Scotch 379). An emphasis on increased production coupled with a near complete lack of safety engineering, increased both the number and ferocity of on the job accidents. With early production machinery it was easy to get caught up in the gear trains, belts and pulleys which were often positioned outside of the machine’s housing. A prime example of this is the steam locomotive with its pistons and connecting rods exposed on the sides of the engine. During this era lathes, drill presses, and mills commonly received their motive power through a series of belts which hung from drive shafts on the ceiling. These free hanging belts conveyed power which was distributed from a driveshaft connected to a large steam engine. As a result, the belts would spin continuously and transmit power to the machines. As a result, factories would often be jungles of moving belts, waiting to grab a sleeve and pull a worker into the machine, or occasionally break and lash an unsuspecting worker.

Factory work placed greater demands on its workers than craft production had. “Long hours of labour in factory environments required a standardized dexterity, speed and intensity of work. Many people with impairments were unable to sell their labour power under such conditions; they were increasingly socially positioned as dependants, excluded in the economy of 62 generalized commodity production” (Thomas 46). As a result, a moment of workplace distraction might transform a competent machinist into a Dickensian pauper. A person’s ability to move forward with modernity and its new, factory-centered normalcy, could be profoundly undermined by an injury in the factory setting. With a serious enough injury the worker could be viewed as less than normal, forced into a cultural space alongside those considered savage and inassimilable. “The process of normality in its modern sense arose in the mid-Nineteenth

Century in the context of a pervasive belief in progress. It became a culturally powerful idea with the advent of evolutionary theory” (Baynton 35). The idea of survival of the fittest (a maxim coined by Herbert Spencer, but often mistakenly attributed to Darwin) was placed in the context of commerce to indicate that the very strongest societies would find the means of most efficiently manufacturing and distributing standardized products. It was considered a categorical imperative that the most advanced societies would have the fastest, most efficient processes and workers. The backdrop for Taylor and his processes of increased production was The Spanish-

AmericanWar. The war necessitated an increase in pig iron and Taylor provided a means for meeting this need.

Although it is clearly true that industrialization called for an increasingly standardized worker, it is equally provocative to examine how Taylor and Ford undermined Marx's idea of the average worker. For example, the orthodox line of thinking surrounding the able body and industrialization can be found in the following passage from the introduction to Rosemarie

Garland Thompson’s anthology Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body

(1996).

Machine Culture created new somatic geographies. For example, the decline of the

apprentice system, the rise of the machine and the factory, as well as wage labor, put 63

bodies on arbitrary schedules instead of allowing natural rhythms to govern activity.

Rather than machines acting as prosthetics for the human body as they had in traditional

cultures, the body under industrialization began to seem more like an extension of the

machine, which threatened to replace the working body or at least restructure its relation

to labor. Efficacy, a concept rooted in the mechanical, ascended to prominence as a

measurement of bodily value. Mechanized practices such as standardization, mass

production, and interchangeable parts promoted sameness of form as a cultural value and

made singularity in both products and bodies seem deviant (Thompson 11).

However, while this was generally true, on closer investigation it can be seen that the reality was far more complicated. For example, an important facet of Taylor’s Principles of Scientific

Management was his test subject, the often mentioned worker known as “Schmidt”, who by any estimation possessed of superhuman endurance and was established as a miser. Taylor used him as an example of how workers could be more productive when given incentive and shown how to properly execute a given task. This process called “scientific management” fulfilled Schmidt's love of money and utilized his indefatigable constitution as he used the methodology prescribed by Taylor. However, because Schmidt was by no means an average worker he functioned like a ringer in Taylor’s experiment. “He was a little Pennsylvania Dutchman who had been observed to trot back home for a mile or so after his work in the evening about as fresh as he was when he came trotting to work in the morning…he was engaged in putting up the walls of a little house for himself in the morning before starting to work and at night after leaving” (Taylor 33).

Clearly, Schmidt is not a common man, far from it. He represents a standard which the common worker cannot, based on Taylor's own observations and preference for him as a test subject, compare. 64

Unlike Taylor, Henry Ford had uses for less than able bodied workers. The impetus for imperfect workers arose from a very different impetus, namely the demand for a very high number of workers to staff his factories. Moreover, Ford wanted people who would value the work they’d been given and would not leave their jobs immediately. It was of great importance that Ford retain these workers and not have to constantly train new workers. While it was certainly true that Ford needed able bodied workers throughout most of his operations, it was also true that given the vast number of tasks which needed to be completed at a plant like the behemoth Rouge, a full range of motor skills or senses were not always required. The following passage is from a chapter titled “Workers With Disabilities” in Ford R. Bryan’s The Rouge:

Pictured In Its Prime.

The policy of Henry Ford was to give equal opportunity for work to all, including those

who did not have full use of their physical faculties. For blind applicants, in particular, a

number of specific jobs were available in such departments as motor assembly, including

especially the gasket and the valve bushing department. This work could be handled

efficiently by sightless employees. There were times when as many as 1200 employees

who were blind or had seriously impaired vision were working at the Rouge Plant,

earning wages equal to those of other workers (207).

In the early Twentieth Century it was much more difficult for disabled folks to get work than it is today, so Ford knew he could find potential employees who were not fully able bodied, to do work which they could handle. In their 1915 study of the “Ford Methods and Ford Shops,”

Arnold and Faurote observed that, 65

The Ford help need not even be able bodied. I had been told that all applicants for Ford

jobs must be up to grade under a military examination by the Ford surgeons. Nothing

could be farther from the truth. The employment agent who looks applicants over before

sending them to the surgeon for examination said to me that so long as it seemed to him

that a man could do work enough to pay overhead charges on the floor space he would

occupy he sent him to the examining surgeon. He quoted Henry Ford as saying “We must

all live. If a man can make himself of any use at all put him on give him his chance and if

he tries to do the right thing we can find a living for him anyway…We might accept a

man with but one eye or one hand or one foot…The Ford Company does not demand

physical perfection in its workers” (42).

Thus, aside from workers who were blind, Ford also employed people who were missing hands or legs alongside folks who were of very advanced age, such as an 81 year old press operator.

Within the industrial world the phenomenon of “mechanic’s hands” (much like “diver’s hands”) functioned to signify experience, trauma and survival; meaning that a skilled worker had made mechanical mistakes, survived them and had the scars to prove it. Industrial ailments, resulting from exposure to smoke, chemicals, or other toxins, were often perceived in the opposite manner. Much like highly infectious diseases, industrial ailments often functioned to brand a person a pariah, either too weak to survive without protective equipment or too ignorant to use it at the appropriate times. Moreover, some workers might surreptitiously fear contracting the ailment from their work environment (occupational asthma or black lung being prime examples), but would conceal their concern due to a fear of being stigmatized as weak or alarmist. Workers who had been seriously injured on the job often became locked out (to use a labor term) of the industrial system as a result of their injuries. Occasionally when injuries 66

proved serious enough these disabled workers were shifted from the factory system to the co-

developing system of state hospitals or asylums (i.e. for insanity and consumption).

THE INCREASINGLY STANDARDIZED WORKER NECESSITATES A NEW KIND

OF FACTORY

The normal body was shaped by the factory system and in turn helped to shape that

system. For example, the types and sizes of clothing being produced in mass quantities were

limited to those with “normal” body types and thus would not normally accommodate

individuals who were structurally exceptional. Similarly, coercive forces constituted new norms

in the industrial society. “Clocks, department stores, ready-made clothing, catalogues,

advertising, and factory items, sculpted the prosaic toward sameness, while increased literacy

and the iterable nature of a burgeoning print culture fortified the impulse toward conformity”

(Thompson 12). Thus, the standardization of bodies, clothing, and work were impacted by the

factory and its ideological actualization.

The shop floor became a space not only for production but also for lessons in time study

and the discipline of the time-clock. Ultimately, within the confines of this system, being “able

bodied” required adherence to a delineated production schedule which easily measured the progress of the work being done. Conversely, not being able to do a requisite amount of work in a given period of time was enough to be deemed disabled. Thus, the technology of the able body reveals time to be at its essence. Much like the able body, time became internalized in this era: clock time and disability intersected. Although the clock had existed for centuries, its application under scientific management allowed its essence to be revealed: the clock’s essence is precision.

67

ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF MASS PRODUCTION

The processes which came together in mass production had existed independently for some time. One process which was essential for mass production to be a functioning system was that all the components having a certain function be uniform in size and fit together in a standardized manner. For example, all of the carriage mechanisms for Remington typewriters of a certain variety had to be manufactured to the same specifications in order for them to be easily manufactured. Thus, the components would be interchangeable on the factory floor and also as replacement parts. In this manner, mass production sought to make the products of a factory as standardized as it had made its workers. Each piece of a rifle being mass produced had to fit together with precision in order for it to work reliably and be interchangeable with other rifles of the same make. For example, if a firing pin was oversize by several thousandths of an inch, then it would not fit in rifles requiring a firing pin of a standardized size.

This emphasis on exact fitting parts was not a groundbreaking concept. In the ancient world it was necessary for the blocks of aqueducts to fit together without difficulty, but it was also possible to modify the shape of a given block based on the needs of a particular structure.

The difference between civil engineering in the ancient world and the needs of mass production can be illustrated by the fact that unlike Winchester rifles, aqueducts did not need to be produced in large numbers over a very short period of time. By contrast, in mass production, each unit had to be easily reproduced at high speeds and in great numbers.

There is a more contemporary antecedent to reliable, interchangeable parts. It comes from the arms industry. Throughout the history of firearms there had been a need for weapons which could easily be maintained and fitted with replacement parts. This need was met in the United 68

States during the Nineteenth Century. According to Carroll Pursell and his article “The

Technology of Production,” the Nineteenth Century emphasis on reliable, consistent machinery

(such as lathes, mills and so forth) would become a mainstay of mass production.

Assembling firearms from interchangeable parts produced in large numbers by

machines came to be known as “Armory practice” and was developed through the efforts

of the federal Ordinance Bureau working with the national armories. The Springfield

arsenal, for example, by 1799 was using machines that were said to dramatically cut the

time needed to make a musket…By the mid-nineteenth century, this so called Armory

practice, the assembly of devices from uniform (if not always quite identical) parts made

by single-purpose machine tools, had spread far beyond the manufacture of small arms.

Indeed, so much had it established itself in areas of civilian production that it was

universally termed the “American” system of manufacture”…Weapons manufacturers

would make demands on their suppliers to keep the same standards as them: to do

otherwise would mean that some parts would be standardized and interchangeable,

whereas others would need to be shaped to fit. Once one part needs modification, then

other parts will have to be adjusted to modify the original part, with the end result being

weapons which are not standardized or interchangeable. The increased production, lower

unit costs and workforce deskilling and discipline made possible by the American

System, however, proved a powerful incentive for its adoption (56-57).

The American system was so useful in producing large numbers of weapons that it was soon realized that they could also be used in the production of other commodities.

Assemblers had to be confident that, as they reached into a bin of parts, the component they retrieved would fit into its designated location with little difficulty and no necessary 69 modification. Quality replacement parts needed to service them were an essential part of this system. If a part failed to fit or function properly then it would need to be fitted (as in craft production) and this modification of individual components would then throw off the rest of the components. A refitted component may then be too large, too small, or generally out of shape with the remaining components and would result in them needing to be modified as well. The end result would be a machine in which no replacement parts could work without subsequent modification.

HENRY FORD, CLOCKWORK, AND MEMORY

As a boy Henry Ford was fascinated by the development of industrial technology. This fascination was an outgrowth of his fixation on repairing watches and clocks as a boy. Young

Henry found life on his father’s farm in suburban Detroit to be boring and tedious. Despite his aversion to farming, Henry would repair machinery on his father’s farm, and according to Henry

Ford biographer Roger Burlingame,

from the earliest time from which there is any record he was a master of

mechanical logic: from a glance at any machine he could understand the

interdependence of its parts—follow a line of reasoning, however long, through

gears, ratchets, spurs, cams and levers…at twelve he developed a passion for

timepieces. He seems to have ridden over much of the country, picking up clocks

and watches that needed repair, taking them home, working on them into the late

night, and returning them better than new (18).

Because farming never appealed to him, Henry further pursued his technical endeavors. In particular, he apprenticed as a machinist in a shop which specialized in building steam engines in 70

Detroit, Michigan. Detroit was set to become the epicenter of major changes in production techniques prior to the Twentieth Century.

The City of Detroit was an ideal setting for the young Henry Ford to gain industrial training and skill. “In the 1890’s Detroit’s railroad car manufacturers, iron foundries and forges combined to produce more railroad cars or ‘rolling stock’ than any other American city” (Smith and Feather stone 16-17). Heavy industry had long existed in Detroit and a bounty of skilled workers along with a well-defined industrial infrastructure made Detroit the ideal location for the birth of the Nineteenth Century American auto industry. Many Detroiters during this period were focused on the automobile and realized its potential for production in the region. According to the detailed history of the labor movement and auto industry in Detroit titled, Working Detroit

(1986), “In 1899, just three years after an experimental ‘horseless carriage’ sputtered and chugged its way down Detroit’s streets, Ransom E. Olds opened the city’s first automobile factory on East Jefferson Avenue, next to the Belle Isle Bridge. Producing one sometimes even two cars a day, the new ‘Oldsmobile’ plant launched Detroit into the Automobile Age” (18).

However, this early experiment in automotivity wasn’t the sole impetus for auto manufacturing in Detroit. “Detroit was an ideal place to manufacture automobiles. The city’s strategic location on the Great Lakes provided easy access to iron ore from the Upper Peninsula and coal from

Ohio, and Detroit’s dominance in building marine engines gave it a head start in the production of internal combustion engines. Its numerous metal-working industries also provided a bountiful supply of skilled workers and engineers…thousands of molders, metal finishers, mechanics, and other tradesmen whose skills were easily transferable to the tooling and building of automobiles”

(Babson, 18). Despite the high number of skilled industrial workers in Detroit prior to the auto 71

industry, massive numbers of workers would be needed to produce cars as the demand for them

increased.

Henry Ford would later work as an engineer for Thomas Edison at the Edison

Illuminating Company in Detroit. It was during his period of employment at Edison Illuminating

that Ford built his first automobile: the Quadricycle. Like many automobiles at the time, the

Quadricycle hybridized elements of bicycles and carriages in addition to early combustion

technology. The Quadricycle had large wire spoke wheels and was chain-driven like a bicycle;

however it was built like a carriage, with the engine under the seat rather than out in front like

contemporary automobiles, thus giving the overall impression that a horse could easily be yoked

to the vehicle. Also, although it had an internal combustion engine, the Quadricycle was steered

with a “tiller” like a small watercraft or a plow. Ultimately, the Quadricycle was a hybrid device

which utilized the spirit of the age; innovation, improvisation, and the melding of old and

emergent technologies. The Quadricycle made its maiden voyage in 1896, just three months after

the first car was driven in Detroit: this despite Ford having built it too large for the garage doors

in which it was constructed. The wall had to be knocked out in order for the vehicle to driven.13

Ford’s innovation in the area of efficiency was greatly impacted by his early experiences

doing clock repair. The meshing of gears and the need for each component to be in the right

place at the right time became the model for Ford factories under mass production. It is not an

exaggeration to say that Ford’s clockwork universe was centered on a mechanized perception of

time which was embodied in his greatest innovation: the moving assembly line. Moreover,

Ford’s fixation on clock time and the central role of the clock in his production paradigm made him an icon of soul crushing, mind-numbing repetitive work. His experiences in clock repair

were so significant that Henry would later purchase the store where he bought many of his clock 72 repair supplies (and moonlighted while working as an apprentice machinist) to have it moved to his newly constructed historical site “Greenfield Village.”

Standardized workers were an important aspect of mass production and were as essential as standardized and parts. Ford preferred to hire unskilled workers who had little or no industrial training because it meant he did not have to break them of work habits which he found counterproductive. “As to machinists old time all round men perish the thought. The Company has no use for experience in the working ranks anyway desires and prefers machine tool operators who have nothing who have no theories of correct surface speeds for metal finishing and will simply do what they are told to do over and over again bell time to bell time” (Arnold and Faurote 41-42). Thus Ford was able to quickly train large numbers of industrial workers to work in his factories because the tasks had been reduced to a few basic steps and they didn’t need to be untrained. Unlike “traditional” automotive manufacturing which was predicated upon highly trained and specialized workers building cars one at a time in a given location, Ford wanted the components (literally the work) to come to the workers. Each worker would have a very small and specific task which they would be required to complete over and over on a large number of automotive parts throughout the day. This process known as deskilling removed a great deal of the skill necessary to the production process. Ultimately, this transformed skilled craft-workers into unskilled, or at best semi-skilled assemblers. In industrial centers like Detroit

“the separation of hand and brain [was] the most decisive single step taken in the division of labor by the capitalist mode of production” (Braverman 126). While the number of tasks performed by a given worker decreased roughly in proportion with job satisfaction, the ability of the average mass production worker to afford the cars they built tended to increase. Unlike his 73

competitors, Ford dropped the price of his cars as production increased thus making his products

available to a larger number of potential consumers.

Ford borrowed from the techniques of Nineteenth Century arms manufacturers in the area

of standardization. He utilized methods of stamping from the production of bicycles. According

to Carroll Pursell,

Two critical areas of fabrication took hold first in the manufacture of bicycles,

and then of automobiles. One was the shaping of sheet metal through stamping

and punch pressing which produced fenders, pedals, and a good number of other

bicycle parts. The second was the employment of electric resistance welding to

join the seams of individual parts as well as connect parts into larger components

(Pursell 7).

Ford also used elements borrowed from grain mills such as gravity slides: literally a metal slide on which one worker would place a part in order for it to be received, via gravity, by a worker on a lower level of the plant.

Ford initially experimented with the moving assembly line at his plant in Highland Park,

Michigan. Ford’s sprawling industrial complex, designed by Albert Khan, utilized traditional

Nineteenth Century manufacturing elements such as overhead drive shafts to power the machines and a great deal of natural light. However, Ford broke from tradition and began experimenting with the placement of his machinery, putting it in sequence of assembly rather than grouping machines together by type. Instead of placing all the stamping presses together in one location he

had them in the assembly line where the parts needed to be pressed as they needed to be stamped

into shape and added to the finished whole. As a result, Ford was able to reduce the amount of

handling required for a given component along with reducing the overall time and cost of the 74 finished product. Using presses in a line (tandem presses) meant that a single sheet of steel could be pressed in a multitude of ways, transforming from a nondescript sheet of steel into a completed fender in a short distance and time. This emphasis on efficiency and speed in industrial design embodies the Fordist mindset.

Although Ford eschewed the influence of Frederick Taylor and his concept of Scientific

Management, it was certainly the case that they both shared a great concern with the development of faster, more efficient ways of producing a finished product. Ford denied that

“scientific management” or “Taylorism” formed the basis of his new industrial methods, most surely some elements of the new managerial tradition influenced the reorganization of work tasks and routines in the Highland Park Plant” (Meyer 19-20 ). Unlike Ford, Taylor was primarily interested in altering the manner in which a given worker approached his task. Taylor would observe a specific worker and use a stopwatch to time each of their motions while they worked in order to parse away any wasted movements, superfluous actions or what Taylor called

“The great gain…which results from the substitution of scientific for rule-of-thumb methods”

(16). After gathering and analyzing data, the so called scientific manager would then develop a new, improved manner for the worker to do their tasks and then provide the worker with incentive to do it differently. Unlike in the craft production era, the worker was removed from the decision making process. Under scientific management the design of the work process was left up to experts who decided what needed to be done and when the worker needed to do it. It is important to notice that this gain in production was a boon for the employer. According to

Taylor’s own account, a company would realize nearly 400% more work for a 60% raise under scientific management. 75

Mass production, as designed by Ford and his associates, was different from Taylor in that it sought to completely redistribute the way in which work was done throughout the factory.

Ford was not concerned with the proper handling of pig-iron by each individual laborer (as was

Taylor in his original study at US Steel), rather Ford wanted to set up a system in which each laborer would do a small portion of the overall task to create an end product that was built in the cheapest, fastest possible manner. Ford’s innovation was not just in the manufacturing process, but also in the simplicity of design in his iconic Model-T. The Model-T was intended to be easy to operate and repair in addition being easy to assemble. Although the Model-T was originally available in a range of colors Ford eventually reduced the number of colors available to black alone, which was selected because it was fast drying and thus did not hold up assembly time.

Unlike Taylor, who sought to make workers more productive, while raising their pay by a mere percentage, Ford’s processes made workers vastly more productive, but did so while more than doubling the wages for some workers. Although the genesis of the $5.00 day remains a matter of some contention, one intended consequence was to provide workers with an incentive to come to work: absenteeism was remarkably high at the Ford Motor Company. Another desired result was an undermining of worker interest in unionizing. Thus, the $5.00 day was predicated upon more than just coming to work and being highly productive. Ford’s desire to make it difficult for union activists to successfully make inroads at his factories was greatly assisted by this doubling of wages. “Henry Ford considered any form of unionism a major threat to the efficiency of his mechanized factory” (Meyer 89). As a result, Ford’s $5.00 day is considered among the greatest management achievements of the last century.

The $5.00 day was predicated upon workers being up to the standards of the Ford

Sociological Department. This meant that workers needed to be successfully Americanized if 76 they were to receive that wage. Unlike Taylor, who was interested in providing incentive for work done “scientifically,” Ford was interested in making certain his workers were good

Americans, free from bad habits such as drinking, gambling, and living in boarding houses. He wanted to make his workers as similar as the cars they built. He wanted Protestant, non-drinking, and hard working men. They should speak English on the job and at home. Harry Bennett,

Ford’s long time bodyguard, stated that Henry Ford “would dream of making over the United

States in his own way: no jails, schools everywhere, water-powered industry decentralized all over the country, and himself there at the top, running it all” (45). At that time in American history, it was common for immigrants to be thought of as needing assistance in catching up to the standards of advanced, Western nations. This line of reasoning was embodied by the racist

“science” of eugenics. Both Ford and Taylor wanted to couch their ideas in scientific terminology by naming the active agent of their endeavors with an enlightened title such as the

“Sociological Department” or, literally, “Scientific Management.” As a result of the stipulations enforced by the “Sociological Department” by Harry Bennett, a surprisingly limited number of workers actually qualified for the $5.00 Day.

GREENFIELD VILLAGE AS NINETEENTH CENTURY SIMULACRUM

With the growing fortune of the Ford Motor Company, Henry began to collect various items of technological fascination. Mr. Ford collected anything from steam engines and locomotives to antique clocks and historic buildings. His collection grew to such a size that over a period of time it necessitated the creation of a museum, which was disparagingly referred to as

Henry’s Attic, and an accompanying village to house all of his artifacts. Greenfield Village, which is America’s first them park and an inspiration to Walt Disney, is home to many of 77

Henry’s prize possessions including Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park complex and a working rail

road. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Greenfield Village is that the Nineteenth Century

lifestyle which Ford created was intended to preserve is that which automobiles were in the

process of destroying. It is, as Heckman says in A Small World (2008), “an eclectic mix of

buildings that conjure up images of an America steeped in nostalgia, even as the nostalgia it

conjures up is that of invention and industrial progress” (15). In this manner, Greenfield Village

represents a simulacrum; it is not the past as it was, but the past as it would be popularly

portrayed. As Baudrillard stated in Simulations (1983), “We are in the logic of simulation which

has nothing to do with a logic of facts and an order of reasons” (31-32). Today, Abe Lincoln’s

Logan County Courthouse is just short walk from the Menlo Park buildings and Henry Ford’s

boyhood home. The Wright Brother’s shop is just around the corner. Ford moved Edison’s

Menlo Park facility to Greenfield Village despite Edison’s desire to have it “remain on New

Jersey soil.” Ford’s conscience was assuaged by the fact he had several railroad cars of New

Jersey soil shipped to Dearborn for Menlo Park to be reconstructed on. Thus, despite it being

hundreds of miles away, Menlo Park rests on New Jersey soil in Dearborn, Michigan.

One portion of Greenfield Village is dedicated to craftworks, where many different types

of craft production take place, from tinsmithing to glassblowing and weaving. This area of

Greenfield Village is meant to represent mid-to-late Nineteenth Century production, whereas just a few streets over there is a 1/5 scale model of The Ford Motor Company’s Mack Avenue plant from which visitors to the Village can catch a ride in a Model-T. Most of the cars running in

Greenfield Village date from 1914 to 1926. Every year there are “improvements” to the village which make it less of a museum and more of an attraction. Ford’s efforts to preserve a slice of the Nineteenth Century are further problematized by the introduction of Model-T rides at 78

Greenfield Village. Ultimately, Ford was trying to capture the essence of something which was being lost under mass production: the spirit of artisans who had the freedom to experiment, to innovate, and to fail.

79

CHAPTER III: TECHNOLOGY AND THE COMMON MAN

The highways were streams of people, and the ditch banks were lines of people. Behind

them more were coming. The great highways streamed with moving people. There in the

Middle- and Southwest had lived a simple agrarian folk who had not changed with

industry, who had not farmed with machines or known the power and danger of machines

in private hands. They had not grown up in the paradoxes of industry. Their senses were

still sharp to the ridiculousness of the industrial life. And then suddenly the machines

pushed them out and they swarmed on the highways. The movement changed them; the

highways, the camps along the road, the fear of hunger and the hunger itself, changed

them.

-Steinbeck, 385

Native White Men began shifting away from defining themselves by their landowning

freedom and independence. Instead they accepted their dependence on capitalists and the

control employers exercised over their lives, and began to define themselves by their

class position as skilled “mechanics” working for better wages under better working

conditions than other people. They became proud of their productivity, which grew with

the growing efficiency of industrial technology, and began using it to define whiteness—

and manhood.

- Pem Davidson Buck, “Constructing Race, Creating White Privilege.” 36

For many people living during the Great Depression journeying westward was a means for finding employment and escaping the crushing poverty which resulted from concurrent economic and environmental disasters. Unfortunately for them, the frontier as a land for homesteading and 80

unbridled opportunity had passed into history more than a generation before. The large numbers of

families, wandering across the American landscape in the 1930s, travelled westward in ramshackle

cars on an interstate highways in search of a legendary past replete with covered wagons, restless

natives, and yellow scarfed cavalry troopers. The main artery stretching from East to West was the

historic Route 66. According to Steinbeck “Highway 66 is the main migrant road. 66—the long

concrete path across the country, waving gently up and down on the map, from the Mississippi to

Bakersfield—over the red lands and the grey lands, twisting up into the mountains, crossing the

desert…is the path of a people in flight, refuges from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of

tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert’s slow northward invasion, from the twisting

winds” (160). In this way, Route 66 carved through harsh landscapes which people, unassisted by technology, were finding increasingly inhospitable.

While the highway allows a rapid migration toward the old frontier, the highway becomes the new frontier in its ability to symbolize freedom of movement and opportunity: A frontier designed by civil engineers and built by concrete finishers. It is a frontier wherever we want it to be. The highway is a technology which goes where you want to go, an emerging frontier with the automobile as its means of actualization. Much like the western frontier which it replaced, it is a fabrication, a socially constructed borderland. For example, the frontier was at one time situated in Kansas, but it later was moved to California and a myriad of places in between. The frontier remained in California until the end of the frontier was announced in the

Turner hypothesis.14 The perils of reaching the frontier in the 1930s were in many ways less

extreme than those which plagued settlers as they moved across the plains in the 1870s. The

threat posed by the elements, hunger, and exploitation were still very real, however, attacks by 81

Native Americans and the general lawlessness of the West was a thing of the past. Despite this, the new migration had its own specific and tellingly modern perils.

INDUSTRIALIZED AGRICULTURE

American Studies pioneer Leo Marx states that “it is difficult to think of a major

American writer upon whom the image of the machine’s sudden appearance is in the landscape has not exercised its fascination” (16). This statement rings true in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, where the landscape is fundamentally altered by machine culture. The paved highway cuts through pastures and small towns leaving those places it does not touch to starve in the absence of commerce. In its own way, the highway is a vehicle for deliverance. It is on the highway that the Joad family passes to what they believe will be the promised land of jobs and prosperity or what Gary Okihiro called “the agrarian ideal of the West” (5). The agrarian expansion in the

Midwest ultimately resulted in the devastation known as The Dust Bowl. Drought in this region was not uncommon, but it was exaggerated by other mitigating factors such as industrialized agriculture during the interwar years.

During this era, the use of tractors and other forms of farming machinery were responsible, to a large extent, for the erosion of land. Also, the farming of land, which was not well suited to agriculture, contributed to high instances of crop failure and catastrophic loss of land which had been plowed despite low levels of topsoil.

The holding up of wheat prices to the dollar level throughout the 1929’s was a

major cause of plowing up of additional hundreds of thousands of acres of pasture lands.

Likewise, the introduction of new power machinery, particularly the tractor and combine

would have itself resulted in a movement of the wheat belt westward because these 82

machines provided a more economical means of production best adapted to the large,

level fields of the Great Plains… the introduction of the tractor and combine provided a

potent stimulus to expansion of farming onto lands not normally suitable for crop

production (Stephens 754).

While it is clear the tractor was used irresponsibly with regard to farming, it could similarly be

argued that the tractor was used as an economic weapon against smaller, less successful farmers

who simply could not compete with the productive capacity of the tractor.

The Grapes of Wrath is the tale of a family of farmers who have lost their land during the

Great Depression. The novel begins just after a bank has repossessed The Joad’s family farm and

their oldest son, Tom, is on his way home from prison. The family home is slated for destruction

by a neighbor, Willy Feeley, who has been hired to operate a bulldozer for that purpose. Willy

Freely, through capturing the favor of the bank, finds an opportunity to better himself despite the

fact his personal betterment facilitates a downward slide into homelessness and poverty for

others within his community. At this time, one of the Joad’s other neighbors reflects that “there’s one thing that got me stumped, an’ that’s Willy Feeley–drivin’ that cat’, an’ gonna be a straw boss on the lan’ his folks used to farm. That worries me. I can see how a fella might come from some other place an’ not know no better, but Willy belongs” (Steinbeck 75). Ultimately Willy uses the bulldozer to knock the Joad’s house off its foundation as a means of demonstrating his new-found power. In this instance, the presence of the tractor on the Joad’s farm is a “sudden and shocking intruder” (Leo Marx) into the Joad’s troubled pastoral lifestyle. Kevin Kelly’s reflection about the misfortune of indigenous people of the Amazon basin is apropos when applied to the behavior of the Joad’s neighbor. “When your forest home is toppled, you are pushed into camps, then towns, and then cities. Once in a camp, cut off from your hunter- 83 gatherer skills, it makes a weird sense to take the only job around, which is cutting down your neighbor’s forest” (87). Similarly, a truck driver at the novel’s opening mentions that many small farmers have been “tractored out” (Steinbeck 12). By virtue of Willy having a job as a straw boss and the recent and total poverty of the Joad’s, Willy sees himself as superior to them socially.

His job gives Willy a great deal of power over the Joad family which he uses in an entirely inhumane manner. “The man sitting in the iron seat did not look like a man; gloved, goggled, rubber dust mask over nose and mouth, he was a part of the monster, a robot in the seat” (48).

Willy has surrendered his humanity and in doing so has become a component of the machine, the face of industrialism.

With the introduction of the dozer, Willy Freely’s humanity is lost. In much the same manner, both farmers and craftsmen were faced with the overt violence of machines as they intruded on the workplace. The Grapes of Wrath uses the undermined pastoral ideal as its starting point. When juxtaposed with pristine landscapes and fertile farm lands “it is industrialization, represented by images of machine technology, that provides the counterforce in the American archetype of the pastoral design” (Marx 26). The machine’s influence is similarly expressed in Willy Freely’s behavior. He has changed from someone who is part of the community, to someone empowered by his position as the operator of a machine. The tractor is a symbol of his authority, but it is also the device through which that authority is actuated. In the parlance of Kevin Kelly, the technium functions through him as he is coopted by technology and works to further the industrialization of agriculture.

The thunder of the cylinders sounded through the country, became one with the

air and the earth, so that the earth and air muttered in sympathetic vibration. The driver

could not control it—straight across the country it went, cutting through a dozen farms 84

and straight back. A twitch at the controls could swerve the cat’, but the monster that sent

the tractor out had somehow got into the driver’s hands, into his brain and muscle, had

goggled him and muzzled his protest… (Steinbeck 48-49).

The preceding description is clearly very different from the traditional agricultural practices that

the Joad’s employed. Given their economic standing the Joads could not have afforded industrial

agricultural equipment on par with the dozer Willy Freely operated. In this way, the Joads were

falling behind the norm of American farming during this period of mechanized agriculture. They

were attempting to maintain a Nineteenth Century farming paradigm during a period of rapid

technological growth. All indications make it clear the Joads were unable to keep pace with

technology as the country moved away from family farms and toward agricultural conglomerates

utilizing modern machinery.

REVOLUTIONARY MECHANICS IN EUROPEAN LITERATURE

Throughout The Grapes of Wrath it is possible to recognize the shifting perception of mechanical skills from the esoteric (inventors working in secrecy), to revolutionary endeavors, (the introduction of mass production), to the mainstream (a car in every garage), before growing mundane and sometimes being co-opted by the inventers and tinkers where they may become esoteric new technologies. Ultimately, these skills move from mystery to mainstream and back again, and are sometimes reconstituted in a revolutionary fashion in the form of luddism and marginally legal technologies. The innovative, rebellious and sometimes reactionary American character is reified though its interaction with technology in the scope of these novels.

Technological skills such as those which were necessary during the Industrial Revolution lost cultural capital as mass production was being realized in popular culture. This trend was not unique 85

to the American experience, rather it was born of a literary conceit which was popular overseas before being co-opted in the United States.

The precedent for revolutionary mechanics (meaning those who have coopted their industrial skill for the purpose of political subversion) can be traced in part to Germinal (1885) by

Emile Zola. Germinal concerns itself primarily with a Nineteenth Century French coal miner strike and the economic conditions which surround it. The novel is significant because it draws together disparate characteristics surrounding the use of technological skill for subversion: the mechanic as savior and saboteur, organizer and agitator, agent of progress and oppositional atavist. Zola weaves a general sense of ambivalence toward machinery and industrialism throughout Germinal despite a tendency to lean toward the assertion that an equitable industrial future is possible if technology is used for the betterment of all humanity rather than to enrich those at the pinnacle of the social strata.

While Germinal is considered to be a great labor novel, its occasional ambivalence underscores the novel’s handling of social injustice. Zola’s characters at times follow their ideologies blindly, despite the inefficacy of their actions. The novel opens with a drifter searching for work. He introduces himself to an old man at a coal mine, telling him “My name is Etienne

Lantier and I am a mechanic.” Etienne is later revealed to have a history of violence. Memories of his turbulent past are rekindled at the mine where he works. “As he stood looking at it [the mine] he thought of himself and the wandering existence of the past week while he had been job-hunting.

He saw himself hitting the foreman in the railway shop and being kicked out of Lille, kicked out of everywhere.” (22). The tendency for a mechanic to be troubled and adrift is part and parcel to subversive archetype. 86

Etienne’s self-identification as a mechanic indicates he has technical skills needed for the

industrial age, but because of hard times in France he is forced to take a job as a coal miner. It is

telling that although Etienne is designated as a mechanic at the novel’s onset he never uses his

mechanical ability during the novel. This lack of actual mechanical work is used to illustrate his

disempowerment due to his status as an outsider, as well as the tough economic conditions of the

times in which he lives. Moreover, Etienne’s titular proclamation suggests that while he can fix

things, he is deprived of the opportunity to do so. The vision of the mechanic oscillates within

Germinal, but so did its function as the revolutionary vanguard in the popular consciousness. Later, literature of the late Twentieth Century would gave birth to the mechanic who corrects societal excesses by breaking its technology. Thus, the mechanic becomes a saboteur or eco-terrorist; a

precedent which is established in Zola’s Germinal by Souvarine, the anarchist engineer who plots

to destroy the mine in which he works. Souvarine is the archetypal Bakuninist who seeks to correct

society’s inequality by destroying its institutions and starting anew.15

Within John Henry MacKay’s The Anarchists (1891), the mechanic acts as a sounding board for the narrator’s revolutionary theories. For example, the narrator of The Anarchists,

Carrard Auban, asserts that individualist anarchism will best serve humanity. Individualist anarchism is defined specifically against Marxist types of anarchist organization. More specifically, according to Auban, non-communal existence allows the greatest possible freedom for the individual. Otto Trupp, the mechanic within The Anarchists, “was a very well-informed and competent mechanic, whose work required good judgment” (40). Otto’s mechanical ability correlates directly with his revolutionary growth. For example, Trupp had been “a fifteen year-old,

neglected boy, without a penny wandering from place to place for two days; he [felt] the ravenous

hunger again” (46). The hunger experienced by Trupp is both literal and figurative. He is starving 87

to be certain, but is also in need, albeit unknowingly, for intellectual sustenance. The next morning

the young Trupp “rose shivering with cold and wholly exhausted from the ground–to ask for work

in the next village [where] he enters a black smith shop. The boss laughs and examines the muscles

of his arm. He can stay, he may sit down to breakfast, a thick tasteless soup, which the journeymen

eat sullenly, but he devours greedily. The others make fun of his hunger; but never had ridicule

disturbed him less. Then, with mad zeal, with burning pleasure and love for all things, he works

and studies” (47). Being a blacksmith’s apprentice fills Trupp’s need for sustenance, but also

makes possible his intellectual growth while simultaneously providing the means for him to travel

and spread his revolutionary message. After becoming a follower of the Russian anarchist Makhail

Bakunin, Trupp “journeys from city to city. Everywhere he tries to undermine the existing order of

things. He has no common interests, feelings, or inclinations, no property, not even a home.

Everything in him is denounced by a single, exclusive interest, a single thought, a single passion–

the revolution”(49). This freedom of movement was made all easier by the skills that he

possessed.16

In Sholokov’s Nobel Prize winning novel about the Russian Revolution, And Quiet Flows

the Don (1928), the mechanic as revolutionary is used repeatedly to illustrate the relationship of

industrial workers to socialist revolt. “From the beginning, Soviet culture was oriented toward, at

times obsessed with, mechanization and technology...Lenin and the Bolshevik leadership dreamed

of transforming the USSR into an industrialized, smokestack-and-factory society. Soviet engineers spent much of the 1920’s infatuated with the production techniques of Henry Ford and the time motion studies of Frederick Taylor” (McCannon 154). In this manner industrialization functions in tandem with the overthrow of the Czarist monarchy. As a result of this industrial infatuation there are several workers who function with revolutionary intent in And Quiet Flows the Don. One of 88

them, Bunchuk, is a “Russianized Cassock. He lived in Moscow as an ordinary worker, but he’s

interested in the question of machinery. He’s a first rate machine-gunner too.” (236). It is important

to note here that the Cassocks were “a special force of mounted troops used by the last few tsars to

break up strikes and quell revolutionary disturbances” (Thompson 20). The transformation of the

Cassocks from Tsarist guards to Marxist revolutionaries is a significant one; from tradition to

modernity, from monarchy to Marxism. Bunchuk also works at “the armament works at Tula”

(238), which, no doubt, was the site of heavy industry and thus symbolizes the marriage of industry

and state sponsored violence. When his would-be lover, Anna, tells him that she would not consecrate their love because to do so would divert energy from the revolution, Bunchuck opens the door of the train in which they are riding and watches the steam and smoke blow by while listening to “the incessant roar of the engine” (480). In this sequence, the engine acts as a metaphor for the revolution and as such is indifferent to their love. It moves forward despite their personal needs and desires. At this point in the novel, the lovers are more concerned with the revolution’s progress then they are with their relationship to each other. At the novel’s conclusion, it is the mechanic who is willing to spill blood in the name of revolution stating, ‘“At the enemies of the revolution’ –A wave of his revolver. ‘Fire!’” (492). The mechanic assumes a position of being the most heavily vested in the revolutionary process and is, consequently, the most zealous.

MECHANICAL SKILLS AND WANDERLUST

The wanderlust of mechanics signified a yearning for a return to the freedom inherent in marketable skills which were not tied a specific geography. Revolutionary mechanics were mechanical workers freed from the bonds of industry. Technological skills allowed the free movement of a craftsperson from city to city, one job to the next. The ability to move to different 89

places and find work stood in opposition to unskilled factory workers who may be tied to a

specific location. As a result, freewheeling trades-people were freed from the factory. In Jack

Conroy’s novel, The Disinherited, the protagonist, Larry Donovan, travels the county by way of the railroad. And in many ways he follows a model which was developed by European authors of the late Nineteenth Century.

For all intents and purposes, The Disinherited conforms to the usual leftist trope of the abused worker who learns a revolutionary ideology and subsequently fights to elevate those within his class. Interestingly, in this particular instance this novel is a semi-autobiographical account of Conroy’s life rather than a work of fiction. Conroy trained as a mechanic for the railroad and also worked “at Willys-Overland in Toledo and the Ford plant in Detroit. [As such he was] poised between the workers’ world and his own literary education” (Conroy 21). He apprenticed under a master mechanic with the intent of becoming a master car repairman in the

Wabash Railroad car shops and began his apprenticeship at 13 years old. Conroy was influenced by the dime novels of the early Twentieth Century. In Douglas Wixson’s 1991 introduction to

The Disinherited, he cites Michael Denning as saying, “These tales spring from the condition of dispossession; the main characters are tramps and outlaws produced by economic depression and strikes after the civil war” (20). When faced with similar circumstances Conroy was attempting, if only to a small degree, to emulate the figures from the books of his childhood. As such,

Conroy’s life and work approaches the ideal of the mechanic as revolutionary.

Douglas Wixson, in his introduction to The Disinherited, states that “it explicitly reveals aspects of the workers’ life rarely dealt with in fiction; what the daily grind of the job is like, the monotony, how a machine works and how to handle it” (28).17 Wanting to escape the life of a

coal miner, the novel’s narrator, Larry Donovan, has an interview as a railroad mechanic’s 90

apprentice, where, “after I had served my time, I’d have a trade at good wages” (80). It is not a

coincidence that Larry works as a mechanic on the railroad as opposed to other industries. As

Leo Marx states in The Machine in the Garden, “the locomotive, associated with fire, smoke, speed, iron, and noise, is the leading symbol of the new industrial power” (87). Both The

Disinherited and The Iron Heel acknowledge the power and significance of the railroad in

creating a new way of seeing the world, of collapsing space and time as the rails allowed the

world to speed by. The train was both a signifier of industrial power and a symbol of the future.

In Jack London’s The Iron Heel there is a train called “The Twentieth Century [which] rushed on

like a sullen thunderbolt through the grey pall of advancing day” (174). In this context the train is

the machine age on wheels. It is the inevitability of a future driven by technology.

The Iron Heel is Jack London’s socialist tract about resistance to a totalitarian state.

Sedition functions to establish a more equitable state than the capitalist oligarchy known, rather

comically, as The Iron Heel. The novel is centered largely on the exploits of a revolutionary

leader named Ernest Everhard who is responsible for co-coordinating a “second revolt” against

the totalitarian regime. Ernest’s “neck was the neck of a prize fighter, thick and strong. [He was

a] social philosopher and ex-horseshoer” (3). Like Otto Trupp of John Henry MacKay’s The

Anarchists, Ernest is powerfully built and has trained as a blacksmith. Furthermore, the novel

critiques early industrial systems and the manner in which society moved from agrarian labor to

manufacturing. For example, Everhard’s position as a horseshoer was undermined by the demise

of the old system of production.18

With the introduction of machinery and the factory system in the latter part of the

Eighteenth Century, the great mass of the working people was separated from the

land. The old system of labor was broken down. The working people were driven 91

from their villages and herded in. The mothers and children were put to work at the

new machines...it was a tale of blood (19).

Unlike the pro-industrial enthusiasm exhibited in later novels such as And Quiet Flows the

Don, The Iron Heel embraces technology as a means of liberating the worker, but does so with

various caveats. The Soviet tendency to view technology as an essential element of revolution

stands in contrast to the early American antipathy toward industrialization. According to Leo

Marx, early resistance toward industrialism resulted from the American belief that land ownership

was essential to being free. By extension, if people were taken off of the land, then their ability to

be free would be highly compromised. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson was initially opposed to the

industrialization of the United States because he felt that class divisions would develop if

Americans became a nation of employers and employees. “If the pristine landscape of Virginia is

conducive to the nurture of democratic values, think of what happens to men in the European

terrain, with its dark, crowded cities, its gothic ruins, and crowded workshops” (Marx 138).

Similarly, Jack London’s statement that “no one today is a free agent. We are all caught up in the

wheels and cogs of the industrial machine” (21) strikes a chord which mirrors the warnings of

Jefferson.19 Nevertheless, The Iron Heel leans toward a positive view of progress.

Within The Iron Heel, the industrial system exploits workers and results in the loss of traditional life ways. Even those who have conservative economic and political views in this novel are willing to point out the manner in which the system takes what it wants from the workers to benefit the owners solely. Nevertheless, the workers in The Iron Heel still manage to maintain the belief that through seizing the industrial apparatus they can improve their standard of living and enjoy the fruits of their labor. Like many other characters in this novel, Ernest refers to the conditions of humanity in technological terms and his revolutionary plan includes altering the 92

oligarchy’s infrastructure. “We intend to take...all the mines, and railroads, and factories, and banks, and stores…we are all caught up in the wheels and cogs of the industrial machine” (31).

This passage calls to mind Thorstein Veblen (a contemporary of London) who stated in 1904, that

“the machine throws out anthropomorphic habits of thought [it] gives no insight into questions of good and evil, merit and demerit, except in point of material causation, nor into the foundations or the constraining force of law and order” (42). Thus, for Veblen the industrial system lacks a moral

imperative. This idea that technology is driven by human needs, vice, greed, and virtue is form of

social construction which stands in steep contrast to technological determinism.

The Iron Heel uses the term “mechanic” to holistically represent the industrial class. For

example, when discussing how the oligarchy views a highly privileged lawyer who they seek to

motivate, it is stated that a lawyer is “situated the same as the unlettered mechanics” (34).

Ultimately, it is concluded that even those who run the industrial infrastructure are “bound to the

machine, but that they were so bound to it that they sat on top of it” (39). In the world of The Iron

Heel, people determine the manner in which technology is used, but are tied to it no matter what

their circumstances. In this way, technology is situated in uncomfortable symbiosis with humanity:

a tether to humankind when it is misused and a boon to the masses when it is used for their benefit.

THE RAILROAD AND MODERNITY

During the period just prior to The Iron Heel, competing railroad lines allowed

manufactured goods to be taken from the cities to the expanding countryside with far greater speed

and regularity then they had in the past. In his exploration of corporate ontogeny, The

Incorporation of America, Alan Trachtenberg states “Penetrating the West with government

encouragement, the railroad and the telegraph opened the vast spaces to production” (20). The 93 potential for growing emerging markets necessitated an increase in the development of production.

Prior to the development of mass production, Detroit functioned as an industrial center, making products such as iron stoves available to the West, but also (and perhaps most notably) produced many of the railroad cars in which these products were shipped around the country. “Throughout the decade [1890’s] railroad car makers were the city’s largest employers” (Smith and Featherstone

17). Agriculture in the West experienced increased crop yields in order to afford industrial commodities from the East. A consequence of this was that agricultural and industrial processes were “overmortgaged, over capitalized [and] overmechanized” (Trachtenberg 21). Trade increased in both directions; from city to countryside, from farm to factory. The latter consequences of introducing industrial agricultural processes is illustrated by the plight of the Joads in Steinbeck’s

The Grape of Wrath. Much like their industrial counterparts in the urban centers, these farmers were “controlled by private corporations” (Trachtenberg 21) who sought to displace farmers and assimilate their farms into increasing larger agricultural conglomerates.

The development of industry in the United States and the changing nature of frontier are part and parcel to the unique status of American revolutionary mechanics. Prior to the Great

Depression, the mechanic was esteemed enough to influence politics largely because their trade embodied the promise of modernity. Due to a growing socialist sentiment and ongoing efforts toward unionization in the United States, the mechanic functioned as an ongoing signifier of social change. In Depression Era literature, characters like Tom Joad utilized superior mechanical skills to attain a uniquely materialist epiphany of oppression in American society.

Tom, the novel’s revolutionary character and the most accomplished technician in their mechanized caravan, assists his family as they flee the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma toward the orchards of California. Tom’s mechanical skills are illustrated after discovering that an engine’s 94 main bearing needed to be replaced in an automobile, Tom’s brother Al looks to his mother, saying “I’m sure glad Tom’s here. I never fitted no bearing” (Steinbeck 226). Tom learned mechanical repair while he was in McAlister Prison. Without Tom the repair would not have been possible and his family’s journey would have taken a very different trajectory.

Despite an ongoing division between skilled and unskilled industrial workers the mechanic still managed to wield power in the popular conscious as a symbol of modernity in the early

Twentieth Century. The power inherent in understanding technology was not a new phenomenon, it had been germinating since the period of the American Revolution. Richard Brown’s Major

Problems in the Era of the American Revolution, 1760-1791 (2000) illustrates an early historical instance of mechanics wielding mechanical and political power simultaneously.

At some point in the 1770’s, as conservative elites challenged their right to a

voice in public affairs, ‘mechanics’ began to wear that term as a badge of pride. In

New York and Philadelphia there were ‘mechanic’ political tickets and

Committees of Mechanics. By the mid-1780’s in New York they formed a

General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen (the title bridging old and new

usage). In Boston, The Association of Tradesmen and Manufactures, a body with

delegates from the various other trades, addressed to ‘their brethren, the

mechanics’ in other cities, asking them to join in a campaign for protection of

American manufacturers. The emblem of the New Yorkers, adopted by societies

in other cities, was an upright brawny arm holding a hammer, with a slogan ‘By

Hammer and Hand All Arts Do Stand,’ a bold assertion of the primacy of the

mechanic arts. Mechanics unquestionably became an influence in political life;

they knew it, and political leaders knew it (502). 95

David Roediger expressed very similar thoughts concerning the same period in American

history. “As a term mechanic carried negative connotations before American revolutionary

movement began, describing ‘low workmen’ and ‘mean’ or even ‘servile’ workers. But as

Howard Rock put it, “For the mechanic the Revolution catalyzed previous economic and political gains into a new and prideful sense of being active participants in the creation of a new republic” (33). However, this was all long before Tom Joad, the Dust Bowl, and the Great

Depression. By the time Tom Joad arrived on the scene, the concept of mechanic as revolutionary had reached its zenith and was on its way back to being a menial, albeit skilled, type of work. Because of the essential nature of this tinker and inventor to our national identity,

Tom still had the means to insight feelings of freedom.20 Tom was an anachronism of sorts; an

archetype which many Americans at the time would have recognized as being lost from our

national character.

TECHNOLOGY AND THE DUST BOWL

The Grapes of Wrath is John Steinbeck’s novel about the plight of the Joad family, and

their forced westward migration during a precipitous failure of the American economy: The Great

Depression. In many ways this novel articulates proletariat themes extant in Jack Conroy’s The

Disinherited. The Joads are among the best known representations of the people known as the

Okies. Drought in Oklahoma was not uncommon, but it had worsened due to other mitigating

factors such as over-farming and the mechanization of agriculture during the period just prior to

the Dust Bowl.21 The use of tractors and other forms of farming machinery exacerbated the erosion of topsoil on the great plains. Similarly, the farming of land which was unsuitable for that purpose contributed to high instances of crop failure. While the Great Depression affected the entire United 96

States, it was no accident Steinbeck used the central plains as the point of origin for The Grapes of

Wrath. “The heartland’s location in the middle of the country is more than a geographical phenomenon; it is metaphorical. It is all American, because it is the sum and average of the nation”

(Okihiro 12). While Steinbeck was being true to the geography of the Dust Bowl, by starting his book in the Midwest, he could appeal to the largest number of Americans.

Farming equipment is occasionally portrayed as weaponry within The Grapes of Wrath.

“The tractor does two things—it turns the land and turns us off the land. There is little difference between a tractor and a tank” (Steinbeck 205). Furthermore, the tractor not only destroys the land, but it is also used early in the novel to destroy the Joad’s family farm. In discussing progress in his essay “Does Technology Mean Progress,” Leo Marx speaks specifically about “the development of radically improved machinery” (5). As machines grew more powerful, so did their ability to displace workers who were performing similar types of work manually. William Haviland, in his introductory Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology (1975) elaborated on the expansion of agriculture and the increased primacy of mechanized agriculture. “Up until about 1950, growth in the world’s food supply came almost entirely from expanding the amount of cultivated land. Since then, it has come increasingly from the high-energy inputs of…fuel to run tractors and other mechanical equipment” (510). Unfortunately for the Joads, access to farming technology is denied to them as a result of their compromised economic status.22 In a world where “tractor engines transformed the productivity and spread of agriculture” (Kelly 38), the Joads simply could not keep up. Conversely, transportation technology is available to them, albeit in the form of a jalopy.

Tom’s social class is a factor throughout The Grapes of Wrath. Tom’s ability to periodically resurrect their Hudson Super Six automobile is derived from Tom’s experience in prison (itself a “white trash” signifier). At the novels onset, Tom has just returned from prison for 97 killing a man in self-defense. Leo Marx stated that “as in Walden, Moby-Dick or Huckleberry

Finn, the journey begins with a renunciation. The hero gives up his place in society and withdraws toward nature” (69). In contrast to Marx’s idealized vision of the outsider, Tom Joad leaves his place outside of society (prison) in order to rejoin his family not in nature, but on a mechanized odyssey. When Tom returns to the pasture he finds it is nearly gone. Tom was ostracized from his farm to the prison, then from the prison to farm, and ultimately from the farm to the road.

Fortunately for him, Tom arrives just days before the family leaves for California after being forced off their property, otherwise he would have missed them altogether.

In speaking of the Nineteenth Century, David Roediger stated, a ‘“Mechanic consciousness’ united masters and journeymen in the belief that those who produced, and especially those who produced useful commodities deserved respect, full citizenship, value for their work and a measure of social power. Mechanics now claimed respect as ‘men professing an intelligent art’ and as intelligent citizens” (Roediger 33). However, this was no longer true during the Great Depression because mechanical work was seen less as the work of skilled artisans and more as a common occupation.

Before the Joads set out on their journey to California, Tom’s father comments that the car his son Al selected, a Hudson Super Six, is a good one. Tom’s father had previously stated Al was really the best person for selecting an automobile because, “‘Al is the only automobile fella here.’ [To which Tom responded] ‘I know some. Worked some in McAlester’” (138). The

Hudson appears to be up to the task despite its appearance. At this early point in the novel, Al’s mechanical prowess is sufficient to the task of selecting a decent automobile. However, as the novel progresses Al’s mechanical abilities grow less and less suited to the demands placed on 98

them. By contrast Tom’s mechanical abilities take on increasing significance as his prowess with

machines is revealed to be essential for their journey. 23

Despite early assurances that Tom’s brother Al possesses sufficient mechanical

competence to get his family across the country, Al’s automotive prowess proves less than sound

as the novel progresses. For example, the Wilsons are a family who travel with the Joads for a

time: unfortunately for them, Al neglects to maintain the proper level of crankcase oil in their

touring car. As a result, one of the connecting rods attritions under the strain and needs to be

replaced in order for the Wilsons’ engine to function. Connecting rods are integral to the

operation of any internal combustion engine. They connect the piston to the crankshaft inside the

cylinder where power is generated where power is transmitted from the engine. A broken

connecting rod is a catastrophic engine failure, which often results in the engine being scrapped.

After Tom miraculously fixes the badly damaged engine, his brother, Al, admits that it is

Tom, the novel’s revolutionary character, who is the most accomplished technician in their

mechanized caravan. After discovering that a main bearing (another essential component) needs

to be replaced in the motor, Al looks to his mother, saying “I’m sure glad Tom’s here. I never

fitted no bearing” (226). Tom Joad is the dominant mechanic and as such situates himself as the

alpha male of the family. “Dominant male masculinites tend to present themselves in the register

of the real, eschewing the performative and the artificial” (Halberstam 266). Thus, while Al is

allegedly the person who can make the Joad’s trip a reality, the mantle of mechanical

competence proves evanescent as his brother asserts actual hands-on technical ability in adverse situations.

Interestingly, the Joad’s Hudson Super Six, despite its worsened condition in The Grapes of Wrath, was a high performance automobile at the time it was manufactured. The Super Six 99 engine was designed to deal with vibration and friction (the sort which likely caused the failure of the Wilson’s inferior main bearing) by utilizing a balanced and symmetrical crankshaft. An automobile’s crankshaft transmits power from the pistons to the flywheel and then on to the transmission. The Hudson Super Six was a fairly inexpensive car which produced more than double the horsepower of other comparable priced cars. Its superior drive train innovations gave it a decided advantage in the automotive market. Furthermore the Hudson Super Six was reliable, powerful and easy to maintain compared to comparable vehicles at the time.

While on the road, Tom saves the both time and money by doing various repairs, thus making it possible for the Joads and Wilsons to continue westward. Without Tom’s mechanical ability, he would not have been able to make the journey and subsequently westward, he would not have had his revolutionary epiphany. Thus Tom’s mechanical skills are directly related to his development as a revolutionary. While mechanical skills are celebrated in The Grapes of Wrath, machines are typically seen as malign and unreliable. As is the case of Willy Freely’s tractor, machines are occasionally portrayed as weapons within the book.

Tom Joad learned about diagnosing and repairing machines in McAlester Prison. Like many great revolutionaries, Tom Joad had spent time locked up. When asked about what put him in prison Tom states, “I killed a guy in a fight. We was drunk at a dance. He got a knife in me, an’ I killed him with a shovel that was layin’ there. Knocked his head plumb to squash” (35).

Tom was discouraged from reading books, particularly books about the government or prison system during his four years at McAlester. Tom’s lack of education, his status as a felon, and the fact he is a good roadside mechanic all point to his lowly social class and the failure, to some extent, of his white privilege. More specifically, since whiteness often symbolizes middle class affluence and is typically indicative of a middle class education, which Tom clearly lacks. Tom 100

recounts the warden’s secretary telling him “for God’s sake don’t read...you’ll jus’ get messed up

worse, an’ for another you won’t have no respect for the guys that work the gover’ments” (75).

The message in this passage is anything but opaque. While in prison Tom learned an industrial

trade, but was dissuaded from reading anything which might make him uncomfortable as

industrial laborer within the capitalist system. Whether by accident or design the warden’s

secretary was attempting to keep the prison population uninformed and servile.

After leaving prison, Tom was stigmatized by his felony and his new profession, and like

so many of his generation he was forced off the farm and into industrial labor. While it is true

that Tom learned to turn wrenches in the big house, most mechanical training at the time

occurred in the factory under the mass production system. For those few who did receive

apprenticeships, they were conducted in a fairly conventional manner within the “skilled trades”

subset of industrial workers, such as millwrights, electricians and machine repair technicians in

mass production facilities.

Tom’s advanced technical skills manifest at various points throughout The Grapes of

Wrath. For example, while doing the complicated main bearing repair on the road, Tom’s mechanical expertise is reveled as he narrates the complicated repair he has been asked to perform.

“‘Here, roll in under here an’ grab a-holt. I’ll tap her loose. Then you turn that bolt an’ I turn out my end, an’ we let her down easy. Careful that gasket. See, she comes off in one piece. They’s only four cylinders to these ol’ Dodges. I took one down one time. Got main bearings big as a cantaloupe. Now—let her down hold it. Reach up an’ pull down that gasket where it’s stuck easy now. There!’” (234). Tom’s heroic ability to repair machines in this setting sets the stage for his desire to correct the ills of society. In this manner, his technical prowess parallels the revulsion that he feels toward injustice. 101

The following passage illustrates the manner in which the machine age is written on

Tom’s body in The Grapes of Wrath. “He pulled the cotter pins and put his wrench on a bearing

bolt. He strained and the wrench slipped. A long gash appeared on the back of his hand. Tom

looked at it—the blood flowed easily from the wound and met the oil and dripped into the pan”

(234). A result the cut on Tom’s hand is that it was “bleedin’ like a son-of-a-bitch,” (235).

Injuries such as these allow others to identify him as a man who works with his hands. In this

way, he is performing the role of a mechanic by possessing signs (in the semiotic sense) of that

trade. As Michel Foucault argues in Discipline and Punish (1997), “the modeling of the body

produces a knowledge of the individual, the apprenticeship of the techniques induces modes of

behavior and the acquisition of skills is inextricably linked with the establishment of power

relations” (294-295). There is the power relation of Tom to the machine, and the machine to

revolution in The Grapes of Wrath. Tom is literally scarred from the experience of traveling

westward. It is a bloodletting which reveals the perils of living in technological symbiosis. It is

significant that Tom is wounded both while repairing a machine and later while avenging his

friend’s death at the novel’s conclusion. In both instances, Tom was trying to correct a wrong;

fixing his friend’s car in one instance and avenging the murder of his companion by the police.

On each occasion Tom spills his blood, he moves closer to his revolutionary epiphany. Bodily

disfigurement reveals an essential quality of Tom’s character; his willingness to submit to bodily

sacrifice in the assistance of others reveals he is blood brothers with the machine.

Clock time clashes with modernity in the pages of The Grapes of Wrath. The cyclical time of life on the farm contrasts with the seemingly endless stretches of time spent on the road.

Bursts of work found intermittently as itinerant workers picking fruit in California stands in stark contrast to the “normal” cycle of seasons spent on the farm planting and growing. Unlike the 102

men working in the clockwork universe of mass production, Tom renders himself less than

interchangeable with other men as a result of his cuts and scars.24 After his fight with the police,

Tom stands out as a criminal outsider.

In David Roediger’s exploration of the working class in the United States during the mid-

Nineteenth Century, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working

Class (1991), he states that in the Nineteenth Century, “there was a tendency to conflate terms

like freeman or independent mechanic with white” (21). Tom’s skills as a mechanic are

illustrated as he explains what needs to be done to repair the engine. ‘“Well, we got to tear the

pan off an’ get the rod out, an’ we got to get a new part an’ hone her an’ shim her an’ fit her.

Good day’s job. Got to go back to that las’ place for a part…We ain’t got the tools to make it

easy. Gonna be a job’” (Steinbeck 227). Replacing the connecting rod bearing is obviously no

simple task and Tom, unlike Al, possesses a service manual’s knowledge of the disassembly,

repair and assembly needed for this complicated task. Tom then disassembles the motor using

only a “monkey wrench an’ pliers” (232) saying later that he “wisht I had a crescent wrench”

which is adjustable and far better suited for automotive repair than a plumber’s monkey wrench.

Such a repair would be difficult outside, next to the road, presumably with very little light to help

you see the underbody of the car even if he had all the appropriate tools for the job. Steinbeck

wants the reader to be aware of the intense difficulties faced by Tom in doing this repair and the

Herculean effort needed to accomplish the task. Tom can repair machines using inadequate tools

under difficult conditions with only the knowledge he gleaned in prison to guide him.

RACE AND CLASS 103

As both a mechanic and a farmer, Tom encapsulates the Marxist dream of a marriage

between labor and agriculture. Tom Joad has an instinct for both altruism and violence which he

visits on those who oppose him. As a white man he is privileged by his race, but he is without

land or prospects for bettering himself and thus embodies the down and out Okies of the 1930s.

“We don’t mention the whiteness of the white people we know…the invisibility of whiteness as

a racial position in white (which is to say dominant) discourse is of a piece with its ubiquity”

(Dyer 540-541). The large blue bruise on Tom’s face, after being stuck by the police, may be the novel’s only overt recognition of Tom’s light complexion. Richard Dyer’s examination of “The

Matter of Whiteness” as a system of racial imagery adds important clues to the significance of

Tom Joad as a white man. Tom is seen as someone who is only vaguely normal: he is a convicted felon, the victim of an uncommon disaster: the era of the Dust Bowl and the Great

Depression. Within The Grapes of Wrath, there is no need to mention that the Joads are white, because they were seen as “normal country folk” during the interwar years. This is, in part,

because there was, and perhaps still is, “the assumption that white people are just people” (Dyer

540). In some respects, Tom Joad is a man with a complicated past and few prospects for the future. As a flawed visionary, convicted of murder, Tom is utterly fallible and completely human. Nevertheless, within the scope of the novel, Tom is a messianic character who expresses the ability to lead others toward a better future. To perform this role, he must be someone who both workers and farmers can relate to, someone the common person can get behind, but most of all, to be successful as a symbol of overcoming oppression in the mainstream, 1930’s mind he must be white.

As film studies scholar Richard Dyer states “Racial Imagery is central to the organization of the modern world” (Dyer 539). Tom’s social standing as a dirt poor Midwestern farmer with a 104 gift for repairing machines, functions to illustrate a partial negation of his white privilege. Tom embodies the popular image of a poor, landless, felon. However, despite this, he simultaneously holds the promise of social remediation through his industrious character and tendency for helping others. The modalities surrounding Tom’s race and class play an important role in the actions he performs and the manner in which those actions will be perceived.

While he was incarcerated, Tom acquired the skills to provide his family with a greater measure of freedom and mobility. Tom is a man in tune with the machine as he develops a self- image predicated on fighting for the common man. The coveted economic mobility encapsulated in the American Dream grows more and more remote as the Joads travel across the country. Tom explains his germinating concern for the existing social order to his mother when she visits him in an earthen cave where he is hiding. “Ma. I’ve been thinkin’ a hell of a lot, thinkin’ about our people livin’ like pigs, an’ the good rich lan’ layin’ fallow, or maybe one fella with a million acres, while a hunderd thousan’ good farmers is stavin’. An’ I been wonderin’ if all our folks got together an’ yelled, like them fellas yelled…”(571). Tom entered the cave as a criminal on the run for a revenge killing and in an elemental turn of events emerged with thoughts of vindicating those who are starving in world’s most industrialized nation.

Despite Tom’s assurances to the contrary, his mother is concerned their family will not be able to find him after he flees from the police. Tom, sporting an increasingly messianic self- image, Tom tells her he can be found “everywhere–wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there is a cop beatin’ a guy, I’ll be there”(571).

Throughout his trip out West, his endeavors on the road, and his injuries he has realized the essence of his nature: he is a revolutionary bent on defending the weak through the use of superior violence. When Ma Joad asks Tom if he intendeds to kill, in the name of social change, 105

Tom replies, “I been thinkin’, long as I’m a outlaw anyways, maybe I could” (572). In this way,

endeavoring on future acts of violent retribution is an idea which is open to Tom and serves to

further differentiate him from civilized, mainstream society.

The Joads are capable only of getting menial employment and are paid substantially less

than they need to survive. As a result, Tom’s experiences on the road lead him to a fundamental

mistrust of capitalism. Tom, in his role as a revolutionary, will try to undermine the capitalist

system which privileges whiteness (or fails to do so in the case of his family) in 1930s America.

Indeed, having failed to fully realize the privilege of his whiteness has left Tom with little to

lose. Being homeless, penniless, and often jobless, means the Joads have failed to accurately

perform white privilege. By contrast, the failure to perform whiteness means they have

successfully performed the stereotype of “white trash.” The concept of white trash is useful in

deconstructing whiteness by illustrating what an absence of that privilege looks like. Through

being identified as white trash, they no longer are perceived as having what it takes to match the

standards of mainstream white society.

Tom’s abilities as a roadside mechanic (itself a white trash signifier) would normally

manifest as an opportunity for a productive vocation, but in this instance that skill ultimately

results in his family’s demise. Tom’s skills are trumped by a rigid class system which is driven

by the dire financial times in which they live. The late John Warren’s Performing Purity:

Whiteness, Pedagogy and the Reconstitution of Power (2003) asserts that whiteness is

established via a series of reiterative acts which constitute identity over a period of time. “The

raced body as a performative accomplishment depends on the repetitiousness of acts, for it is in

the repeated nature that identities become normalized” (Warren 30). Thus, through the repetition of job loss, automotive breakdowns, roadside burials, and sundry indignities, the Joad’s establish 106 their white trash identity. In this manner, the privilege of whiteness and its subsequent negation are illustrated in The Grapes of Wrath.

According to Warren’s assertions, the performance of whiteness is self-regulated, evaluated, and modified by the reactions of an individual’s peers. The Joad’s poverty represents a failure to accurately perform whiteness because they have not taken full advantage of the economic privilege inherent in whiteness; i.e., access to loans, gainful occupations, and so on.

Therefore, a failure to perform whiteness, which derives from, and sometimes results in, poverty may be central to who is or is not viewed as white trash. “Words with metaphorical power like

‘white’ and ‘black’ carry vast ideological weight…the symbol of whiteness connotes purity, cleanliness, and goodness, while images of blackness (white’s metaphorical opposite) suggest deviancy, evil and pollution” (Warren 45). In this instance, whiteness, as a symbol of purity, is negated by the qualifier of “trash.” This begs the question of how can something be both filthy and pure. For those possessing non-stigmatized privileged whiteness, white trash is a way for mainstream America to say “you are with us, but not of us.” Thus a person, family, or segment of the population may fit into the ethnic milieu of whiteness, but nevertheless fail to live up to the accepted performance of whiteness.

Within the scope of The Grapes of Wrath, white trash is broadly defined set of stereotypes including joblessness, poverty, and transience. White trash represents a near failure or disintegration of the privilege surrounding whiteness, representing instead “the cracks, the gaps in the machinery of whiteness…[in] the logic of whiteness” (Warren 9). Because of his status as a felon, Tom Joad is largely disempowered and must assist his family through acting as the mechanical juggernaut behind his family’s westward journey. 107

During the period after losing their farm, the Joads are forced to work for wages24 as

opposed to working for themselves. In speaking of the early Nineteenth Century when the term white trash first came into being, historian of race and the working classes, David Roediger, states that “native-born whites had come to be increasingly concentrated on the single category of wage labor. While this dependency was sometimes defined metaphorically as ‘wage slavery’, it could also be seen in republican terms as temporary [similarly] the cultural expectation that working for wages was a stage of life rather than a permanent condition persisted as it became a permanent condition for many workers, it was seen as ‘wage slavery’” (56). Simply being employed (rather than being an employer) was often enough to deny a person the economic means for upward mobility. Inherent in the American dream is the idea that a person’s social status can be overcome with hard work.

MASCULINITY

Tom has the go-it-alone, do-it-yourself mentality of the American revolutionary or what

Denning calls “artisan republicanism” (Denning 103). Men tend to tie their identity to their work in

American society. In his sociological investigation of trucker culture, Lawrence Ouellet states that

“Men learn social scripts that describe masculinity, and the world of work is the major institutional arena for acting out this script” (101). For Tom Joad the potentially emasculating experience of being jobless was ameliorated to a large extent by his ability to fix machinery and empower his family’s westward journey. His mechanical skills were acquired in the hyper-masculine space of the penitentiary. The ability to repair machinery helps restore Tom’s self-esteem and is an immediate and observable means for the Joads to acknowledge his worth. In this manner, fixing machines functions as a sort of revolutionary virtue. 108

Steinbeck’s previous success as a novelist helps to illustrate that The Grapes of Wrath was written for a large, mainstream audience which sets it apart from the working class novels which Michael Denning evaluated in Mechanic Accents. Denning states “the bulk of the audience of dime novels were workers – craftworkers, factory operatives, domestic servants, and domestic workers – and that the bulk of the workers’ reading was sensational fiction” (27). In his essay, Work and Culture in American Studies (2002), Denning asserts the need for a work centered approach to the study of culture. Unfortunately, he puts forth what is quite assuredly a post-deskilling dichotomy of mental and physical labor. “The unity and division between mental and manual labor is the starting point of any labor theory of culture. Of course, we are more aware of their separation than their unity, since, as Braverman argued, ‘the separation of hand and brain is the most decisive single step taken in the division of labor by the capitalist mode of production’” (433). American Proletariat literature of the 1920’s and 1930’s stood in contrast to this alleged separation between hand and mind wherein industrial workers often functioned as revolutionaries and as such represented a working class manifestation of the intellectual vanguard. Tom was an example of a worker who melded “mental and manual labor” (Denning

434) during the Great Depression. Tom Joad was radical enough to appeal to socialists, but was also honest and hard-working enough for the average American citizen to recognize as personifying their ideals. Indeed, for all but the most affluent farmers, turning wrenches was a necessary part of maintaining their both their equipment and way of life, and fighting for what is right is seen as an American virtue.

Like the factory ship which forces itself into the landscape of Melville’s Moby Dick, the machines of The Grapes of Wrath are charged with ambivalence, promise and peril. Within the scope of this study, the spirit of revolution is revealed through the use and maintenance of 109

technology. In Tom Joad there is the reversal of mass production. He exhibits an elevated

intimacy with the machine rather than an alienation from it. Instead of having the exact

equipment needed to do a job (as was the case with dedicated machines and the semi-skilled technicians who operated them on Ford’s assembly lines) Tom utilizes very general tools in very specific repair instances. While the assembly line’s essence is speed, when the Joads are on the road they appear to exist in a space beyond clock time, occupying an endless expanse of waste, loss, and endless miles. If mass production is all about taking worker’s skill out of the production process, then Tom’s roadside repairs place him (and by virtue of that, humanity) back into the equation. Because of this, it is clear that Tom has a very different relationship to his automobile than the assemblers who produced it. The assembly line can be understood as the meta-machine with its own drives, its own pulse, appetites, and waste. It is a machine for making machines wherein human beings function like digestive enzymes, assimilating materials and resources.

The Grapes of Wrath is the reversal of a Horatio Alger story. It is the failure of the

American Dream. However, technology offers a dubious brand of salvation. At the story’s onset

Tom is nearly left behind and it is his younger brother who is initially viewed as their primary mechanic. Tom’s skills as a disciplined mechanic are revealed as he travels westward in their jalopy, but unfortunately there is no longer a frontier with boundless expanses of land and opportunity to which the family can escape. Like seeds on hard currents, these people float across the western United States, uncertain where they might land and if they will ever take root.

The flowers born of them were wildly varied, but in these cases they bloomed with revolution and dissent.

While in prison, Tom learned the discipline of machine repair while he was being disciplined by the prison system. It can be assumed that Tom’s vocational training was in some 110 manner intended to allow Tom to more easily reintegrate to society as a skilled craftsman. His training, if it did result from a formal training program, was almost certainly meant to help him find gainful employment and become a productive member of society upon his release.

However, his mechanical training did the opposite, it provided him the skills needed to hit the road, live a vagrant lifestyle, and ultimately commit more capital crimes.

The technical descriptions extant in The Grapes of Wrath are unique because they reveal the author’s understanding of the technology; it’s mechanisms, drives and forms of transmissions, and in doing so provide an ethnographic (or perhaps techno-graphic) thumb-nail sketch of automotive components. This tendency for technical detail stands in contrast to many other descriptions of working class labor wherein a mechanic is depicted as doing mechanical work without attempting a serious description of the being done. These descriptions are typically more about the essence of the device than its actual operation.

While articulating a central tenant of the Birmingham school of cultural studies,

Matthew Denning states that “ideology is best understood as narrative in form” (257). This invariably begs the question of what is central to the narrative surrounding the mechanic. The narrative of the mechanic encapsulates its own ideology upon which various theoretical lenses are superimposed: Marxist, postmodern, neo-libertarian (in the case of Rand), and so forth. The idea of the mechanic as revolutionary fits nicely into the American consciousness and as a result is easily yoked with any number of ideologies, dogmas, and systems of propaganda. In the case of this study, the spirit of revolution is revealed within the mechanic through the use and maintenance of technology. The mechanic as revolutionary reifies the existing meta-narrative 25 of Americans as innovators and tinkers, capable of fixing society in a manner which roughly equates to how they fix society’s machinery. 111

Unlike the accents and affections of Denning’s mechanic heroes, the “mechanic rhetoric”

(143) of this study is one of actual mechanical terminology, of tools and grease and technique.

Tom Joad speaks in the manner of a Midwestern dirt farmer, but does so while articulating the steps needed to perform complicated mechanical repairs. His description could be used as a thumbnail sketch for further repairs by the readers of The Grapes of Wrath. This tendency to illustrate actual techniques for working on machinery is one of even greater importance in the case of the machine breakers in the following chapter.

112

CHAPTER IV: THE MECHANIC AS MACHINE BREAKER AND HACKER

During the last few generations mankind has made an extraordinary advance in the

natural sciences and in their technical application and has established his control over

nature in a way never before imagined. The single steps of this advance are common

knowledge and it is unnecessary to enumerate them. Men are proud of those

achievements...this new won power over space and time, this subjugation of the forces of

nature.

-Sigmund Freud

As the most powerful force in the world, technology tends to dominate our thinking.

-Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants

I understood the poetry of machinery.

-Peter Kropotkin , from Memoirs of a Revolutionist

The presence of mechanical prowess is fundamental to mechanics on both sides of the emerging neo-Luddite question. Mechanics embody a trade tradition which stems from a pre- industrial era wherein the passing down technological information entails the transmission of essential philosophy concerning the relation of men to machines and industry. In his essay,

“Technology: The Emergence of a Dangerous Concept,” Leo Marx speaks specifically about

“the development of radically improved machinery (based on mechanized motive power) used in the new factory system of the late Eighteenth Century” (5). The fundamental conclusion of

Marx’s essay is that as machines grow more powerful, so does their ability to displace workers manually performing similar types of production. 113

As Naomi Klien noted in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007),

the political power which the mechanic held before the interwar years would be eclipsed as New

Deal compromises curtailed the need for working class revolutionaries.

In 1947…the idea that business should be left alone to govern the world as it

wished was one barely suitable for polite company. Memories of the market crash of

1929 and the Great Depression that followed were still fresh – the live savings destroyed

overnight, the suicides, the soup kitchens, the refugees. The scale of this market created

disaster had led to a surging demand for a distinctly hands-on form of government” The

1930s through 1950s was an unabashed time of faire: the can-do ethos of the New Deal

gave way to the war effort, with public works programs launched to create much-needed

jobs, and new social programs unveiled to prevent growing numbers of people from

turning hard left” (65).

The rationale for mechanics to use their abilities to propel radical political agendas would take a number of surprising and unlikely turns in the late Twentieth and early Twenty-first

Centuries. New Deal compromises took a great deal of the political punch away from social revolutionaries following the World War II. As a result, the tools and techniques used by mechanics prior to the war began to be used to correct perceived problems in society in very different ways when the war was over. Mechanics began to take on a more critical stance with regard to the machines and their use. Some of these mechanics would later destroy machines to correct an industrial culture they saw as pathological. In the previous chapter, the distinction was drawn between the machine tender who used technology for political progress and those people who were passively changed by their proximity to the machine. For example: Tom Joad becomes 114 a revolutionary through his proximity to the machine, whereas Willy Freely transforms into a fascist equipment operator.

LUDDITES

“Is man, then, a defenseless and perplexed victim at the mercy of the irresistible superior

power of technology?”

-Heidegger

After World War II , the literary relationship between mechanics and machines takes a definitive shift. The Holocaust and atomic bomb lead to an increasing uncertainty concerning the ability of technology to fix the problems of humanity. This tendency to view machines as adversarial was not new; it was born during the early years of the Industrial Revolution: The

Luddite rebellions. The Luddites were weavers in the early Nineteenth Century who sought to break the machines of industrialism to resist technological developments which removed the need for skilled workers from the weaving trade. As Kirkpatrick Sale argues in Rebels Against the

Future (1995), “It was not all machinery that the Luddites opposed, but ‘all machinery hurtful to the Commonality” (261). The Luddites rightfully feared the social consequences of employing machines, which under the care of a single operator, could do the work of many people. Although their efforts to curtail the erosion of craft production through machine breaking proved to be in vain, the Luddites nevertheless became a symbol of resistance to technology.

In the Iron Heel, Jack London provides the following opinion on the Luddite rebellions:

Do you know what a machine breaker is? Let me tell you. In the eighteenth century, in

England, men and women wove cloth on hand-looms in their own cottages. It was a slow, 115

clumsy, and costly way of weaving cloth, this cottage system of manufacture. Along came

the steam-engine and labor-saving machinery. A thousand looms assembled in a large

factory, and driven by a central engine, wove cloth vastly more cheaply than could the

cottage weavers on their hand-looms. Here in the factory was combination, and before it

competition faded away. The men and women who had worked the hand-looms for

themselves now went into the factories and worked the machine-looms, not for themselves,

but for the capitalist owners. Furthermore, little children went to work on the machine-

looms, at lower wages, and displaced the men. This made hard times for the men. Their

standard of living fell. They starved. And they said it was all the fault of the machines.

They did not succeed, and they were very stupid.

Yet you have not learned their lesson. Here are you, a century and a half later, trying to

break machines. By your own confession...machines can do the work more efficiently and

more cheaply than you can (69).

Thus, according to London, the problem lies with capitalism rather than the machines it utilizes. Furthermore, London longs for a “day in which there won’t be any destruction of the machines. The struggle then will be for the ownership of the machines” (83). Unlike the anti-

technological movements which gained popularity later in the Twentieth Century, London is not

battling technology, rather he understands that industrial workers need industry. Therefore, it is not

necessarily in the best interest of workers to undermine industry. In The Iron Heel, it is clear the

Luddites fail to recognize that breaking machines in one country will not prevent industry from developing in another nation. Capitalists in other parts of the world may then seize this advantage, displacing both workers and industry in the machine-breaker’s nation resulting in dismal economic conditions. 116

DEEP ECOLOGY

Radical environmentalism, known as “deep ecology,” was highly influenced by Edward

Abbey’s novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975). In The Monkey Wrench Gang, an increasingly radical group of people begin to attack the vestiges of industrial society. They initially destroy billboards and bulldozers, later increasing their level of violent political activism until they ultimately endeavor upon destroying a dam. “One way or another they were going to slow if not halt the advance of Technology, the growth of Growth, the spread of ideology of the cancer cell”

(207). At times Abbey’s argument leans strongly in favor of returning to a hunting and gathering way of life. This tendency is strongly in keeping with Ted Kaczynski, who lived in a shack made from throw-away items from the nearby community. Throughout their endeavors, the heroes of

The Monkey Wrench Gang benefit from their use of technologies such as automobiles and firearms. This is all but lost on them. Similarly, the Unabomber utilized many commonly purchased items in his everyday life and also in his bomb making endeavors. “The Unabomber’s shack was crammed with stuff he purchased from the machine [mainstream culture]: snowshoes, boots, sweatshirts, food, explosives, mattresses, plastic jugs and buckets, etcetera—all things he could have made himself but did not…based on photographs of his cabin’s untidy interior, it looks like he shopped at Wal-Mart” (Kelly 211). In the case of returning to a hunting and gathering paradigm, with over 7 billion people on the Earth, the result would be mass starvation and an increasing social instability around the globe. Humanity would be faced with mass famine rather than a carefree Utopia.

In A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (1989), Abbey states “the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses” (100). This quote is of interest because his characters readily use technology to evade the authorities after destroying the 117

machinery they oppose. What Abbey’s work suggests is that destroying large public works such as

mines and dams will return nature to a pristine state in which nature is unaltered and human beings

interact more equitably with the natural environment. The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) was

immensely influential in germinating the radical environmental movement in the United States.

The primary motivation behind the Monkey Wrench Gang (as they are known in the novel) is the

belief that they are “caught...in the iron treads of a technological juggernaut. A mindless machine.

With a breeder reactor for a heart...A planetary industrialism growing like a cancer. Growth for the

sake of growth. Power for the sake of power” (61). In his book, Green Rage (1990), Christopher

Manes says of the radical environmental group Earth First that “they shared their admiration for

the characters in Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, the neo-Luddite rebels with an

ecological cause who scoffed at the convoluted tactics of institutionalized environmentalism and

instead took direct action, in the form of ecotage to protect the environment” (69).

Despite this aversion to technology, The Monkey Wrench Gang set the standard for fiction

containing functional recipes for bombs and explosives. It is obvious that Abbey intends for his

technical advice to be applied by his readers. For example, he cites a recipe for “thermite materials

[includes] 45 pounds of iron oxide flakes, 30 pounds of aluminum powder, 10 pounds of powdered

barium peroxide and 2 ½ pounds of powdered magnesium, all of it packed in round cardboard

containers with metal ends” (289). Aside from more precise instructions with illustrations it is

difficult to imagine a more concise recipe for explosives existing in a widely available novel. In

this manner, Abbey’s frequently described methods and ingredients for pyrotechnics is in keeping

with the tradition of Johann Most, often called the father of terrorism (Tautman), The Anarchist

Cookbook, and even Jack London who posited that “when it comes to powder, chemical mixtures are better than mechanical mixtures, you take my word” (132). However, despite his recipe for 118 explosives, Abbey emphasizes the mechanical destruction of machinery, as opposed to destruction which is actuated by explosives. Later, Chuck Palahniuk would use this same literary device in his novel Fight Club (1996). Whether or not Palahniuk intends for his explosive advice to be heeded is uncertain.

Although all of the members of The Monkey Wrench Gang take part in sabotage, it is

George Hayduke who most closely embodies the historical image of the mechanic as revolutionary. For example, in this passage he not only knows how to disable the machine but also locates and utilizes the correct tools to do so.

Hayduke crawled under the bulldozer to find the drain plug in the oil pan. [After breaking

open a tool box he removed] a variety of giant end wrenches; a sledgehammer, a wooden-

handled monkey wrench; [Later] Hayduke took the spanner, which looked like the right

size, and crawled again underneath the tractor. He struggled for a while with the plug,

finally broke it loose and let out the oil. The great machine began to bleed; its life blood

drained out with pulsing throbs...(86).

Hayduke releases oil from the dozer’s crankcase so that when the operator starts the motor it is destroyed almost immediately by heat and friction. Thus, he uses his mechanical knowledge to create a situation wherein the destruction of equipment would result from its normal operation.26

Hayduke is a skilled and methodical mechanic who exploits the weakness of the mechanical system he opposes as well as exploiting the inability of the uninitiated to spot tampering. The extensive attention paid to engines and machine design in this novel works to impart authenticity to the reader in a manner not dissimilar to the gratuitous technical information in Melville’s Moby

Dick. Nevertheless, through using other tools and technologies The Monkey Wrench Gang fails to step outside the technological system they oppose. 119

Abbey’s characters openly identify with Ned Lud, the apocryphal machine

breaker, from the early years of the Industrial Revolution. According to them “there was a great

Englishman named Ned, Ned Lud. They called him a lunatic but he saw the enemy clearly. Saw

what was coming and acted directly” (65). Through acting directly, Ned Lud set the stage for direct

action. Direct action would later become the modus operandi for environmental groups like The

Earth Liberation Front (ELF)27 and The Sea Shepard Conservation Society which is dedicated to

sinking whaling ships. Earth First “members would...carry out direct action to defend threatened

natural areas, using the tactics of the civil rights and anti-war movements: guerrilla theater and civil disobedience, and, if necessary, monkeywrenching” (Manes 69). The term

“monkeywrenching,” comes from the title of The Monkey Wrench Gang, and the Sea Sheppard

Conservation Society has a monkey wrench crossed with a tomahawk painted prominently on its anti-whaling ships.

Since the inception of anarchism as a political movement, there has been a milieu of anarchists who express utopian yearnings for what they perceive as a simpler, less technologically determined age. For example, Bakunin “was horrified by the dehumanizing effect of specialized industrialization. In its place he anticipated peasant communities in which small units undertook all the necessities of production” (Forman 29). This desire for a return to small peasant communities, which are viewed as sustainable and equitable, is one that is still heartily maintained by the anarchist subculture. Naomi Klein argued in response to the 1999

Battle of Seattle that eco-anarchist “John Zerzan sees rioting and property destruction as the first step toward the collapse of industrialization and a return to ‘anarcho-primitivism’ – a preagrarian hunter-gatherer Utopia” (21). In his book, Running on Empty: The Pathology of Civilization,

Zerzan asserts that “technology has unmistakably become the great vehicle of reification. Not 120

forgetting that it is embedded in and embodies an ever-expanding, global field of capital,

reification subordinates us to our own objectified creations” (55). Operating on similar note, the

philosopher Martin Heidegger poses the question, “Is man, then, a defenseless and perplexed

victim at the mercy of the irresistible superior power of technology?” (52-53). According to eco-

anarchists the answer is yes, unless direct action is taken to correct humankind’s servitude to

technology. Within the discourse of modernity, the disabled worker acts as an unintentional

signifier of Luddism. This new band of Luddite destroys the idea of modernity and technology,

not through sabotage, but rather with their bodily abnormality. In this manner the factory system

is opposed by workers who are unable rather than unwilling to work, and it is the body, not the

factory, which becomes the site of contention. Their dissent is written on the body. It is a dissent

which is undeniable in its opposition to the system of normalcy.

FIGHT CLUB

At its core, the novel Fight Club (1996) is about a descent into madness which surrounds the desire to opt out of mainstream society by participating in acts of ritualized violence. It is told by the novel’s narrator and the actions of his violent alter ego Tyler Durden. Although Fight Club is not an overtly environmental novel it does develop angst toward environmental degradation.

This environmental angst is later used by the fight club members as a justification for chaos. The novel’s narrator states that, “For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on the planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And count every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfill toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born” (124). Absent is the sentiment that the world can be saved; instead it must be destroyed and 121

recreated. “A cultural ice age. A prematurely induced dark age…force humanity to go dormant or

into remission long enough for the Earth to recover” (125). In this manner the utopian vision of

contemporary anarchic environmentalism is inverted in the novel: it is the desire to return to an

imagined time of peace tranquility through the destruction of the present. They desire to return the

earth to an era prior to industrialization.

The narrator’s desire to return to a more primitive, immediate state can be seen in the

following passage.

“Imagine,” Tyler said, “stalking elk past department store windows and stinking

racks of beautiful dresses and tuxedos on hangers; you’ll wear leather clothes that will last

you the rest of your life, and you’ll climb the wrist thick kudzu vines that wrap Sears

Tower. Jack and the beanstalk, you’ll climb up through the dripping forest canopy and the

air will be so clean you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison to dry

in the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway stretching eight—lanes—wide

and August hot for a thousand miles” (125).

Early in the novel the narrator is liberated from the restraints of the quotidian by blowing up his apartment with homemade explosives. However, author Chuck Pahlahniuk does not stop with just a description of the explosion. Instead the novel provides exacting knowledge of explosive ordinance production and thus shares that unusual quality with The Monkey Wrench Gang.

Similarly, the protagonist of The Iron Heel reveals his personal knowledge of explosives while defending himself in court, claiming that the bomb he is accused of throwing is too pusillanimous for him to waste his time on. “There wasn’t enough powder in it. It made a lot of smoke, but hurt no one except me. I exploded right at my feet, and yet it did not kill me. Believe me, when I get to throwing bombs, I’ll do damage. There’ll be more than smoke in my petards” (142). All of this 122 information on Fight Club must be borne in mind with the idea that although the fight club as a social phenomenon can initially be viewed as personally liberating, it quickly becomes hierarchic and authoritarian. Fight club clearly has its rules.

The mechanic character is not present in the film version of Fight Club. In the novel the mechanic illustrates the connection between technology and revolution, between the knowledge of machines and the ability to effect both personal and social change. “Our fight club mechanic says he can start anything. Two wires twist out of the steering column. Touch the wires to each other, you complete the circuit to the starter solenoid, you got a car to joyride” (138). Clearly this character possesses the technical knowledge necessary to perform car theft and function as societal miscreant. Unlike The Monkey Wrench Gang, those involved with Fight Club aren’t really fighting for anything, rather they are fighting against a sense that they have been reduced from human beings to consumers. They use nihilism to combat nihilism.

The fight club mechanic can perform acts of incredible strength and stamina much like

Souvarine of Germinal. This mechanic also embodies Tom Joad and Ernest Everhard’s two-fisted approach to revolution. “The mechanic is tall and all bones with shoulders that remind you of a telephone crossbar. [And later] It’s one scary fuck to see guys like our mechanic at fight club.

Skinny guys, they never go limp. They fight until they’re burger…guys watching don’t even yell when guys like our mechanic go at each other” (139).

Within the novel, the fight club attempts to undermine monetary systems on a number of different levels. For example, there is a rule against paying for admission to fight club, and the group frequently chooses corporate banks and sites of consumerism as targets for their direct action. “According to the mechanic, another new fight club rule is that fight club will always be free. It will never cost to get in. The mechanic yells out the window into the oncoming traffic and 123

the night wind pouring down the side of the car: ‘We want you, not your money.’ The mechanic

yells out the window, ‘As long as you’re at fight club you’re not how much money you’ve got in the bank. You’re not your job. You’re not your family, and you’re not who you tell yourself.’ The mechanic yells into the wind, ‘You’re not your name”’ (143). What the mechanic is proposing here is the intentional and total destruction of the individual’s identity. While reiterating the maxims of the narrator’s alter ego Tyler Durden, the mechanic invokes both Bakuninist and Futurist sentiments. ‘“Burn the Louvre,’ the mechanic says, ‘and wipe your ass with the Mona Lisa. This way at least, God would know your names”’(141). Palahniuk is not attempting to imbue the mechanic with religious authority. Instead, the religiosity of early novels such as The Grapes of

Wrath is inverted and made obscene. This mechanic is the embodiment of adrenaline fueled

nihilism and much like the Futurists who worshiped technology, he advocates for a liberating

destruction.

There are several overt references to anarchism in Fight Club. “Maybe this is where you

first wanted anarchy. Years before you learned about little acts of rebellion” (Palahniuk 76). [And

later in speaking of the schedules surrounding Fight Club initiatives] Mischief meets on

Wednesday. And Misinformation meets on Thursday. Organized Chaos. The Bureaucracy of

Anarchy” (119). Palahniuk is comfortable using anarchist imagery and jargon in an effort to inflate

the countercultural aspects of his novel. The organizational structure of the anarchist cell is

embodied in the passage, “No one guy understands the whole plan, but each guy is trained to do

one simple task perfectly” (130). The protagonist in Fight Club also has a career as a white collar

worker and at the novel’s onset feels “dwarfed and helpless before the managerial cadres and their

manipulated and manipulative minions” (Mills 111). It is against this crushing conformity that the

protagonist acts out and develops the idea of a “fight club” which is a space to fight against 124 conformity, consumerism, and mainstream society. At the conclusion of the movie adaptation of

Fight Club, there is an orchestrated apocalypse in miniature, wherein high rise office towers are razed to the ground in an attempt to stop civilization.

Y2K, SURVIVALISM, AND THE COMING APOCALYPSE

“Survival = Anger x Imagination”

–Sherman Alexie, from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993).

The survivalist movement in the United States has gained in popularity and acceptance in recent years. Natural disasters such as Super Storm Sandy and Hurricane Katrina have coupled with the threat and reality of terrorist attacks to make many Americans feel as if their government may not be there to help if they get into serious trouble. One response to this has been for individuals and small groups to prepare for a variety of contingencies. Whether it entails building an expeditionary “bug out” vehicle, creating an underground shelter, or buying a multitude of exotic weaponry, many survivalists are marrying old school American ingenuity with an instinct to confront the unrealistic threats of danger which they see as immanent. In her introduction to The Pocket Prepper’s Guide author Bernie Carr states,

There is a lot of uncertainty in our daily lives…Besides the financial crisis, on the

daily news we witness natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, landslides,

hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires, as well as the man-made disasters of terrorism and

war. 125

Like many people, I started getting the feeling of insecurity and unease on a daily

basis. I felt worried about myself, my family, and my future. Yet I found myself at a loss

as to what to do about it.

I needed to regain the feeling of security and hope, so I started to delve into the

world of preparedness.” (13).

While there is no central, unifying theory of survivalism, some threads of thought are woven through all survivalist thinking. The most obvious of which is to remain alive through a potential, often unnamed crisis. Other common modalities include the survival of loved ones and a desire to retain possession of property and assets. By contrast, maintaining a consumer driven way of life is rarely, if ever, a part of the survivalist mindset. Water, shelter, and food are paramount in any survival scenario. There is no avoiding the need for clean, safe drinking water.

Therefore, all survivor manuals and prepping guides including the US Armed Forces Survival

Manual (1980), a Y2K preparation book, or the farcical Zombie Survival Guide (2003), have roughly the same central information. This is because human survival needs are the same from one scenario to the next: human physiological needs remain constant. Ultimately, the production of survival is a dialectic surrounding the use of technology, primitive and otherwise in confrontation with adversity. Survivalism is often about beating nature, but it is also about using personal technology (generally either high tech or stone age) to defeat a larger breakdown in structural technology such as a the world economy, the power grid, or the social order. Some of these technological failures may or may not be the result of an environmental disaster; such as a solar storm which undermines our electrical grid. In this manner, a natural cataclysm may generate a subsequent technological failure. 126

Despite these concerns, the book, Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will

Survive A Mass Extinction (2013), argues that there is nothing to worry about because “during the last million years of our evolution as a species, humans narrowly avoided extinction more than once. We lived through harsh conditions while another human group, Neanderthals, did not.

This isn’t just because we are lucky. It’s because as a species, we are extremely cunning” (2). At its heart survivalism is about beating the elements. It is about catching lunch instead of buying it.

It is about keeping warm when the climate is freezing. It is about using survival skills and technologies such as shelter and primitive fire making; technologies which are outside the mainstream.

Survivalists count on the breakdown of society after a calamity. The survivalist movement is typically broken down historically into three eras:

1. The “Duck and Cover” years of the Cold War. The threat of a nuclear exchange between the

United States and the USSR was the principle catalyst for this era of survivalist thinking. The initial cataclysm of a nuclear exchange, along with the subsequent fallout would presumably have made life on earth all but untenable. Although this era is largely thought of as being left in the 1950s and early 1960s, it had a resurgence in the 1980s as the Cold War again heated up, and ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December of 1991. Bomb shelters in public places and backyards were extant in the early years of this period.

2. Y2K. The Y2K scare resulted from the fear that computers would think the year 2000 was actually 1900. This was because early computers had used only 2 digits to indicate a given year in order to save memory. Thus the year 1999 would be 99 and the subsequent year would be 00 rather than 2000. It was thought that confusion from the loss of 100 years would have resulted in big problems for finance, economics, and any other business area which functions on digital 127 chronology. While it is now common to think of Y2K as a farce, there are a number of apologists who say disaster was avoided because we were proactive about preventing it. Under any circumstances Y2K functioned to normalize the practice of stocking up on essential supplies for a generation of Americans.

3. Our current era. The early Twenty-first Century has experienced its share of natural disasters, terrorist attacks, plague scares, and financial breakdowns. Many people lost faith in the federal government’s ability to react to domestic crisis in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Moreover, the slow governmental response time for other disasters such as Super Storm Sandy coupled with

The Great Recession to create a sense that the average American is on their own if a disaster occurs. As a result, a growing number of Americans have taken FEMA’s advice to stock up on canned goods, bottled water and essential medical supplies to the extreme. Instead of having a three day supply of food they might have three months or three years-worth of supplies. They are not preparing for a short term breakdown of civil services; they are counting on a total societal collapse.

Ultimately, survivalism exists as a hybrid space between pro-technology movements

(such as the Futurists) and anti-technology movements (such as the Luddites). Survivalism is both suspicious of the failure of technology, but it also advocates for dealing with that failure by having individual technologies as a backup. Survivialism exists in opposition to technologies which are seen as unreliable, but it fetishizes nearly any technology which is used for survival.

Survivalists are typically deeply suspicious of governmental systems, but are highly supportive of technologies which exist “off the grid” meaning those which rely on power that is not generated by a utility company. Thus, survivalist movements tend to be inherently anti- authoritarian. The paranoia which potentially surrounds survivalist movements is not dissimilar 128

in nature to the opposition of organized government or its perceived related systems of control

(such as the WTO or the UN). A return to hunting and gathering along with simple systems of

barter is desirable compared to the publicly traded commodities which make up our consumer

capitalist society.

The survivalist movement has gained such popularity in recent years that farcical survival

guides such as Max Brooks’ Zombie Survival Manual (2002) have become wildly popular.

Brooks’ “survival manual” replicates the typical paramilitary approach of most survival manuals,

but does so with the very specific (imagined) crisis of surviving a war with the undead. Rather

than providing general advice on how to survive a multitude of various calamities, the Zombie

Survival Manual is predicated on solving the very specific problem of dealing with a zombie

apocalypse. In most zombie scenarios, the undead are eager to kill and often eat the living. As a result this calls for some specific defensive tactics to be coupled with more commonplace advice on terrain types, supplies, and so forth. Curiously, in 2012, the CDC (Center for Disease Control) used the zombie apocalypse as a means to inform people to be prepared for an actual emergency under the guise of preparing for an event from popular fiction.

While it was quite marginal at one time, survialism has become big business in our contemporary world. As a result, it has made some strange bedfellows. One might not expect anarchists to be allied with Tea Party constitutionalists, however, anarchist Cody Wilson has endeavored on making 3D models of assault weapon receivers (virtually the only element of assault rifles which is not widely available online) for distribution on the internet. Wilson has done so in an effort to be certain that citizens can defend themselves against their government.

These 3D models can be legally produced with a 3D printer. Thus, anyone with the 3D specifications can produce plastic versions of AR-15 receivers in their basement. This is an 129 important technological development because rifle receivers are the only part of the weapon which is made with a serial number that is traceable both to the manufacturer and original point of sale. Moreover, with a receiver, all other parts of the rifle including the barrel and springs, the trigger, sights, and magazines can be bought as aftermarket products. Weapons assembled in this fashion, while technically legal, are referred to as “ghost guns.” When asked about his intent,

Wilson stated, “The goal is to create contempt for the state.” (from the CNBC Special

“America’s Gun: Rise of the AR-15”). Wilson’s website, Defense Distributed, posed the question of "How do governments behave if they must one day operate on the assumption that any and every citizen has near instant access to a firearm through the Internet?" In 2012, Wired magazine included Cody Wilson in its list of the “15 Most Dangerous People in the World.” In this manner Wilson reifies the radical technician by utilizing cutting edge technology to make his revolutionary stance a reality. “He's only created the first platform devoted to sharing the blueprints online for free to anyone who wants one, anywhere in the world, at any time”

(Wired.com). Through making it possible to mass produce assault weapons in the home, Wilson has hacked the weapons industry and made it possible for do-it-yourself-minded individuals to circumvent the system.

HACKERS

In the late Twentieth Century, the United States moved away from its industrial base and toward a more intensively information centered economy. The result of this is that a great many people who grew up with the intention of working in steel mills and auto plants now find themselves with skills more fitting for a Nineteenth or Twentieth Century job pool than the one which they currently face. In this way, rust belt workers are as atavistic in the information age as 130

their craft production ancestors were in the early years of mass production. As mass production

facilities provided the wages and jobs necessary for building the American middle class it also

undermined the need for a highly skilled work force. A result of the deskilling produced by mass

production, is the resurgence of the Luddite ideology. Former MIT historian, David Noble, states

in his book, Progress Without People (1993), that “A Detroit newspaper responded to Time

magazine’s ‘Machine of the Year’ (the computer) with an announcement of its own ‘Tool of the

Year’: the sledgehammer” (50). This statement may in part illustrate the fear that “human beings

would one day be reduced to little more than cogs in a social machine” (Mourby 17), both

mystified and manipulated by computing technology by it. Similarly, computers reify the

dominant ideologies28 of those who program them. Many information workers have abandoned the need for a factory and the geography on which it sits. These workers may exist anywhere in the world provided they have internet access. Like mass production workers, they are completely removed from any sort of craft or guild system. Network engineers, like the internet itself, appear divorced from terrestrial space.

McKenzie Wark has argued for a populist approach to the control of information in his book A Hacker Manifesto (2004). Much like Tom Joad, Wark realizes that technological knowledge is paramount when negotiating a rapidly changing economic landscape. As Mark

Bowden said in Worm: The First Digital World War (2011), “Social theorists awoke to the thing’s potential, and a new vision of a techno-Utopia was born” (17) or rather it was reborn.

Techno-utopian sentiments, hope and dreams have been around since at least the middle

Nineteenth Century. A similarly populist appeal was initially enjoyed by the mechanic (Henry

Ford) and the computer enthusiast (Steve Jobs) albeit in very different eras. Because of their cutting edge skills, mechanical work was an occupation which received a degree of privilege (as 131

a result was largely closed to women and people of color) and along with “factories, railroads,

and telegraph wires seemed the very engines of a democratic future” (Trachtenberg 38).

However, with the failure of factories to maintain a healthy US economy, the mechanic is no

longer in a position to give direction to our republic.29 Contemporary industrial mechanics are

more likely to disassemble the machines of American heavy industry for the purpose of

globalized production, than they are to use technical knowledge for revolutionary political

purposes.

Ontological similarities between information workers and mechanics beg the question of

what revolutionary potential information workers may ultimately possess. Computer training has

been attractive to young people since at least the Regan Era. The growth of the internet, “has

been bottom-up, in that beyond ad hoc efforts to shape its technical undergirding, no central

authority has dictated its structure or imposed rules or guidelines for its use” (Bowden 14). The

once insular and esoteric world of computers has become open to the public, although not all

aspects of computer training are equally accessible to all parts of society. Just a few decades

later, the demarcation between programmers, computer repair people and computer engineers

has taken place. Computer repair is now taught in vocational centers alongside automotive

diagnostics and welding. For many, “the innards of mainframes and operating systems and

networks are not just unfathomable but somehow unknowable, or even not worth knowing”

(Bowden 8) [Italics theirs]. Programming is learned at the community college level, while

computer engineering is largely the province of universities.

Ultimately, the computer, like the lathe, will become passé in the popular consciousness, but what of those who labor with hard drives, bits and data? In the era of Silicon Valley billionaires, there is still the risk of becoming a techno-serf in “our post-Fordist, postindustrial 132 cybereconomy” (Denning 432). This risk is an increasingly real as computers and their smart phones descendants are now as ubiquitous in our culture as factories were in our industrial past.

We may soon look to those who write code as being “just programmers.” However, like Tom

Joad, they may be the embodiment of a new social direction, a new teleology based on an as yet unrealized technological imperative. According to Wark, computer hackers provide the potential for such direction because they have the skills to actively oppose an emerging class of information capitalists, called Vectoralists. Hackers can liberate information from corporate control and they, like the mechanics who preceded them, need only their acumen and a few tools to do so.

“Increasingly networked technologies track everything about us, creating records of where we go, what we buy, what we read, what we like, and who our friends are” (Parry 3). The popular use of Foucault’s “panopticon” indicates a reverence for technology, a religiosity reflecting his feelings toward the metaphoric penal machine, itself the ideal of complete surveillance. “The panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad; in the peripheric ring, on is totally seen, without ever being seen” (Foucault 201-202). Foucault’s panopitcon breathes the language of totalitarian oppression30, bereft of a locus for dissent, because dissent only works to reify the structures it seeks to oppose. Foucault theorized the panoption prior the explosion of hacker culture. “Malware in the first decade of the Twenty-first

Century underwent something akin to the Cambrian Explosion, a period in evolutionary history when change seemed to accelerate” (Bowden 79). In the world of Foucault, a space does not exist which is removed from panoptic power. In the world of anarchist hacker, collectives such as Anonymous, the panopticon becomes a tool of resistance. “Modern malware is aimed less at exploiting individual computers than exploiting the Internet. A botnet-creating worm doesn’t 133 want to harm your computer, it wants to use it” (Bowden 23-24). “One also sees the spread of disciplinary procedures, not in the form of enclosed institutions, but as centers of observation disseminated throughout society” (Foucault 212). Through this mobility, “the exercise of power

[is made] lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle coercion of society to come”

(Foucault 212). The device that Foucault is describing was coming to fruition during the early years of the industrialism, but has reached its pinnacle in the emerging information age.

TECHNOLOGY: AGENT OF ORDER?

Technology is our friend if you have the right skills. Technology is your enemy if you do

not.

-Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor

The shifting modalities surrounding the mechanic forecast the trajectory of skilled information workers. In our current era where, as Wark has argued, information rather than property is the new capital (32) the transformation of mechanics from representatives of modernity to lowly grease monkey has implications for the information age. Much like Henry

Ford, the founder of Apple Computers worked out of a small shop (his garage) independently designing, assembling and engineering his project. The mechanic and the computer programmer have followed a similar evolutionary path, from obscurity to the promise of contemporary ethos and on to ubiquitous banality.

Although it is possible to expand on the evolution of the mechanic as a symbol within popular culture, as Brian Arthur has noted, technology does not evolve in the same manner as biological evolution. 134

The jet engine didn’t evolve out of variations on the air piston engine. In

Darwin’s scheme, if you get a new species of finch, it’s related to some older species of

finch, but it has adapted gradually, the structure of its beak changing because of some

new circumstance. There is a gradual progression until a new species is formed in a

slightly different niche and branches off from the old species. You couldn’t say the laser

or the jet engine branched off from anything. They were completely new (232).

While his example that a jet engine is not a clear descendent of the piston engine is astute, it leaves out humanity as an interlocutor. The tendencies of humanity are what bridge the spinning of the pottery wheel to the spinning of a lathe, to a spinning flywheel, and ultimately to a spinning turbine. Nevertheless, the interrelated novels surveyed throughout this project comprise a network of material that effectively illustrates the evolution of mechanical revolutionaries. The optimism of the The Iron Heel’s blacksmith to Fight Club’s nihilistic mechanic mirrors society’s view of technology but with greater intimacy and passion due to a closer proximity to the machine. Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930),

During the last few generations mankind has made an extraordinary advance in

the natural sciences and in their technical application and has established his control over

nature in a way never before imagined. The single steps of this advance are common

knowledge and it is unnecessary to enumerate them. Men are proud of those

achievements...this new won power over space and time, this subjugation of the forces of

nature (38).

The mechanic is the agent of industrialism’s achievements and failures. In the words of Jack

London, “They were not land-serfs like the farmers. They were machine serfs and labour serfs”

(168). Mechanics can never fully depart from the logic of technology because in order to destroy 135

technology they utilize its tools. Within these novels, industrialism functions as a dynamic

ideology and that dynamism is not lost on mechanics that, by extension, are as revolutionary as the ideological imperatives on which they operate.

In his essay, “Work and Culture in American Studies,” Michael Denning asserts the need for a work-centered approach to the study of culture. Unfortunately, he puts forth what is quite

assuredly a post-deskilling dichotomy of mental and physical labor. “The unity and division

between mental and manual labor is the starting point of any labor theory of culture. Of course,

we are more aware of their separation than their unity, since, as Braverman argued, ‘the

separation of hand and brain is the most decisive single step taken in the division of labor by the

capitalist mode of production” (433-434). Counter to this alleged separation between hand and

mind was US Proletariat literature of the 1920s and 1930s which often featured workers who

functioned as revolutionaries and as such represented a working class manifestation of the

intellectual vanguard. Tom Joad is a representation of workers who melded “mental and manual

labor” (Denning 434) during the Great Depression. He was radical enough to appeal to socialists,

but was also honest and hard-working enough for the average American citizen to recognize as

representing their ideals. Indeed, for all but the most affluent farmers, turning their own

wrenches was a necessary part of maintaining their both their equipment and way of life.

Much like mass production displaced knowledge from the worker to the manufacturing

process, the computer has alleviated the need for certain types of knowledge in the creation and

distribution of information. For example, just a decade ago it was important for someone crafting

a written document to possess an exacting knowledge of grammar to appear competent. The

computer has replaced the need for such knowledge; however unlike the autoworker who

experiences anomie doing work bereft of skill (or at best semi-skilled work) the information 136

worker is willing to allow the computer to assume responsibility for small details such as

spelling and comma placement. No longer must late evenings be spent crunching numbers

because computers perform tasks such as creating spread sheets and graphs, thus allowing or

requiring the worker to focus on other things. As Michael Denning has argued, “The capitalist dream of complete automation never dies—robotic assembly lines, desktop publishing and money breeding on an eternally rising stock exchange” (Denning 432). Much like the laborer of the industrial age, their information producing counterpart is freed of knowledge and skill while

being required to generate more and more capital through increased levels of productivity.

Unlike Denning, this study does not place class at the center of understanding the narrative,

rather it places technology at the center of culture. “To know a culture is to know its conventions

and formulas, to know the patterns it places on the world, the stories with which it tells its lives, the

maps it makes of its terrain, the names it uses” (Denning 75). Technology is essential, but invisible,

it obstructs, is dealt with and then disappears into the background. This cycle of technology reifies

the essential quality of the American character as innovator and revolutionary. The mechanic is

recoded with each telling.

137

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145

APPENDIX A: ENDNOTES

1Deskilling is the act of removing skill from industrial labor by engineering machines which have the integral steps of the work process engineered into their mechanical functions. For example, prior to deskilling, it would have required the work of a skilled machinist to hone the cylinders of a Ford engine block. However, with the introduction of dedicated machines and jigs it became possible for a semiskilled worker to do the same job by locking the engine block in place in a jig or fixture and then pushing start on the honing machine. By honing identical engine blocks on the same machine over and over it was no longer necessary for skilled machinists to perform the laborious task of setting up machine tooling for each individually crafted engine block.

2Culture is a technology of organization which stratifies and prioritizes for the people who are its users.

3For example: the technical information extant in The Monkey Wrench Gang is quite reliable with regard to sabotaging heavy equipment. Also, the information on bomb making (itself a technical area requiring a great deal of skill and nerve) is reliable enough in the book version

Fight Club, but that same information has been altered in the film to make it ineffective.

4The City of Detroit, Michigan, will function broadly within this study because its history follows an arc which is similar to that of the mechanic since at least the Nineteenth Century.

The period immediately following World War II was arguably Detroit's most productive as an industrial center. It was a time when the auto industry built the middle class through 146 unprecedented levels of production and high-paying industrial jobs. However, in the last thirty years the American auto industry lost its grip on the domestic market while technology and labor disputes reshaped the industry. Detroit transformed into the city it is today. Detroit City has always been an enormously dynamic place and the distant industrial past can provide interesting clues about where it is headed technologically and culturally. The technologies which Detroit area mechanics pioneered lead the city and have ultimately challenged the popular understanding of what Detroit is and what it can be.

5 Denning in his introduction to Mechanic Accents defines contested terrain as “a field of cultural conflict where signs with wide appeal and resonance take on contradictory disguises and are spoken in contrary accents” (Denning 3).

6 Through his linguistic examination of technology Kelly brushes against Heidegger’s opening argument in The Question Concerning Technology wherein he states that “All ways of thinking, more or less perceptibly lead through language” (Heidegger 3) and it is from this stepping off point that he begins one of the most influential essays on technology and philosophy ever written. Although use of the term technology is ubiquitous in our contemporary culture, according to Kevin Kelly, “Until 1939, the colloquial use of the term technology was absent. It did not occur twice in a State of the Union address until 1952” (Kelly 6).

7 Social Engineering is different from social construction in that social construction deals specifically with how we allow technology to develop and influence our lives. Social

Engineering on the other hand has to do with putting policies in place which direct and control the fate of large numbers of people, often without their consent, in order to gain a specific political outcome.

147

8 “While Marx had meant to refer only to the popular verbal rhetoric of technological progress,

Kasson employed the phrase more expansively to refer both to the psychological experience of awe in the presence of the machine and to the self-conscious development of aesthetic styles appropriate to the physical forms and cultural meanings of technology” (Mielke, 158).

9 “This global-scale, circular, interconnected, network of systems, subsystems, machines, pipes, roads, wires, conveyor belts, automobiles, servers and routers, codes, calculators, sensors, archives, activators, collective memory, and power generators—this whole grand contraption of interrelated and interdependent pieces form a single system” (Kelly 9).

10 Heidegger had studied theology and thus questions of “being” was considered from many perspectives (religious, philosophical, pragmatic) and became part of the structure of how

Heidegger viewed the world.

11 In his 1995 treatise, “The Beginner’s Guide to Art Deconstruction,” performance artist

Norman Conquest advocates the destruction (or rather deconstruction) of art and the museums that house them. Conquest sites “Four basic methods of deconstruction” (Conquest 7) which include “hand demolition, burning, machine deconstruction and blasting” (Conquest 7-12).

When citing the techniques of art deconstruction, Conquest turns to “an anonymous proponent

[who] put it ‘Sure it’s risky, but I like the danger, the excitement, even the sound of the explosion. I’ll never forget the night I took out six Warhols with a single charge! Yeah, there will always be new art, so what’s the big deal?’”(Conquest 14). The endeavors of performance artists like Norman Conquest embody futurist angst in a manner which high-brow academics would seldom (if ever) allow themselves to approach. As a mockery of contemporary design, Punk Shui reminds me a bit of the little known and dreadfully executed A Beginners Guide to Art

Deconstruction (1991). Punk Shui owes at least as great a debt to Futurism as the punk 148

movement. Punk Shui is written to be absurd and as such it’s curious to speculate on how many

folks will read it and, having taken the book seriously, will go on to saw their couches in half and

set their chairs on fire. This book, like Marinetti’s manifesto, both instructs and encourages the

reader to commit acts of anti-social behavior. However, beneath the obvious joke that punk

culture has become (this Martha Stuartesque guide being a prime example) there is a history of

nihilistic art and design from which it is clearly descended.

12 “Machine” ostensibly predates mechanic. As a term was assimilated into English around the

Sixteenth Century. “The ultimate source of both machine and mechanic was makhos, a Greek

word meaning ‘contrivance, means’ passed into Latin as machina ‘engine, contrivance’ which

was in due course to find its way into English through Latin mechanicus” (Ayto 332).

13 The irony of this is that Ford’s Bagley Avenue garage was replaced by a United Artists

Theatre which later on was gutted in order to become a parking garage for the Detroit’s

commuters. This parking garage was featured in Eminem’s film about adversity and hip hop

titled “8-Mile”.

14 During the late Nineteenth Century competing railroad lines allowed manufactured goods to be taken from the cities to the expanding countryside and in doing so hastened the reality of the closing of the frontier, as expounded upon in the Turner Thesis. “Penetrating the West with

government encouragement, the railroad and the telegraph opened the vast spaces to production”

(Trachtenberg, 20). This potential for the growth of industrial markets necessitated an increase in

the development of production. In this way Detroit functioned to make products such as iron stoves

available to the West, but also (and perhaps most notably) produced many of the railroad cars in

which these products were shipped. “Throughout the decade [1890’s] railroad car makers were the

city’s largest employers” (Smith and Feather stone, 17). As a result, agricultural markets had to 149

increase their crop yield in order to afford industrial commodities from the East. Agricultural and

industrial processes were similarly “over capitalized [and] overmechanized” (Trachtenberg, 21),

thus increasing trade in both directions; from city to countryside, from farm to factory. Much like

manner in which deskilling is linked to the Second Industrial worker, the introduction of industrial

agricultural technology is largely associated with the Twentieth Century (as was illustrated by the

plight of the Joads in Steinbeck’s The Grape of Wrath). Their industrial counterparts in the urban centers, these farmers were “controlled by private corporations” (Trachtenberg, 21).

15 Sovarine of Zola’s Germinal is an engineer for the Colliery where he works and he uses his

technological knowledge to plan the mine’s destruction. Ultimately it Souvarine’s mechanical

ability is what makes him effective as an anarchist saboteur. Thus the combination of mechanical

skill, coupled with revolutionary intent qualifies Souverine for inclusion within this study.

16 Otto is fortunate that he is allowed to travel extensively as a skilled tradesperson. Less than a

century earlier many countries including Britain “were attempting, by strict regulations to prevent

any...skilled mechanics from leaving the country” (Marx 155). The restrictions placed upon

mechanics at the time may have been part of the impetus for MacKay to choose a blacksmith as the

representation of a revolutionary who is good with his hands, thus lending an additional rationale

for the mechanic revolutionary trope.

17 “Jefferson, through envisioning the thousand-year expansion of a pastoral landscape peopled

by simple yeomen, also feared the corrupting influence of mills and factories like those already

subverting the independence of European artisans.” (Miekle 151)…this would be a great place to

use passages from “From the American System to Mass Production”

18 By the late Nineteenth Century, “America had gone through an industrial revolution with its

resultant rise in population and workforce, the growth of cities and urban centers of manufacturing 150

and trade, transportation innovations, immigration, and a translocal, national integration. And

although most Americans still depended upon agriculture for their economic well being, the

context of that activity had expanded from local to national and international economies” (Okihiro,

2001, 22).

19 This sentiment is not entirely like the Tea Party’s use of Revolutionary War imagery in our contemporary political moment, although the political trajectory of the Tea Party is vastly different from that of John Steinbeck.

20 Although precipitation records had been kept since 1836 at Fort Leavenworth “no records of this

length are kept on the Dust Bowl proper” (Stephens 751). However, the records for the “101 year

period, 1836 to 1936, shows that the 1840’s and 1860’s were droughty” (Stephens 752).

21 “Depression and drought have only accentuated a situation which has been long developing.

The problem is one of arresting the decline of an agricultural economy not adapted to the climatic conditions because of lack of information and understanding of at the time of settlement

and of readjusting at the time of settlement and of readjusting that economy in the light of later

experience and of scientific information now available.” (Stephens 757).

22 Tom allows the family to move west and because of this is an essential asset that many other

families lack. “In the day the ancient leaky radiators sent up columns of steam, loose connecting

rods hammered and pounded. And men driving the trucks and the overloaded cars listened

apprehensively. How far between the towns? It is a terror between towns. If something breaks—

well, if something breaks we camp right here while Jim walks to town and gets a part and walks

back” (Steinbeck 161).

23 It is interesting to consider that both Taylor and Ford undermine Marx's idea of the average

worker, but manage to do so in very different ways. Taylor found a test subject (the often 151 mentioned Schmidt) who was by any estimation possessed of superhuman endurance and was regarded as a miser as well. Taylor used him as a subject for how workers could be used to work both harder and smarter while being given cash for the incentive. Scientific management fulfilled the "smarter" part of the working equation, while Schmidt's love of money and indefatigable constitution were all he needed to work harder at the steel mill. In a way, Schmidt acts like a ringer in this experiment. He is not the common man, far from it. He represents a standard which the common worker cannot (based on Taylor's own observations) compare with.

Ford's need for less than able bodied workers relies on a very different impetus, namely his demand for a high number of workers to do a limited number of tasks who will not leave the job immediately. In the early 20th Century it was much more difficult for disabled folks to get work than it is today, so Ford knew he could employ those who were not fully able bodied to do work which they could handle (bring in the example of the blind workers at the Rouge).

24“A nation that depended on hirelings could not be a republic” (Roediger 44). In his use of the term “hireling” Roediger means, ‘one who is hired or serves for wages’” (Roediger 45, excerpted from the OED).

25“Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives[. ..] The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements—narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on” (Lyotard xxiv).

26 Note the similarities and differences here to Souvarine’s sabotage of Le Voreux in Zola’s

Germinal. Both of these acts rely on unsuspecting workers to trigger the actual destruction. By sabotaging the mine shaft Souvarine creates a scenario where the miners descent would cause a cave-in, thus allowing water from an adjacent mine to do the bulk of the damage. 152

27 Andrew Boyd from “Truth is a Virus” in the Cultural Resistance Reader. “The ELF is an

underground movement of autonomous groups who carry out economic sabotage to protect the

environment…ELF and other political activists have adapted viral structures grow their

resistance movements…” 376.

28 Friedrich Kittler of Humbolt University, Berlin, stated that, “Computers are not emanations of nature. Rather, the universal discrete machine, with its ability to erase, negate, and oppose binary signs, always already speaks the language of the upper echelons” (Kittler 250).

29 Punching Out tells the story of an auto plant, specifically a stamping plant (Budd Automotive),

in the year after it has closed. Paul Clemens chronicles the process of it being disassembled and

redistributed to other factories around the world. Rather than working with the disassembly

crews in order to understand the experience firsthand Paul Clemens, dedicates large amounts of

time to camping out in the plant and watching the processes of its disassembly. He is a journalist

rather than functioning as an ethnographer engaged in participant observation like Solange

DeSantis (Life on the Line), Lori… (On the Line at Subaru Isuzu) or Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickled

and Dimed). He turns down opportunities to work with the crew, but is there more often and

certainly for longer a longer duration than the majority of the workers. The plant is described in

the terms of a netherworld, with pits into which workers descend and heights to which they must

climb in order to reach the “crown” of the largest presses. The plant is peopled by travelers from

distant lands and has many dangers such the thieves and scrappers who lurk in their midst, seen

only in glimpses and disappearing into the shadows. The plant appears to have its own weather

system which is always appreciably harsher than the weather outside. Artifacts from the plants

previous life litter the industrial landscape. Clemens mythologizes the plant and it is the plant

which is the book’s most important character. The heroes of this story are those who possess 153 both the greatest skill and the most entertaining foibles. Within American culture, in the moment of post-industrialism there is a tendency toward fascination with those who continue to work with their hands despite an almost categorical imperative to do otherwise. This is evidenced by the burgeoning subgenre of TV shows which showcase skilled labor; Ice Road Truckers, Ax Men and The Deadliest Catch being just a few. One is reminded, if only passingly, of Melville and his book Moby Dick. At the time Moby Dick was written, an indeed, in the duration of years since then, as a debased and lowly trade. However, Melville is able to weave philosophy within the pages of trade specifications and technical jargon. Perhaps it is for this reason that Clemens repeatedly mentions the crew of the Pequod as he tells of the plant’s disassembly. Of course

Clemens mentions Moby Dick throughout the book. Moby Dick tells the tale of a group of sailors aboard a whaling ship which functions as an ocean going factory. Aboard the ship is a captain who is obsessed with killing the a white whale which maimed him years earlier. The whale’s name is Moby Dick and the captain, Ahab, is willing to do whatever it takes to destroy the whale. The whale ultimate represents nature and the ship they sail on, The Pequod, is a representation of industry. Clemens uses this Nineteenth Century vision of whaling and the battle between industry and nature as the defacto allegory of “Punching Out.” In this manner he presents industry, ergo the whaling ship, as the forces of globalization. The factory, or at least its contents are the whale which must be killed in Moby Dick and dismantled in “Punching Out.” In either circumstance the Whale/Nature/the Bud Plant, are fundamentally dangerous and cannot be taken without considerable struggle. Unlike The Grapes of Wrath, the workers of Punching Out are not just heading toward the west, the work itself is moving, along with the machinery needed to perform that work. It is a greater, more integrated automotivity. The workers, largely

American, move primarily around the Midwest, scrapping plants and picking them apart. Rather 154 than picking fruit like the itinerants of the Great Depression, they are “picking apart the carcass…” They are more like the neighbor’s boy, Willy Freely, who is paid to destroy the

Joad’s farm than Tom Joad, destined for his revolutionary epiphany on the road. If the turtle is the symbol of the family struggling to get across the road in The Grapes of Wrath, then the City of Detroit and the factory are interchangeable as symbols of each other being cleaned out and abandoned in the pages of Punching Out. It is the technological diaspora; the redistribution of technology across the globe. Everything is moved except the plant. When one of the workers (he may be an engineer) discovers that the plant will remain unused he says, “What a waste”. Just to ask such a question is to be ignorant of the state of affairs in Detroit specifically and in the rust belt in general. It is ironic that Henry Ford’s primary inspiration for the assembly line was the disassembly line of the meat industry (wherein an animal would be taken apart as it was conveyed by a series of meat cutters). The assembly line which made Detroit what it was has itself been disassembled in a somewhat systematic process which more closely resembles craft production than the highly deskilled jobs of the assembly line.

30 “George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Philip K. Dick…each of these writers predicted that technology would be an important tool of state oppression” (Bowden 66).