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    Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, Editors Cultures of United States Imperialism Bill Brown The onto Science Fiction, the World’s Fai ands ent” P ; en the Prosthetics of Empire, title 1910-1915 et me begin in the future, after World War I, with the publication of Edgar Rice Burroughs's sixth Martian novel. The Master Mind of Mars (1927) presents itself as a manuscript written by Ulysses Paxton and sent to Burroughs to add to his “as yet unappreciated contributions to the scientific literature of the world."! On the battle- field, this captain's legs have been “blown away from midway be- ‘ween the hips and knees.” He shrinks “more from the thought of going maimed through life” than from the thought of death (360) But with his eyes focused on the Red Planet, Paxton is able to “throw off the hideous bonds of [his] mutilated flesh” and finds himself on Mars, standing “naked upon two good legs” (361). Re-membering the war-torn body, science fiction here performs a magic act of pros- thetics, But while the prosthetic fantasy empowers the hero to tran- scend his disintegrating body, the novet takes as its central task the injunction against any scientific production of such transcendence. ‘A modern Frankenstein, the Master Mind of Mars, Ras Thavas, having developed a technology to preserve bodies and to transfer brains, furnishes his clientele with corporeal youth, and the result- ing traffic in bodies provokes a kind of somatic chaos: “Two men, cach possessing the body of the other,” sit beside “an old and wicked Making men instead of iron, this mill owner's son would, let us say, make men of ‘ron, insensate and unconscious, never suffer: pe rom the ith, poverty, ant physical deformity that Rebecca Harding ‘Strong, hardy, bronze... powered in all that goes to make up the ” this “physical man,” but the 'n this mechanized conquest Of the indigenous race, ‘The Prosthetics of Empire Figure 1, The Steam-Man, is itself racially coded: the Steam-Man’s face is “made of iron, painted a black color, with a pair of fearful eyes, anda tremendous grinning mouth’ (12); in multiple editions of the novel he is illustrated variously, but in- variably he is an enormous black man (figure 1). Thus, in its occasional moments of breakdown, a kind of technological frenzy, the Steam-Man may be said to embody the threat of the slave's (or the recently freed Icitrance in the way that, as Andreas Huyssen has argued, the machine-woman of Lang's Metropolis comes to embody the threat of female sexual excess.’ More simply, while this technology re~ leases Johnny from the able/disabled somatic binary, it does so only by racializing the mind/body and capital/labor binaries. Which is to say that the novel emancipates man from his body but incarcerates the machine within the American system of somatic semiosis. This codification makes immediate sense, of course, according to the Aristotelian logic with which George Fitzhugh and others defended slavery before the war: for if the “natural slave” is he “who is able to exe- cute with his body what another contrives.” then any American machine “naturally” appears as an American slave, which means: a black Ameri- s a 2 ro a Bill Brown cané The novel, participating in this logic, exemplifies Critical Theory's Point that technology, far from being dependent on scientific neutrality, 's and has been an objectification of divisions within society—in this Case, an objectified preservation of divisions that have been politically (if the important quip made by Fanny Fern in sessed with an interracial, cross. ‘generational, and homosocial bond that, inthis case, even cl haracterizes man's relation to machinery? But I want to emphasize something else: the way the novel Pletion of, his body. While the narrator of Life in the Iron Mills pleads that what,—other than he is,” a longing artistically rl Woman, (25), in Ellis’s novel, Johnny, m somatic self-identity. Borrowing is body is his, but not him. ‘sing an era's conviction that, as Ronald Takaki become “a replacement for the human body” century American coding of prosthesis that we Phy; prompts him to modernize the but not without figuring that ma- 18ers are the slaves in the republic ‘The Prosthetics of Empire of the body.” Moreover, even when he goes on to describe the beauty of the “well-shaped, intelligent, docile limb,” he equates it with the “beauty and firmness which moulded the soft outlines of the Indian gitl and the White Captive in the studio of [Palmer's] namesake in Albany.” The refer- ence here—to the statuary of Erastus Dow Palmer—establishes the limb as female and as either “racially” distinct or captive. Reconstructions of the body ultimately inspire Holmes to produce a celebration of American technology that rhetorically reconstructs the nation, that establishes the power of this nation despite its present ills, and that envisions further national progress once “we recover from the social and political convul- sion ... and eliminate the materies morbi.” But this celebration, like the dime novel, reinscribes, within the prosthetically completed body, the very conditions that led to war." What I've been describing is the way the inaugural American science fiction novel can only restore a postbellum body by restoring antebel- lum race relations." But it should be added that by establishing a race for machines The Steam-Man unveils a mechanics of race wherein “race” appears not as a biological property but as an effect of power. The text thus provides some purchase on the way technological advances could, in contrast, threaten the existing order. As Takaki argues, “the hope for industrial ‘progress;” which necessitated the industrial proletarization of the free slave, stood in obvious tension with “the desire for racial depen- dency and order” (211). The novel clearly inverts that dependency and makes a muck of that order. It stages a master/slave dialectic wherein mastery depends not just on the compliance of the slave but on the slave's ‘oming a compliant extension of the master’s body. The inventor may never find himself, like Frankenstein, a slave of his creature, but his hero- ism depends on his hybridity—on being both white and black, both man and machine, both less and more than human. And this can help to account for the fact that the book's first lesson— Where the body was (ploughing fields, hauling rocks, fighting Indians) there the machine will be—is no longer taught during the sudden pro- liferation of science fiction from 1910 to 1915. In the foreword to Bur- oughs's The Princess of Mars (1912), serialized shortly before Tarzan, the hero, John Carter, isan “athletic man,” “a splendid specimen of manhood, Standing a good two inches over six feet, broad of shoulder and narrow Chip." In the first pages of George Allan England's Darkness at Dawn lees (1912-14), the engineer, Allan Stern, wakes up from a millennium- suspended animation having “kept the resilient force of vigorous ‘manhood’; the “self-contained, courteous, yet unapproachable engineer 13 Uhas] disappeared” to reveal “ust a man, a young man, thewed with the is 'S Even in the most technologically oriented of novels, Hugo Gernsback’s Ralph 124C 4/ + (serialized in 1911 in Modem Electronics, the country's first radio magazine, Produced by Gernsback himself), the inventor exhibits the the greatest living scientists of the day,” tran ‘dy (as he must in order to be the hero that heis), nonetheless his body is not displaced by, but corresponds to, his Powers of invention: on the first page of the novel we discover a “big man,” ‘a Physique much larger than that of the average man of his times.” * Body and mind metaphorize one another Ralph's body is his, and i's him. Johnny's frontier companion in The Steam-Man embodies a priot, Peaneet mode of American success whigh the crippled boy can share scends the limits of his bo h of social and technological Progress only while as though to combat what Veblen called the “cultural incid chine process,” a mechanization of the everyday, Goux refers to as “technological soci- ality,” wherej ese novels, dualize agency by heroizing the engi- eer over and against the “incorporation of America”; they theatricalize the Amer ‘ican '8 to the paradigm that Susan Jeffords bas taught us to call the “remasculinization of America® ard to qutain this body, they resory, for all their futurism, to 20 imperialist narrative Paradigm that had become Tecognizably outmoded in the first decade the creation of the Paname Canal Zone, what we ic extension of American—not a “natural” expres- hb The Prosthetics of Empire global flow of goods."® In turn, of course, preserving the vitality and in- nate difference of this body becomes the means of naturalizing American global power. American Body Parts In 1908, employing early trick photography, the Vitagraph company pro- duced a comedy, The Thieving Hand, which must also be one of the first American horror films. After a one-armed pencil vendor buys an eerily animate artificial limb, he discovers that the arm and hand are obses- sively, frantically pickpocketing passersby without his volition. Unable to control the hand, the vendor sells it to a pawn shop, from which the limb crawls back and reattaches itself to his body. When he is ultimately jailed for his unconscious crimes, the limb finds its rightful owner, a thief, and the thieving body becomes whole again? This prosthetic nightmare quickly locates us in the realm of the un- canny—more particularly, in the early parts of Freud's famous essay (1914) where he refers to the paper by Jentsch (1906) that suggests that un- canniness is prompted by automata and our more general doubts about “whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate.” To this, Jentsch _ adds “the uncanny effect of epileptic fits, and of manifestations of in- : sanity, because these excite in the spectator the impression of automatic, mechanical processes at work behind the ordinary appearance of mental activity.” While these last comments approach an (uncanny) account of Freud's own metapsychology, Freud himself focuses on the way dismem- bered limbs “have something peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when... they prove capable of independent activity in addition.” Follow- ing Freud, of course, we soon face castration anxiety. (Following Lacan, we more slowly face, in such events as war's dismemberment of the sol- dier, an unveiling of that “massive cultural disavowal of the lack upon which [male subjectivity] rests.")?2 But the automata in Jentsch’s discus- sion and the autonomous limb in the film achieve a more remarkable un- Canniness if we take a detour through the Marx of the Grurdrisse, where he describes the transposition of “living labor” into the activity ofthe rs] | chine, capital's most explicit assimilation of “living labour into itself ‘as pital (the is capital's though love possessed its body.”” In this personification of Perpetual flip side of Marx's burgeoning antihumanism), desire that becomes the ground for rethinking anxieties about the human body. Within the system of machinery, labor suffers its final “metamor- Bs " wherein the machine “is itself the virtuoso,” wherein “workes themselves can be no more than the conscious limbs of he aura This is meant to suggest that just as the somatic comedy of The Tho ing Hand anticipates that of Chaplin's Modern Times, so too i © " ri the somatic ramifications of mechanized production. In other lich dynamic, The Thieving Hand is ur b is in fact so {amar familiar bce of the worker's translation intoa limb and because of the fate of his lt les of war." fnzine continue to make as Many cripples as did the missi ath of Moreover, the very success of mechanized industry and the Brow Scientific management had disintegrated the human body i pickin of production, Frank Gilbreth’s Concrete System (1908) and ° ing System (1909) successfull e1 compricey the worker's accomplishments, and, in his subsequent oe Braphic studies of motion, he managed, as Siegfried Giedion ne t 10 separate motion from “its conjunction with the human ook te £8 Giedion suggests, the mechanical imagination begins by isolatit stasize human hand, then the first decades of the twentieth century hypost j| that beginn: tsion oflabor into the very bodies of workers, render olkction of unconnected parte" Huron sab he materially reduced to the ©peration of the body Part, al ithin h Hons only as a part, the “conscious limb,” wi a ier ver~ peience fiction ofthis period occasionally manifests anoth Sion of 1 ‘is Uncanniness, InBu tians Possess an ext are hounds with t Mar- "roughs’s account of Mars, the geen Hee imbs (used either as legs or as arms), rk, 7 Taylor himself, in his most famous vo of momentarily adopts rategy. While he offers The Principl fin Tesponse to Roosevelt's ‘question ol The Prosthetics of Empire creasing our national efficiency,” he recognizes that the ideal of efficiency alone will hardly do. Against the anticipated complaint that this ideal will transform the worker into a mere “automaton,” he insists that the life of the “frontiersman” was in its intensity of focus fairly well comparable” The “frontier” appears as a rhetorical antidote to machine culture. In Gernsback’s novel, Ralph the inventor comes to recognize that he himself functions only as “a tool, a tool to advance science, to benefit humanity. He belonged, not to himself, but to his Government” (41). And his former sense of success as a “tool” is undone by his feeling for Alice, “an emotion he had never experienced before” (65). Having once lectured that love is “nothing but a perfumed animal instinct,” he ends up missing his lee- tures because of the instinctual distraction (140). His genius ultimately serves neither the government nor humanity but his own mission to save the woman he loves from the villainous foreigner, a Martian. A story of inventions becomes a story about instincts and about bodies, the man’s strong body and the woman's weak body. Like Freud, let us say, Gerns- back hastily introduces sexual relations as a way to displace any inquiry into relations of production. The very title of Gernsback’s novel, Ralph 124C 41+, marks the quan- tification of human being on which scientific management and mass pro- duction depend, But the novel's subtitle—a romance—names its own res- B cue mission, saving Ralph from the process of abstraction. In this respect, the text's two titles crystallize and neutralize the bifurcated fate of the American body in the closing decades of the previous century. In texts like “The Physical Proportions of the Typical Man” (1887), D. A. Sargent (who had become director of the Gymnasium at Harvard in 1879) explains how he devised “a uniform system of measurements” to provide “anthropomet- ric data” and some “standards by which to judge symmetry and strength,” inventing such devices as the “dynameter,” the “spirometer,” and the “ma- Rometer” to test the strength of lungs, chests, triceps, backs, and legs.” Sargent’s somatic calculus standardizes a technology that can detail the “standard body,” normalizing the body by inventing a fragmented “nor- malcy.” But this disintegration of the body has as its complement the vision of an imperialist American body that will recuperate the nation. For the Chicago Tribune, William Matthews, rendering the benefits of Physical culture for “Getting On in the World” (1871), points to England's “splendid empires,” her “victories on the field, in the mart, in the study as the inevitable result of English “physical ability.” “When the sweep- ing work the Germans made of it in their late war with France is called to mind,” another commentator asks, “does it not look as if there was 137 ‘Bill Brown 200d ground for the assumption so a * Physique of the Germans which did the business?"® This more fail iar body, wherein the nation’s and the individual's health converge (asin freely made, that it was the superior A ‘ P re80 said to characterize that body. And itis thie imperialist Physique mae ; that science fiction stages as the proper emb of American success. R; cal triumph not as a machine-body, me | Superior “moral, mental, and physical nares that can express a of power ‘ather, that body appears to assimilate mechat- but as a eugenic body, an “innately i inking re of the novel satisfies what Timothy Brennan, thing Anderson, terms the “the national longing for by “objectifying the ‘one, yet many’ the structure of the nation, a clearh If the geni alongside Benedict styles,” then we might the imperialist longing for Grunication systems, the emerge capitalist world-econ, science fiction makes th tan interracial conflic the globe—the new! Perial/metropolitan The point, then, modern emergence, can imperialist traj century. This body Robertson suggests, we can res ects the “aerial” and the “inter ceptible.®> Additionall duces the American fairs and natural hist tion of the American War—epitomized by Roosevelt's Ro say that the ” of national life and by mimid ne ly bounded jumble of language a subgenre of science fiction sats bgenre i" #. form, infinitely extending those boundarie ng the i le. Ifthe inter metropolitan jumb! I was predicated by the world’s unifice ' om ice of spatial barriers effected by travel and ci planets ly produced and ly, we can argu tory museums) Sin ‘nce of mass culture, and a burgeon . ‘omy—then the very spatial collapse recount 7 '¢ novels’ inter-imperialist rivalry and metropol * appear wholly predictable.» If we recognize th as the “take off period of. globalization,” as oa 'Pect science fiction as the genre that yenize the h ary” as the point of view from whic miniaturized globe—becomes per fe that the genre discursively rep" - “les (ataworld’s naturalist and ethnographic spectacles (at worl that depended on the modern im- network asa mode of cal lection.* vn ent of 's that American science fiction, in its mom it meri- attempts to synchronize the modernity of the At Jectory with an it emerges during male that took ious imperialist body from the previous a transition from the theaticalza Place during the Spanish-Ameri ugh Riders—to the theatricalization The Prosthetics of Empire Figure 2. Roosevelt in Panama. (Library of Congress) of American machinery in World War L2” This body emerges when Ameri- can technology, as epitomized by the Panama Canal, appears as the new mechanical mode of American international triumph, when Roosevelt is famously photographed not on top of a horse but sitting at the controls of the Bucyrus shovel at Pedro Miguel, the startingly white American control of, but miniaturized by, the gargantuan, dark prosthetic machine (figure 2). In relation to such an image, science fiction depicts not just an obsolescent “strenuousness” with which American extra-continental ¢ Pansion was originally configured, but also a body so magnificent it will not be reduced to the miniature. For all its conventionality, the genre finds itself in a dialectical re- lation to the rise of modernism, a dialectic revolving around an axis nist accounts have called “modernization.” Strongly summarized, revis shown us that modernism can be understood as the aesthetic of glob- alization. Ralph 142C 41+, Burroughs’s Martian and Pellucidar novels, and England's trilogy appeared in the period (1910-15) when, as Lefebvre I ESS’:*“S TOO Bill Brown favs, a certain space was shattered” (25), the inaugural phase of what David Harvey cals “time-space compression" (263) the result not just of the industrial subjugation of the world’s spaces, but ales of Ford's spatial- such material developments as radi film, and aerial photography. Its hardly surprising, then, to find William Carlos Williams writing that Gertrude Stein's “pages have become like the United States viewed from an ai imperialism” (302). And Jameson, read: hat modernist “style” can be understood aS a set of “formal symptoms” of the “representational dilemmas of the new imperial world system,” namely the (“necessary”) occlusion of the relation between the life of the metropolis and the life of the colonized subject.¥ The Prosthetics of Empire ment. That kind of ethnographic display, which we can trace back at least as far as William Clarke's Western museum (established in St. Louis in 1816), also took place in San Francisco, But another connection between thet kes me as the more pertinent means of gaining access to the problematic of imperial prosthesis. In the Spanish-American War, the Oregon's difficulty making its way from Puget Sound to Santiago provoked the kind of governmental and popular enthusiasm for the engineering project that helped Roosevelt accomplish what had been an international ambition since the sixteenth century, when Charles V imagined a canal, an ambition made practi- cable once Humboldt, in the early nineteenth century, had completed his studies of the isthmus, Needless to add, the transisthmian transport of treasures back to Europe (and the transport of California gold to the East) had long transformed the region into an imperialist vortex, espe- cially after the midcentury completion of the transisthmian railroad. Fol- lowing the bankruptcy of the private French endeavor and Great Brit- ain’s capitulation to U.S. interests in 1901, the Hay-Herrdn treaty with Colombia in 1903 secured U.S. privilege to build the canal. The Colombia Sovernment’s failure to ratify the treaty provoked Panamanian indepen- dence (an intermittent struggle since 1838), swift American intervention, Roosevelt's instant recognition of the revolutionary government, and the US. government's purchase of the New Panama Canal Company's prop- crty.# Just as the young Herbert Hoover, in his role as publicist for the San Francisco fair, thought of California itself as expressing “the last great Conflict of these [northern and southern] races for the land,” the com- Pletion of the canal itself was thought of as resolving an international Conflict with clear U.S, hemispheric domination’! But this resolution, " should be emphasized, depended foremost on capital investment, the diplomatic system (however scandalous), labor management, and tech- ological know-how—not on the sort of manliness that supposedly char- ‘terized the triumph over Spain. With the support of the United States, Panama's revolution had succeeded without casualties; work on the canal “teceeded as a triumph of American artific a celebration of this triumph—the complex excavation and ae lock the a Construction that had taken more than ten years to comp! a Spiny. the tradition of world expositions, also boasted a decade's "0 ing” inventions; “‘Wireless, ‘radium,’ ‘automobile, ‘aeroplane, ‘Diese! seene" ‘high tension current,” as one list began.” Besides the aviation Tobatics, two particular feats were singled out for special attent ident Wilson's switching the fair “on” from Arlington, Virginia (“an irs, rather between some of the events they celebrate, st “t ethereal impulse spanned the continent in an instant”) and the transcont- nental “telephony,” allowing fairgoers to heat the headlines, the weather Feel and Phonograph music from New York® Almost ‘unimaginably novel, these instances of time-space compression at once mechanically «xtend the human body and effectively disembody presidential powerand the human voice. But accom invisibility was a Servant of industry no less than they are the handmaid of drama.’4 But if “moving pictures,” “aeroplanes,” and transcontinental “tele Phony" inspired admiration, it was the mechanized, $500,000 reproduc tion of the Panama Canal itself, exhibited in the “Zone” (San Francisco’ version of Chicago's Midway), that inspired something like awe (figures} and 4). One “of the most remarkable reproductions ever seen,” the canal left viewers agreeing with “the advertisements” that said, now "you do pot need to visit the Canal itself'"#s This sort of hyperreality achieved "sion—no one needed to see the real canal to know that they did not really need to See it—may well have resulted from its prefigure- tion of aerial Cinematography, its anticipation of the visual experience that inventions at the fair irdseye view of the entire country is obtained as the moving platform slowly conveys one over the five-acre tract of tructed this clever piece of engineering work.” More. exactly, the simulacrum makes author sense because the fully mechanized mode of display corresponds to the newly mecha nes represent machines. And as a gigantic achinery at work, it could help appease the fear . Tike on the canal was simply “too gigantic to be work Rr At Ou, lke any miniature, present a transcendence that erases history and causality: and it Could establish the proper power relation between spectator and Spectacle, with the commodified image mimick- "Ne the commodified territorial Possession that the Canal Zone itself had The Prosthetics of Empire PANAMA CANAL ON THE ZONE. P= PAC. INT. EXPOSITION aN FRANCISCO, 1915) 3. Postcard of the fair’s Panama Canal. PANAMA CANAL ON THE ZONE AN PAC INT. EXPOSITION SAN FRANCISCO, 1915, Figure 4, Postcard of the fair’s Panama Canal become. The exhibit’s production of an acrialized, globalizing point of | view had already been suggested by a Philadelphia Inquirer cartoonist in 1906, representing Roosevelt's “personal observation” of the canal s rather than portraying any personal contact with officials or workers, as Countless photographs did, the cartoon suspends the presidential figure Bill Brown, i beginning of the nineteenth century: the landscape we eal 22 Present itself to an agentlons beholder; travelers appear to be ‘@ collective moving ‘eye on which the sights/sites register.”* On the other hand, the reality effect of the model canal recalls the faked newsreel foo!- age of the Spanish-American War. and the San Francisco Earthquake, the latter employing an claborate model. More significantly, for the “crowds" whose numbers swelled ae Easterners canceled their trips to an embattled Furope, the exhibit develops ¢ ‘erritorializing, even militarized optical Jotmation, producing a new ‘ruth effect that is akin to what Paul Virilio has termed the “logistics of military perception,” crystallized by the Euro- ean war: Over and against the local panoramas provided by the Eiffel The Prosthetics of Empire Figure 6, Postcard of the Acroscope: Tower, the Ferris Wheel, and San Francisco's own Aeroscope (figure 6), the canal exhibit provides “aerial aim” at Central America. For Virilio, “cinema and aviation seemed to form a single moment. By 1914 aviation as ceasing to be strictly a means of flying and breaking records. .. . [I]t was becoming one way, or perhaps even the ultimate way of seeing." AS diversion at the fair, “The Panama Canal” mediates between a residual and an emergent, prosthetic mode of imperialist perception. We can return now to Ralph 124C 41+ and recognize that, de- spite Gernsback’s involvement with radio, the novel concerns itself fore- Most with technologized visualization. In Ralph's house, a 650-foot glass cylinder, he works in the top floor, looking out on the passing “trans: Sceanic’ and “trans-continental” airliners, sharing their perspective on New York (40). In both the aerocabs and his space ship, the scientist achieves the seeing Virilio describes. Inventions of the day, such as the Subatlantic Tube, establish global connection (in this case, between New York and Brest, France), but the Telephot, a television phone, establishes EE” Bill Brown Ralph's visual contact with the rest of the world, just as his Tele-Theate (relying on “composite Telephot Plates” to project a “perfect” fullscak illusion) brings live opera into his home, connecting the voice with the face (86). In this case, the aerialized world picture finds its complement in the close-up. For Ralph, “personal observation’ i both distant and im mediate; the “ultimate way of seeing” is to see the city and the world in miniature and from above, and to see the People of the world face to fae The prostheticized, aerial point of. view does not erase the full-scale image of the human. Despite the fair's display of technological marvels (and despite th fact that a hydroelectrical magnate, Charles C. Moore, served as chair man of the Panama Exposition Company), the official poster for the fair, Petham Nahl's "The Thirteenth Labor of Hercules,” displays nothing tech nological (figure 7). instead, it shows a muscled, naked, Michelangelesque hero forcing apart a pastoral Culebra Cut to create the canal—or, 6 Frank Todd, the fait’s official historian, phrased it, “thrusting apart the aqucntal barrier at Panama to let the world through to the Pacific and incidentally to the. Exposition, whose fair domes and pinnacles rie mistily beyond." If such engineering marvels as the Crystal Palace and the Eiffel Tower were emblems of “progress,” here it is instead a tra scendental hero who emblematizes “power.” And while colossal ‘women Mike Liberty, Columbia, and the Republic) typically symbolize the Amer Gan Ration, the male colossus now, symbolizes the mechanical, interna Nonal triumphs" The poster Produces an antithetical point of view from model canal exhibition: a terrestrial (even sub ‘nt inverts the aerial miniaturization; the giganti¢ wal alternative to the miniature machinery of the Without” human bodies. This classical body sub Weer ant 8Ork ofthe 30-40,000 “whine vas negro workmen,” primarily * West Indians, employed to construct the canal (Todd, 18). It aestheticizes labor into the abstraction of “the thirteenth labor.” But it simultaneous! \ er aeretizes labor, articulating what Marx called the “many-sided play OF the muscles” that is lost within a mechanized labor system. Above all, it occults the mechanical achievement by refiguring the decade-long being OtsrUction asthe gesture sf the individual, who is whole without being pare of a labor, technological, or military force—without being @ 7 tool of the Bovernment.” While Todd admired the poster, it occasioned ( fis Comlaint that the “Titerary language” used to describe the fait had body becomes the vis Zone that operated * become a “sheer mis i f the 'spresentation,” concealing " ders of work" (Todd, 20) 30" Presemtation,” concealing “the real won 46 The Prosthetics of Empire Figure 7. The Hercules poster, from Frank Morton Todd's The Story of the Exposition. (San Francisco, 1921) I'he Bill Brown , te According to the Theweleit paradigm, work on the canal mig understood as part of the era's regulation of bodily (and BS — and the “transcendence of a female/nature."* But aa es ea symbol of that construction (and despite a genital reading ae readily prompts), would seem instead to allegorize capital, aoa talist machine,” in more strict accordance with ma and Gu wr hat oedipal romance. By this I mean that the poster et lation, but a moment of deterritorialization an opening up of as a facilitation of the flow of energy, toney, and goods—be ee “ancillary apparatuses, such as government bureaseracies an nee of law and order, do their most to reterritorialize [that praelaes ing in the process a larger and larger share of surplus value. eee, history, read as this romance, might posit the completion 1 Zone with its military fortification and then the "production ne within the Fair's Zone as premiere moments of ee ae tery in which the territorializing gaze itself is finally offered ors a * of the fair, wondering if “the exposition is anything ean department store in costume,” it was especially lamentable pial i par aueant to “Exploit the World,” that "human achieemeat’ ae “Bit up “in individual packages for the world to come and take an fairs that were funded by the = led by those ideas—or, more pre naires, with specific sites rul -xhibitions” He as internationality itse acter embodies a dialectic of the national and international that chai ies the history of both the fair’s and the canal's representation. are one hand, the poster seems locatable in a national imaginary, whl ‘ual mirror-stage, requiring that its on in the sight of a single body that ea vent Perialist body) as the nation’s own cohe the nation endures a Perpe heterogeneit 'y be integrated (like Roosevelt, like the iny (male) corporeality. On the The Prosthetics of Empire perialist project, fraught by counternationalisms, senate debates, politi- cal corruption, and mud slides. Describing the “monumental contrast” between the war and the exhibition, one report explained that each “is, in its way an unexampled exhibition of war,” one “a war between differ- ent races of mankind,” the other “a war waged by the whole human race against the forces of nature.” The fair itself, the guidebooks maintained, is “the celebration, not of San Francisco, not of the Pacific Coast, not merely of the United States, but of the whole world’; itis the celebration of “a race of people in the making” that can be traced back to Athens, Pericles, and Themistocles. At the same time, the fair represents, very specifically, “a Great American Achievement.” Ironic as this internationalist nationalism may seem, given that the Klan revived in 1915 and that both anti-German and anti-Jewish senti- ment had been provoked by the war, such accounts of the fair simply replay the accounts of the country’s intervention in Colombia, under- stood as the “consummation of five centuries of effort to find or make a direct westerly route from Europe to the Orient.”* As Roosevelt himself described the events in 1913, “the enterprise was recognized everywhere as responding to an international need’; the support of Panama, equated with the support of the canal, fulfilled responsibilities not just to the United States, but “to the civilized world which imperatively demanded that there should be no further delay in beginning the work." Familiar | as this internationalist nationalism has now become—ratified by World War Land revoiced ceaselessly during the Gulf Crisis—it should be recog i nized as a significant break from the “manifest destiny” that “propelled” | the United States to California: for the country is now said to serve, and, ‘0 embody the will of, something like the “world.” The point is not, as it was in the Philippines, to help the natives, but to help all the peoples o the globe. Familiarly, Frank Todd, summarizing the history of the canal in his history of the fair, traces that history back to Balboa and argues that the transisthmian route is “in a very large sense, the gift of the United States to the world, America’s contribution to world harmony.” Nonethe- less, his subsequent chapter begins by quoting G. W. Goethals, chairman and chief engineer of the commission, who explains that “our primary Purpose in building the Canal was not commercial but military: to make Sure that no battleship of ours would ever have to sail around South America” (Todd, 18, 20). Just as the body inevitably reappears, giganti- cized, in the machine-body dialectic of the fair and science fiction, so ‘00, in the world-nation dialectic, the nation finally asserts its priority | | EEE SO Bill Brown over any global flow. Goethals asse Sression and economic gain as a w. national and the international “Modernity” was sequestered in the fair’sJov Zone or architecturaly contained by “Spanish Gothi uildings such as the Palace of Machines and “modernism” was confined to the fine art exhibit. Guidebooks for the fair, carefully explicating such outdoor friezes and statues as “Natural Selection” and the “Survival of the Fittest,” were stumped by the “ult modern experience” of futurist Canvases.’ But it is not quite the work of the futurists, but Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, exhibited at the Armory show two years earlier, thet strikes me as the appropri: Ste analogical antithesis to “The Thirteenth Labor of Hercules” For if ts a distinction between military a. ‘Ay to assert a distinction between te and scientized body. The center of the exhibition's celebration of technology was the Cour ted by a cluster of buil Metallurgy, and Machinery, For the center of the Court, Robert Aiken designed a fountain, from the center of which rose § Sculpture, “Destiny” on either side of upright human figures lay, in the sculptor’s own words, “s symbolized Destiny in the shape of t¥0 Enormous arms and hands, Biving life with the one and taking with i “Destiny” participated in the fair’s gener to the degree that it (metaphorically) signifies ‘man the “ser” and (synecdochically) the whole of Hercules, it accomplishes itself. But ent and occlusion as the poster itself. B ‘The Prosthetics of Empire respect, Michael Fried’s redescription of the “impressionist” project— where Crane and Norris, for instance, isolate not seeing, but writing, and metaphorize the act of writing in the representation of human dis- figurement—could be recognized as an account of the writers’ own dis- figurement, the autonomization of the hand (and its relation to the pen and page). Such a recognition would be buttressed by Friedrich Kittler’s account of how the typewriter, circa 1900, disintegrates the writing pro- cess, differentiating the physicality of writing from itself, distancing the eye from the hand, the hand from the page And it is as though, at the Panama-Pacific Exposition, this version of the body-machine, part-whole dialectic were also recognized and resolved in Underwood's contribution i to the fair: a fourteen-ton typewriter, each key the size of a chair, gener- ally photographed with visitors sitting on the keys. The (fully functioning) | machine functions as a monumental synecdochic completion of “Des- ; tiny,” reintegrating the human body at the site of technology. The whole i body comes to signify (indeed, to act as) the body part, the finger. i Plotting Race in the Post-Prosthetic Empire 4 In 1910 an article in Scientific American, trying to think beyond the way the “similarity between living organisms and machines” had been tradi- Uonally described, explained “certain peculiarities of machines by refer- ence to facts which are well known and familiar in connection with living Creatures,” such as the ‘theory of the origin of species.”* Unwittingly, the essay intimates a world where machines, Marx's virtuosos, assume : a life of their own, obeying their own evolutionary laws without regard for the human. In contrast, it was the more traditional law of survival that the statuary throughout the San Francisco fair made explicit, And at { the fair’s Race Betterment Conference, organized by David Starr Jordan, Cugenicists modernized the study of race to assert more precisely the spe- cifically human law of survival. Revisions to the Binet scale promised to measure racial intelligence scientifically; the new cephalic index became, for influential figures like Madison Grant, the “best method of determin- 'ng race."* These formed the literal component of what Walter Benn Michaels has termed a “new technology for identifying white people” that) @PPeared in the aftermath of Plessy v. Ferguson, wherein the correspon dence of color and race was undone.” And that technology appeared in the aftermath of modern production's effective obliteration of racial char- acteristics, corresponding to what Kracauer called the “obliteration of 1st “The issue is not just, in Taylor's formulation, that “an intelligent gorilla” could, Scientifically managed, perform mote efficiently than any self-managed worker (40)—a comment that actually Lonamns Us t0 the violation of the species barrier—-but also thatthe an ike abstract human motion, like abstract labor, 38 not available as a site for racial inscription. In a sense, it is just such problem, intensified by a mechanized mode of production, that The ‘Steam-Man foresaw and forestalled by representing machinery as a whole body, and as a black body: Of course, Taylor's conceptualization of the Worker as a machine that is part of a machine was meant to transcend ideological and class conflict. But for the ‘eugenicists, racial conflict was the only way to make industrial progress make sense. For Jordan, eff ciency, like aggression, could account for Anglo-American expansion into “lands scantily occupied by barbarous races." Yet, in the face of the universalizing claims of modernity, science fic- bit its aggressive instinct, without which that body would be non-narratable. The scopic regime of Ralph 124C 41+, Twant to emphasize now, allows its hero to see, via the Telephot, the faces of the villains who will launch the melodrama: Fernand, with his eyes t00 close together and his cunning mouth; and the Martian, instantly recog: “great black horse eyes in the long, melancholy face” and tite, typically Martian, provokes him to circumvent the law against “the intermarriage of Martians ‘and Terrestrials” (45). He abducts Alice. Ralph, his own sexual appetite just discovered, finally rescues her. The somatic Semiosis with which the novel Produces race and its attendant sexuality is o ceiniosis that is everywhere contested Fernand employs a “Cloak of In- visibility”; Ralph himself Projects an artificial comet to confuse the Mat- tian; and science in the year 2660 challenges most notions of physicality (as does Science in 1915 when it discovers, for instance, that “if our eyes Were sensitive to ultraviolet light only, all men would be negroes, so far a8 color is concerned”) But in Ralph's hands, technology finally exposes true” physicality. The Martian, within the future metropolis, appears a5 The Prosthetics of Empire imaginable future that phallus will still exist, visibly, in relation to which American white masculinity can perpetually reconstitute itself. Regarding the historical moment of the text's production, we can argue that its racism, its insistence on racial conflict, works to undermine the nationalized and racialized division of labor exemplified by work on the Panama Canal, where, let us say, the American mind managed West j Indian hands. More generally, this conflict works to upend a set of dual- isms—abstract/concrete, mind/body, culture/nature—that characterize what Nancy Harstock has called “abstract masculinity’; in other words, the text offers an oxymoronic, idealized, “concrete” masculinity.* That ideal, presented as an embodied global power, most explicitly appears in England's Darkness and Dawn trilogy, an extended American example of what Patrick Brantlinger has termed “invasion scare-scare stories, in Which the outward movement of imperialist adventure is reversed.” Darkness and Dawn (1912) records the perils of an engineer and a ste~ \ nographer who wake up in a New York skyscraper to find themselves the last two humans alive in a world that has been destroyed by an “Epic of Death.” They are soon attacked by “demoniac hordes” of black, ape-like “tealures with a “trace of the Mongol,” and Allan Stern, believing him- self to be “the only white man living in the twenty-eighth century,” must defend himself and the woman he grows to love against racial extinc- | tion (108, 103). Facing a world “gone to pieces the way Liberia and Haiti j and Santo Domingo once did when white rule ceased,” Stern nurtures his | ‘deep-seated love for the memory of the race” (112, 113). Finally, in the i lastof the novels, The Afterglow, he establishes a new social system among the other survivors (the so-called “Folk”) where people are free because of { the proliferation of scientific thought and the introduction of the English i 2 language, that “magnificent language, so rich and pure,” its purity mir- reine the racial purity achieved once Stern achieves “the extermination Of the Horde” (645). But only in relation to that horde, only in the face or civilization’s demise, does Allan Stern retrieve the ideals of “labor and {Ploration” and transform himself from the “man of science and cold et into a man who can feel the “atavistic passions” and the aggression | Z3cial conflict provokes. The engineer's piloting skill makes “man the biplane (seem) almost one organism’ (458), the prosthetic idea but coke! Vigorously differentiates the human organism from machine lure. While The Steam-Man technologically restores a postwar body "articulating antebellum race relations, The Afterglow restores a post- sattological body by reformulating the conditions of original conquest St ei “™ recognizes, as the novel comes to a close, that the “reconquest of EE "le Bill Brown the entire continent” Femains to be accomplished, that indeed there is still the “whole world to reconquer™ (665, 664). The trilogy thus shares the traditions: image of empire as, in Any Kaplan's words, “the site for recup, —in this case, a sit Engineer's globalizing power with his bod. "n, that Burroughs's Pellucidar series, bea © (1914) and Pellucidar (1915), redivides men and manual labor between Senerations and inverts the division provi Perry, a middle-aged amateur inventor, brings ve Peoples living underground, But it is mine owner, who performs a set of hereuen underworld creatures, and finds himself elec technology to the primiti young David Innes, son of labors, combats a host of 1. as a source of om nology as insufficiently and green races of Mars, to liberate the green- ruler, to become a war lord, and to defend the Peated assault. He discovers, with the sort of wi fhe Race Betterment Conference, that the red an‘ men from their despotic Princess he loves from rey tainty only dreamt of att Breen races of Mars can Isa m The Prosthetics of Empire race and one “reddish yellow race” (62). And it is the threat of interracial abduction that he must prevent, saving the almost humanoid Martian 4 Princess from the sexual assault ofa bestial green jeddack. While, in Owen) Wister's Virginian (1902), the southern hero refashions southern chiv- alry and heroism within the confines of a Wyoming ranching economy, Burroughs's Virginian reclaims the full romance of the South, but only | q by moving beyond the boundaries of the nation and of the world. Like Dixon's The Clansmen (1905), The Princess of Mars depicts a white south- em male reestablishing racial order, but for Burroughs this is no new birth of a nation. Rather, the genre recognizes that only beyond the mod- em nation, and beyond modernity’s internation, will the recognizable American reappear. At the close of The Master Mind of Mars, when that mind has been defeated by the American body, Ulysses Paxton finally meets John Carter. The soldier from the war where, as one analyst puts it, “the machine Bun sealed the fate of horsed cavalry” meets the cavalryman from a ar that first accelerated American mass production They recog! one another not just as humans, not just as speakers of English, but 4s Americans: “A countryman?” John Carter asks; “Yes, an Americ Paxton replies (492). Nationality itself becomes all but physiognomically ‘ecognizable, overcoming what Benedict Anderson has articulated as the difference between nationalism, “which dreams in terms of historical destinies,” and racism’s will-o-ahistoricity (136~40).” But these national bodies appear only where the nation itself has disappeared; the national j body is saved as the nation’s expense. The Master Mind, which I originally yl described as a prosthetic fantasy, can finally help us, like The Steam-Man, ‘© redescribe the emergence of modern science fiction in America. For / despite the genre's depiction of a postprosthetic empire, the genre is of fourse fundamentally prosthetic, imaginatively repairing the damaged body, the fragmented body, the separated head and hand. The monumen- [il male these texts produce is a body without scars, a body on which history is not written but crased, a body without memory, a national body with no nation. In this respect, the pulp market of the period should itself Pe defined as a traffic in bodies, or, far more precisely, the traffic in one body, circulating the same eugenic body, making it available for a reader’ matinary inhabitation. These days, since all the demythifications of sci- ance have hardly arrested technology's demythification of the human, it's the Surprise to read that the recent and “intense fascination with the fate of 4 body" may well result from the fact that “the body no longer exists remarks have certainly reflected that interest. But they've been meant EE Bill Brown Xe Suagest that this nonexistence has a material history, which one idea of re-embodied empire, contesting the modernization of American global Power, struggled to efface Notes {consider these remarks part of an ongoing account of moderni , entitled Amer: Car Body Pars, 1910-1915. The paper was presented at the Univercty of Chicago’ Committee on Critical Practice and at Chicago's Humanities Institute, and it has benefited from both subsequent discussions. In articular, I've tried to clarify or

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