Dismantlings

Words against Machines in the American Long Seventies

Matt Tierney

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501746772
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria norteamericana

"For the master's tools, " the poet Audre Lorde wrote, "will never dismantle the master's house." Dismantlings is a study of literary, political, and philosophical critiques of the utopian claims about technology in the Long Seventies, the decade and a half before 1980. Following Alice Hilton's 1963 admonition that the coming years would bring humanity to a crossroads—"machines for HUMAN BEINGS or human beings for THE MACHINE"—Matt Tierney explores wide-ranging ideas from science fiction, avant-garde literatures, feminist and anti-racist activism, and indigenous eco-philosophy that may yet challenge machines of war, control, and oppression.

Dismantlings opposes the language of technological idealism with radical thought of the Long Seventies, from Lorde and Hilton to Samuel R. Delany and Ursula K. Le Guin to Huey P. Newton, John Mohawk, and many others. This counter-lexicon retrieves seven terms for the contemporary critique of technology: Luddism, a verbal and material combat against exploitative machines; communion, a kind of togetherness that stands apart from communication networks; cyberculture, a historical conjunction of automation with racist and militarist machines; distortion, a transformative mode of reading and writing; revolutionary suicide, a willful submission to the risk of political engagement; liberation technology, a synthesis of appropriate technology and liberation theology; and thanatopography, a mapping of planetary technological ethics after Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Dismantlings restores revolutionary language of the radical Long Seventies for reuse in the digital present against emergent technologies of exploitation, subjugation, and death.

CHAPTER 1

Luddism

one by one, but with growing frequency, [they] will begin to lose their machines

—W.S. Merwin, “The Remembering Machines of Tomorrow” (1969)

In 1969, The New Yorker published an experimental prose poem by W.S. Merwin on the topic of computation. In a series of ruminative paragraphs called “The Remembering Machines of Tomorrow,” Merwin describes a scene that was then fictional but seems now perfectly common. Humans delegate a human task, memory, to a nonhuman machine and soon come to rely on that machine. In an unfamiliar coda to the familiar narrative, the poem ends when the humans finally cease using their machines. The piece does not narrate a refusal of information technology. Instead it invites a gradual relinquishing of it: “Attached to every person like a tiny galaxy will be the whole of his past—or what he takes to be the whole of his past. His attachment to it will constitute the whole of his present—or of what he takes to be the present. The neat, almost soundless instrument will contain all of each man’s hope, his innocence, his garden. Then one by one, but with growing frequency, men will begin to lose their machines.”¹ Merwin’s “instrument” has a capacity for prosthetic memory that gives way to transformations in thought and spirit, because the remembering machine is “attached to every person” such that it “constitutes the whole of his present.” Yet the remembering machine will ultimately be lost, surrendered to disuse. Its owners will learn to live without it, or else forget how impressed they ever were with it.

Merwin’s poetic image—the image of a fantastic tool that is finally abandoned—is a dedramatization of both the technological and the antitechnological impulse. This is Luddism of a sort. The machine vanishes without hammers and without malice, but it does nevertheless vanish. It is not that kind of Luddism that is associated, say, with the nostalgia for old tech like pay phones and arcade games; less still with what Dominic Pettman dismisses as that “nostalgic, romantic, neo-Luddite position (which assumes, naively, that the human somehow predated technics, before being contaminated by it).”² Rather, it is a gradual relinquishing of machines whose continued use would contravene ethical principles. To let go of certain technologies in order to let go of certain forms of dehumanizing activity—this is instead the activity that Audre Lorde calls dismantling and Langdon Winner calls epistemological Luddism. In much of Long Seventies cyberculture, as in Merwin’s poem, this activity is accomplished by literary means, such that poetic tools are indeed mobilized to interrupt technological values.

Dismantling the Master’s House

Perhaps the clearest account of dismantling-as-relinquishing is Audre Lorde’s 1979 declaration that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”—in her lecture of the same title at the University of Kansas in 1979, during the “Second Sex Conference,” the first meeting of the National Women’s Studies Association. Lorde’s influential claim was that feminist practices of mobilization and analysis must account not only for gender difference but also for differences of class, sexuality, age, and race. By working and thinking on behalf of women yet simultaneously on behalf of people who are poor, queer, old, or black, Lorde imagined a movement that might possibly break the devastating political technologies that had partitioned those forms of identity from one another in the first place. The metaphor of tools is not incidental. Lorde stands at the near end of traditions in feminist and antiracist poetry and oratory, but she stands as well in the tradition of the antitechnological Luddites at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and in the tradition of subsequent revolutionaries for whom acts of sabotage can signal a total detachment from the reactionary norms of society and culture.³

In its central image—the search for correct tools to break the machines of the house of power—Lorde’s paper hinges on two distinct claims about technology: one, not all tools are appropriate to all tasks; and two, some worldly objects (in this case, the master’s house) cannot be reinvented but must be destroyed. Whether or not the proper tools may be found for dismantling the house, this much is clear: both master’s house and master’s tools must be abandoned.

The tools of a master, Lorde writes in her lecture, “may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”⁴ Other tools will be required, other tools than the inherited ones, if solidarity is to be achieved. Call them machines or technologies or devices, tools are Lorde’s metaphor for instruments of power as well as the opposition to power; for what gets dismantled as well as what dis-mantles; for institutional language as well as analytic thought; for the extant world as well as the tactics that might change the world. Dismantling, following Lorde, is a labor of picking apart social machines in order to understand them, and an insistence on smashing those antisocial machines that sustain unequal distributions of power. Lorde sees feminist texts and institutions as largely blind to forms of structured power aside from gender, even though most women’s lives are as thoroughly structured by inegalitarian structures of “race, sexuality, class, and age.”⁵ Blinded in this way, Lorde claims, feminists fail to recognize “the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences… enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future.”⁶ The “master’s house” is where the heteropatriarchy, classed and raced, thrives and reproduces itself. It is where women are treated, and treat one another, only as women. It is therefore, for Lorde, the very house that must next be destroyed.

Here is where the logic of technology, considered as the logic of tools and the regimentation of the terms of tool use, comes in. Thinking about social and political power as a kind of technology or machinery is a procedure many centuries old, so the technological aspect of the master’s tools metaphor is not of itself a surprise.⁷ What surprises is the sheer flexibility of technological metaphors, such that they might ground emancipatory claims like Lorde’s, but also justify a more reactionary idea of machines in and of the world. Lorde asks: “What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?” And then answers: “It means that only the most narrow parameters of change are possible.”⁸ To Lorde, tools are for examining and dismantling, more than for making, and their most urgent task is to examine and dismantle the epistemological impediments to solidarity. There are tools that can aid in examining and dismantling, and there are tools that are not adequate to that task. The inadequate tools are the “master’s tools” that, because they are the “tools of a racist patriarchy,” are suited only to the preservation of that patriarchy.

Meanwhile, what sets Lorde’s speculation in motion is that there may be tools still more adequate to antiracist feminism—tools, in short, that emerge neither from racism nor from heteropatriarchy, nor from ageism, nor from capitalism. When Lorde describes feminist solidarity, she is modeling a kind of togetherness distinct from the contemporaneous metaphors of cosmotechnics. Whereas the global village (or the one-town world or the whole earth) comes together through a machine-enabled shrinkage of the world, Lorde’s world comes together without shrinking, through the breaking of partitioning machines rather than the making of communicative ones. Lorde’s aimed-for political movement can be accomplished only by people whose bodies are different from each other (aged, classed, sexed, as well as gendered) but whose purposes converge in opposition to anybody who would deny that difference. Her twinned metaphors, the master’s tools and master’s house, are not generally considered in light of technological transformation. But read as a form of dismantling, Lorde’s metaphor remains a critique of cosmotechnics. Teletechnology and military technology have only yet produced illusory regimes of global connectivity and capital flow. Dismantling seeks precisely to dispel those illusions and help topple those regimes; and, for Lorde, it can be accomplished by poetic means.

Intimate Scrutiny

Charlotte Bunch precedes Lorde in metaphorizing tools for feminist action, in her well-known 1974 essay “The Reform Tool Kit.” Distinguishing reform from reformism, Bunch argues that the former is very often subordinated and appropriated by the latter. Whereas reform is the transformation or demolition of existing institutions, she writes, reformism is only a reaction-formation: a backing away from revolutionary principles, and a strategic accommodation of violent institutions. For Bunch, the biggest challenge to feminism is that reformists have co-opted reform. The consequent need, therefore, must be “to develop a new kind of politics that could not be co-opted.”⁹ This is Bunch’s version of Lorde’s master’s tools argument. Bunch and Lorde, it is often said, gesture only vaguely, suggesting rather than strategizing, toward the destruction of unnamed old systems with unnamed new tools. But it is only a misreading that can cast Bunch’s reform-tool-kit or Lorde’s not-the-master’s-tools as a simple opposition to all forms of political dominance. Both instead issue specific calls to specific kinds of action. Just as Lorde’s principal objective is to knock down the partitions that separate antiracist from antipatriarchal (as well as working class, antiageist, and anti-homophobic) struggles, Bunch’s principal objective is to recover the feminist tactics that have gone unused because of their co-optation by mainstream liberal feminism. For Bunch, developing a tool kit of useful strategies means making an admission—that “we need a new social order based on equitable distribution of resources and access to them in the future”—and asking a set of guiding questions, including: “What kind of process does this involve?” and “What types of power must women have to make these changes?”¹⁰ The tools in Bunch’s tool kit are an egalitarian polemic and a pile of open-ended questions; not just solidarity in a vague sense, but specific weapons against “the slimy institutions we want to destroy.”¹¹ Bunch’s sense of inquiry, simultaneous with her sense of urgency, is what prefigures the question implied by Lorde’s title: By what tools, not those of the master, is the master’s house to be dismantled?

Lorde has her own answers, as is evident across the text of Sister Outsider, her 1984 collection of nonfiction. By their titles alone, two chapters in that book—“Uses of the Erotic,” “The Uses of Anger”—invoke a rhetoric of tool use in order to describe just what might be instrumentalized toward the dismantling of power. Along with eroticism and anger, desire and emotion, Lorde finds a similar use for literary language itself. Literature has only ever been institutionalized by universities and publishing, and it has only ever contributed to the further institutionalization and perpetuation of these industries. It must therefore be regarded with suspicion, for its near-certain associations with the house and tools of a master. But according to Lorde’s 1977 essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” also collected in Sister Outsider, it may be that literary language is not simply one more of the master’s tools. Poetry, for Lorde, may also be the vehicle for any subsequent imagination of feminist solidarity and racial justice: “We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared…. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.”¹² Notably, Lorde’s metaphors are again technological. As architecture and foundations, poetry is a way of building. As a bridge, it is a way of connecting, although one delinked from any fantasy of perfected telecommunication. Poetry is a way to talk and build together that is wholly separate from the latest electronics.

Rather than the communicative architecture of a network, Lorde theorizes poetry as a “skeleton architecture” that is both somatic and affective, combining the virtues of eroticism and anger. Rather than flows of power linked across a planet, she theorizes a bridge that leads away from power and toward shared language. As Roderick A. Ferguson writes, Lorde appeals to poetic practices as “the resources for establishing a will to connect, especially in those areas where certain connections were often prohibited.”¹³ But Lorde’s will to bridge is not merely a substitute for telecommunication; it is a wholly different way of living together, and one that rejects the commandeering of language by industry or the academy. To the charge that poetry is just another object of a heteropatriarchal inheritance, handed down as the tool of reactionary institutions, Lorde clarifies: “I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean—in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.”¹⁴ The capacity to bridge and build is not inherent to all poetry, but it does inhere in any poetry that seeks insight as well as imagination, thus offering access to distilled experience. These are also the qualities that inhere in Lorde’s own poetry. As Ferguson argues: “For Lorde, poetry was a way to enact an intimate scrutiny needed for personal and social transformation, a way to critically engage the self to set the stage for new interventions and articulations.”¹⁵

So it is that in 1973, six years before the Second Sex Conference, four years before “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Lorde provides her clearest account of machines and selves, in what approximates a poetic method for political dismantling. The poem “For Each of You,” collected in Lorde’s 1973 volume From a Land Where Other People Live, enjoins its listener to live well and judge consistently, without distraction by daily realities. “When you are hungry / learn to eat / whatever sustains you / until morning,” the poet writes in the second stanza, “but do not be misled by details / simply because you live them.”¹⁶ This is a lesson in modeling ethical consumption for subsequent generations: a detail is part of life, but it may not be necessary for sustenance. To accept the mere detail as nourishment is to be misled. Lorde expounds in the next stanza, the poem’s longest:

Do not let your head deny
your hands
any memory of what passes through them
nor your eyes
nor your heart
everything can be useful
except what is wasteful
(you will need
to remember this when you are accused of destruction.)¹⁷

The “details” that the poet mentions earlier are here neither explained nor enumerated. But they are defined: details are excessive, wast...

Table of contents

• Introduction: For the Sake of Survival
• 1. Luddism
• 2. Communion
• 3. Cyberculture
• 4. Distortion
• 5. Revolutionary Suicide
• 6. Liberation Technology
• 7. Thanatopography
• Conclusion: American Carnage and Technologies of Tomorrow
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Permissions
• Index