So, I’ve been sitting down to write this thing, and after looking over the 30 pages worth of write-ups I think it’ll make most sense for me to do a reading of Butler’s Erewhon. Also, I found Butler’s article that the Book of Machines section is based on. Here’s the link: http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-ButFir-t1-g1-t1-g1-t4-body.html. I’ll leave Sister Carrie to my Merish paper.

I’m definitely going to talk about technology and enslavement. Also, C.S. Lewis’s critical essay on technology and how it enslaves man will be really helpful as well.  Okey dokey, that solved that.

Sue Zemka’s 2002 article, “Erewhon and the End of Utopian Humanism,” is really great, and I plan on using it in my paper. Here’s the link: http://0-www.jstor.org.library.lausys.georgetown.edu/stable/30032027?seq=4

Next semester is going to come sooner than I’d like, so I’m starting to really think about this application process. I like Science and Technology Studies as a whole, but I know that my writing sample is going to have to emphasize one over the either (ie: more science-y, or more technologically based). So, I was thinking, will I “package” myself more as “science girl” or “technology girl?” (haha, I like them both actually….sounds like a nifty super-hero name). After much thought, I’ve decided that I’m probably going to submit a writing sample that demonstrates my interests in electricity and literature, that way I can have both science and technology: the electrical phenomenon is itself scientific, but it’s applications could also bring it into the technological sphere. I’ve really started thinking about this distinction between science and technology after someone in the audience at UVA asked for me to expand on that distinction, and I think that was incredibly helpful. It’s really quite simple–electricity, as a principle, is science, and it’s application is technological– but I don’t think I was explicitly thinking about the distinction. 

So, in light of all this, I think I’m going to stick with the electrical metaphor and magnetism that we see earlier in the century, rather than focusing on the more technological metaphors of bodies and machines that we begin to see later in the century. I’d like to focus on how notions of animal magnetism provide mental maps, which allowed for a more fluid understanding of race. I touch on this in my UVA presentation: when bodies are thought to be unified by an electrical principle, then the importance of skin is diminished. I’ve always wanted to write on Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee and now I think I’ll have my chance! Bird, himself a trained physician, was clearly informed by principles of animal magnetism with all the “body jumping” that happens throughout. I’m thinking about how Sheppard Lee’s soul enters the body of the dead slave. Oh, I’m excited! I miss early American texts (Sheppard Lee is 1835, I believe), and I think I can have the opportunity to get back into this period.

I am blown away by Steven E. Jones’s Against Technology. Dr. Macovski recommended reading it for my paper and I’m glad I did. Jones talks about the ways in which the term Luddite has evolved from its initial use in 1811 to describe the followers of Ned Ludd to its contemporary association with the general technophobe. The original Luddites, Jones argues, were far from techophobic. They were, in fact, highly skilled laborers who went around smashing the very machines that were being used to replace their labor. Unlike modern day Luddites or “neo-Luddites,” the original Luddites did not complain about the prominance of technology in their daily lives. “Neo-Luddites” express discomfort over technology’s capacity for enslavement. A “neo-Luddite” would complain of being tied to her cellphone, checking the internet twenty times a day, etc.

This, of course, complicates my earlier argument that electricity is construed as man’s slave. While it is true that electricity is described in these terms (see past blog entry, Electricity as Man’s Slave) other things are also going on in nineteenth-century philosophies of technology. So, at the same time that electricity is described as man’s slave, technology is also percieved as enslaving man. I would like to argue that the fear of technological enslavement that is seen in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has its roots in the ninenteenth.

In Samuel Butler’s 1875 Erewhon, the argument is made that machines will enventually develop consciousness and in order to avoid a mechanical take over machine should be selectively destroyed to limit their numbers (Note, the author says we can’t destroy all machines because we’ve become too dependent on them, thereby acknowledging that man is already enslaved). Butler’s text is an example of neo-luddism of the internet age rather than the Ned Ludds of 1811. Machines aren’t being smashed because they are a threat to the skilled labor force; rather, they’re being smashed because technology itself is fearful. 

So….I think I’ve offically decided on my thesis: I’m interested in the ways in which technology is associated with slavery. Specifically how the very technology that man enslaves also enslaves man. I think that nineteenth-century texts that deal with technology represent this very ambivalence: technology both liberates and enslaves. Yay, thesis!

I’m beginning to realize that my research interests aren’t as specific as I thought they once were. Yes, I am interested in how the electrical metaphor and race are connected, but what about technology in general? This is of course for another paper (or another chapter in my thesis), but after reading Nell Irvin Painter’s “Representing Truth: Sojourner Truth’s Knowing and Becoming Known,” I’m starting to contemplate the advent of photographic technology and the ways it intersects with race. Two important quotations:

Although prosperous African Americans had their photographs taken for their own use, bourgeois portraiture was as uncommon as bourgeois blacks. In the 1860s images of black people were rare, and most of them had not been taken at the instigation of the subjects. Photographs of black men were most often found in the files of city police, where photography had taken its place as a tool of law enforcement two decades earlier (485, 486).

AND

Another genre of photography also took people of color as its subject matter: the anthropological specimen photographs that displayed ‘types’ of native peoples to educated metropolitans. In anthropological photographs, captive individuals, usuaully stripped of their clothing and staring straight into the camera were displayed as examples of otherness, like insects pinned in cases or stuffed mammals in museusms. British and French explorers specialized in this genre of natural history photography, but the American biologist Louis Agassiz had specimen photographs of enslaved African Americans taken in the 1850s. Sojourner Truth’s posture, clothing, and stance distinguish her from the criminals or native types who shared her color, for she is well groomed, well clothed, and posed so as not to look directly into the camera’s lens (486).

Both passages point to the intersections between race and technology, how technology is often part in parcel of policing or, in the case of photography, actually aiding in creating “fixed” categories of race. If individuals could be photographed and their race could be labeled from these photographs, a kind of running, universal language of racial cateogories was beginning to be systematized. I wonder if a reading of Pudd’nhead Wilson and the use of “fingerprinting” to discern race as stand-in for this anthropological photography could be done. Hmm…

So, could this be my thesis??!!–how race and technology interesect, as seen in the electrical metaphor, telegraph, photography, etc.