Brooks Landon
Two Primo Takes on Pomo’s Technological Sublime
David E. Nye. Narratives
and Spaces: Technology and the Construction of American Culture.
Columbia UP, 1997. xvi + 224 pp. $45 cloth; $17.95 paper.
Mark Dery. The
Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink of the Millenium.
Grove, 1999. 224 pp. $25 cloth.
Show Mark Dery pictures of Coney Island
at night, its garish architecture outlined by thousands of electric lights, and
he starts wondering whether the turn-of-the-century carnival of America’s
first great amusement park is a harbinger for the excesses and grotesqueries of
contemporary pomo culture. Show David Nye those same pictures, and Nye starts
wondering exactly where Coney Island fits into the history of the
electrification of America. Both authors see the Coney Island of 1910 as crucial
to the development of a consumer culture of sensation and simulation, but, while
Nye views Coney Island within several —orderly— narratives of
technological progress, Dery sees it in terms of carnivalesque cultural chaos.
Dery and Nye approach contemporary American culture from very different
perspectives and to very different ends, but these two books feature a
surprising overlap of subjects, and both should be of interest to cultural
studies students and science fiction scholars. Moreover, Dery’s wonderfully
written essays, what he terms his —perilous tap dance in the minefield
between pop intellectualism and academic criticism— (viii), display more
than enough cultural insight and verbal élan to reward anyone who likes to read
and to think.
Nye’s Narratives and Spaces
continues its author’s well-respected project of unpacking the prevailing
narratives related to America’s understanding (or misunderstanding) of
technological change. With Electrifying America (MIT, 1990), The
American Technological Sublime (MIT, 1994), and Consuming Power: A Social
History of American Energies (MIT, 1999), Nye has established himself as one
of our most insightful and reliable commentators on the history and cultural
construction of technology in America. In Narratives and Spaces he
revisits much of his earlier work, as he focuses on the ways technological
change has been narrativized to create American —landscapes,—
including the newest one of cyberspace. Nye’s primary goal is to discredit the
notion of technological determinism; instead, Nye uses ten case studies to argue
that —most fiction has a technological underpinning— (180) and that
theories of narration rather than technology itself determine the cultural
impact of technology. His case studies range from how railroad technology was
narrativized to create the —natural vistas— of Niagara Falls and the
Grand Canyon, to how NASA failed to narrativize the moon as a landscape during
the Apollo Program, to how narratives about computers have reconstructed the
machines’ initial association with authoritarianism to make them guarantors of
democracy and decentralization, the creators of the interior landscape of
cyberspace.
Nye devotes a chapter to the
electrification of the American West, a chapter to Wright Morris’s photo-novel
The Home Place (1948), a chapter to New Deal electrification projects,
and three chapters to various aspects of World’s Fairs as loci of
technological narratives. All of this should be of significant interest to
students of American Studies and of the cultural representation of technology,
but two of his chapters strike me as also being of particular interest to
readers and scholars of science fiction. His fifth chapter, —Energy
Narratives,— reconsiders novels (such as The Great Gatsby [1925])
not generally known for their focus on technology in terms of how they
narrativize energy. An energy narrative, Nye explains, may derive implicitly
from the form of energy (steam, electricity, nuclear power, etc.) that is a
central part of the social order depicted in a text, or it may derive explicitly
from a particular technology —such as electric high-tension lines or a
hydroelectric dam— that —becomes the subject of or the location for
social struggle— (75). According to Nye’s schema, —most explicit
energy narratives emphasize one of the following five preconceptions: (1)
natural abundance, (2) artificial scarcity, (3) human ingenuity, (4) man-made
apocalypse, and (5) existential limits— (77). While it is clear that
science fiction is not one of Nye’s literary interests, it is tempting
to wonder what new insights into sf such a typology might yield: reconceiving
the genre in terms of its explicit or implicit energy narratives might lead to a
fresh and provocative understanding of its underlying assumptions.
To these five characteristic approaches
to energy narratives, Nye’s conclusion adds a much broader typology of at
least six characteristic narratives of technology in general. In this umbrella
schema, narratives of technology (1) tend to overlook or undervalue the impact
of machines, (2) present machines as agents of social ameliorization, (3) depict
technology as a means of social control, (4) present new technologies,
particularly media, as reshaping the perception of time and space, (5) satirize
the unintended consequences of technology, or (6) depict new technology as
apocalyptic. —All of these narratives,— Nye observes, —can be
used to present technologies as deterministic forces, which, depending on one’s
assumptions, can lead to automatic growth, social betterment, massive
surveillance, transformation of the life-world, ironic reversals of intended
results, or apocalyptic destruction— (179). Nye rejects each of these six
possibilities as master-narratives, however, arguing for the importance of
—contemplating a set of rival discourses— to free us —from being
the prisoner of any one account— (188). Once again, Nye’s discussion is
not concerned with sf, but seems to me to offer a potentially useful analytic
grid for rethinking the way sf works function within larger cultural contexts.
Nye’s ninth chapter, —Don’t
Fly Me to the Moon: The Public and the Apollo Space Program,— may also be
of particular interest to sf readers and scholars, as it relentlessly chronicles
the extent to which the Apollo Program was never seen as compelling by the
American public. In 1965 only 45 percent of all Americans favored going to the
moon, with 42 percent opposed. In 1967, support for going to the moon dropped to
34 percent and support remained about that low until Neil Armstrong set foot on
the moon in 1969. While the Apollo Program was most enthusiastically supported
by —those who were young, affluent, well-educated, Caucasian, and
male— (151), it was strongly opposed by —African-Americans, women, the
least educated, and the poor— (150). Only a month after the successful moon
landing, 47 percent of Americans believed —that the space program was ‘not
worth it’— (152). Nye argues that significant popular support for the
Apollo Program never materialized because NASA administrators and supportive
politicians and scientists failed to construct the moon as a landscape, —as
infrastructure or background for our collective existence— (159), but he
goes on to note that —the Apollo Program appears to be gaining sanctity in
retrospect— as it becomes a unifying cultural memory (160). While Nye does
not contrast this —narrative failure— with the —narrative
success— that has constructed cyberspace, sf readers and critics may well
find this topic worth considering.
A clear subtext of Nye’s chapters has
to do with the author’s obvious anxiety that the deconstructive moves of
postmodern literary theory may somehow challenge the idea that history can still
be written. —Social historians,— proclaims Nye, —do not need the
wrecking ball of deconstruction,— since they —labor to create new
texts out of fragments, and in that sense they have been postmodernists for a
long time— (8). Like Nye, Mark Dery reveals a deep-seated mistrust of
narratives of technological determinism, and Dery also critiques deconstruction,
noting that it, along with semiotics and New Historicism, comes strangely close
to sharing the world-view of conspiracy theory. Of course, —the best
conspiracy theorists,— he wryly observes, —are unhinged scholars,
virtuosos of overinterpretation and amok ‘intertextuality’— (21). But
then, Dery sees both conspiracy theory and deconstruction as not-unjustified
panic-attack responses to contemporary everyday life. Up from what Dery sees as
an increasingly deep pool of cultural anxiety bubble the oddities and
grotesqueries his essays target for interrogation, auditioning each initially
unlikely-seeming subject for a role as a millennial meme. What Dery sets out to
answer in The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium, continuing and expanding the
information-age cultural critique he began in Escape Velocity: Cyberculture
at the End of the Century (Grove, 1996), is the question of whether or not
the world has gone crazy, and to this question he brings not just the
methodologies of deconstruction, but of an amazingly wide range of contemporary
theory. His answer, somewhat anticlimactically—but characteristic of his
generally even-handed approach to competing cultural claims—is —yes and
no— (30).
Starting from John Kasson’s brilliant
reading, in Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (Hill
& Wang, 1978), of the different social and cultural functions Coney Island
served at the start of the twentieth century, Dery suggests that all of American
society may be —out of control— in the way that Coney Island was
around 1910, when a writer called it a —pyrotechnic insanitarium— (3).
Coney’s fin-de-siècle —signature blend of infernal fun and mass
madness, technology and pathology— strikes Dery as strongly parallel to the
—infernal carnival— of fin-de-millennium America (6). The
fourteen essays in The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium surround this proposition
with an atmosphere of linked or linkable information, more than justifying Dery’s
savvy claim that his book is not a linear argument but —an obsolete hunk of
dead-tree hardware that went to sleep and dreamed it was a Web page— (44).
Ranging in ostensible subject from killer clowns and cloned sheep to the
Disneyfication and Nike-Swooshing of America, from Jim Carrey’s talking
asshole act to the Unabomber’s murderous ecotopianism, these essays deliver on
Dery’s promise to refract —the megatrends and microshifts of American
culture late in the twentieth century through the prism of a mass fad, a
subcultural craze, a pop archetype, a work of art, a TV show, a corporate
enterprise, a technological breakthrough, or the night-vision world-view of a
mad bomber, a millennial cult, a conspiratorial underground— (43). While
the rhetoric and research in The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium invariably lean
toward constructing contemporary culture as —out of control,— Dery
scrupulously reminds us in essay after essay of the perhaps even more unsettling
prospect of a —controlled— or —ordered— culture structured
by the norms of an elite, whether of the right or the left, whether composed of
technophobes or technophiles. Behind too-easy condemnations of liminal culture,
Dery notes, of a too-easy dismissal of Jim Carrey’s talking butt act and of
other recent valorizations of excrement, —lurk the old, familiar specters
of class, gender, and race (along with the modern frisson of sexual
preference)— that shaped elite culture responses to Coney Island (98).
It is almost always the case—as is
particularly true of his —Return to Abnormalcy: Freaks, Gaffes, and Geeks
at the Fin-de-Millennium——that Dery’s essays take unpredictable and
rewarding turns as he examines a subject through differing theories, counters
his own arguments, effortlessly justifies associational links, and reaches
provocative conclusions. In this case, he starts from a discussion of sideshow
freaks, teases the topic through five or six major turns (including a delicious
go at right-wing talk radio), and ends with the pragmatic observation that
freaks ‘r’ us: —Collaborating on the consensual hallucination that is
the freak, we become what we behold— (105). Dery’s best essays, such as
his superb —Wild Nature, Wired Nature: The Unabomber Meets the
Digerati— (a compelling interrogation of —the buried lines of
connection between the Unabomber and the geek elite who style themselves the ‘digerati’—
[229]), not only unfold in impressively original ways, but also swell with
finely crafted, exquisitely precise sentences: —Wild Nature conceals wired
nature: The Unabomber may be a wolfman, but he’s a prosthetic one, a
self-declared ’techno-nerd’ beneath his hairy neo-Luddite hide— (230);
or: —The Unabomber’s radical libertarian vision of a ‘postnational’
body politic, decomposed into scattered cells, is the missing link between wild
nature and wired nature, the toggle switch that connects the Unabomber to
cyberpunk on one hand and cybercapitalism on the other— (236).
Dery’s subtitle, —American
Culture on the Brink,— fails to specify whether that brink is of chaos,
apocalypse, anarchy, disaster, the millennium, or any of rhetorical brinkmanship’s
other usual suspects. —On the brink of precisely what?— the picky
reader might ask. One possible answer, based on Dery’s patterns of progression
and argument in the fourteen essays that ground this book, might be on the brink
of escaping theoretical formulation, as American culture is simply becoming too
weird and too contradictory in too many different ways for cultural critics to
—control— or —edit— its burgeoning oddities into any
satisfying master narrative. Even as it looks as if Dery is trying to craft a
new meta-narrative of the odd, he acknowledges that:
the information revolution and
globalization have greatly amplified the historical tensions in postwar American
society—between capitalism and democracy, private and public, the elite and
the masses, national and global, suburban and urban, the mainstream and the
margins, —normal— and —deviant,— mind and matter, culture
and nature, unreal and real. (261)
As a consequence, Dery views
contemporary America as —less a coherent society than a fault zone, a
network of interconnected societal fractures— (261). He’s not the first
and is far from the only cultural critic to make this point; indeed, Dery’s
larger targets—such as the erasure of the borders between the real and the
unreal, the growing sense that computers lead us ever more toward disembodiment,
or the sense that the digerati are simply the newest face of corporate greed and
social irresponsibility—have all been theorized more completely and more
rigorously, if much less engagingly, elsewhere. His particular genius is that he
gets at these larger targets through pockets of strangeness on the very edges of
our peripheral vision, bringing to his criticsm the kind of always edgy,
sometimes creepy, insight I associate with the fiction of J.G. Ballard.
Dery’s subjects include the oddly
inappropriate-seeming appropriation of Edvard Munch’s modernist emblem, The
Scream, by a postmodern culture that rewrites the terror of Munch’s
painting in ironic and affectless ways. He devotes essays to the profusion of
—killer clowns— in postmodern media culture and to the reasons why Jim
Carrey’s talking butt gag found mainstream acceptance. A discussion of the
—dead meat— art of Damien Hirst turns into a discussion of the
emblematic functioning of mad-cow disease, which Dery suggests has served as
—a screen for the projection of popular anxieties about the free-floating,
indeterminate nature of things in postmodern culture, where quotation,
hybridization, and mutation are the order of the day— (135). A description
of The Operation, a frequently yucky example of TV-verité on the
Learning Channel, turns into one of Dery’s many briefs for the persistence of
the body in an age of digital disembodiment—one of his many points of contact
with the discourses of cyberpunk. Indeed, Dery rarely misses an opportunity to
celebrate the reality and corporeality of flesh—no matter how grotesque or
grim its form—against digital dissing. —It’s the body’s job, these
days,— Dery sadly observes, —to be a symbol of ‘detestable putridity’
in the eyes of an information society characterized by an exaltation of mind and
a contempt for matter, most of all the body—that aging, earth-bound relic of
Darwinian evolution that Net junkies sneeringly refer to as ‘meat’—
(142). In —Space Oddities: Heaven’s Gate and Homo Cyber—Strange
Allegiances on the Level Above Human,— Dery warns that the —neognosticism—
that led to mass suicide by Heaven’s Gate cultists is not all that far removed
from the protocols of cyberpunk and other longstanding strains of sf, and the
new desiderata of the digerati who rally around Wired as their blueprint
for the future. Terming the Heaven’s Gate cultists —merely a
cyberspace-cadet caricature of the growing alienation of our minds from our
bodies in an information society where we spend ever greater amounts of our
lives sitting in chairs, staring at screens,— Dery concludes:
Obviously, most of us aren’t going to
be packing our carry-on luggage for a one-way flight to the Evolutionary Level
Above Human anytime soon. But as increasing numbers of us spend more and more of
our working lives and leisure time on the other side of the screen, a neognostic
alienation from our own fleshly —vehicles— and the world around us is
beginning to haunt mainstream America. The relocation, in technology, of many of
our mental and muscular skills, what McLuhan called the —self-amputation of
our physical bodies,— has made the supposedly obsolete body a source of
creeping anxiety, if not outright fear and loathing. (255-56)
As the above paragraph may suggest, the
concerns, claims, and assumptions of recent sf are never far from the focus of
Dery’s essays. Moreover, as I read Dery’s provocative discussion of Renee
French’s chilling comics, —Grim Fairy Tales: Renee French’s
Kinderculture,— I began to realize that his consistently perceptive and
wide-ranging references to sf works represent only one part of the significant
connection between his essays and contemporary sf. Much more important is that
Dery’s essays mine the cultural phenomena that more and more give rise to sf’s
most engaging narratives, suggesting that the horrific ontologies of artists
such as Renee French or David Lynch, rather than the triumphalist physics of Hal
Clement’s Mission of Gravity (1953), may now fuel the genre’s
innermost workings.
Promotional web pages for Dery’s
books contain a brief bio that ends with an ambitious credo suitable for a
whacked-out postmodern Whitman (Walt, not Slim):
Aesthetically, however, I’m
interested in the unlit, unfrequented corners of society, the nethermost regions
of the self: freaks, forensic pathology, true crime, conspiracy theory,
cannibalism, madness, medical museums, Art Brut, weird science, sexual deviance,
soft tissue modification (by tribal peoples and postmodern primitives), creature
features, alien abductions, insects, Situationism, Surrealism, science fiction,
the gothic, the grotesque, the carnivalesque—in short, extremes and excess of
every sort. I want to induce, in my reader, the vertigo that comes from leaning
too far over the edge of the cultural abyss.
And for my money, that’s exactly what
Dery delivers in The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium. Whether or
not I share his particular anxieties, I find his approach to American culture
through its anxieties both engaging and valuable. I’m a newcomer to the Mark
Dery bandwagon, but—based on the perception, the precision, and the panache he
so clearly displays in this book—I look forward to a long and exciting ride.
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