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Representations 25 (Winter 1989)
. . .
In
the following pages, I trace the transformations undergone by the opposition
between the individual and the social during the Progressive period, or rather,
I try to show how that opposition disappeared. I begin by arguing that the
defense of individuality against the “group” took the form of imagining persons
as machines, independent because essentially inflexible—mechanical as opposed
to social. My central example here is Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in
King Arthur’s Court. I go on to contrast this conception of individuality
as independence from society with a conception of individuality as difference
within the “system”—here my central example is Edward Bellamy’s Looking
Backward. For Twain and Bellamy both, the group—they tend to call it the
“mob”—poses a threat to individuality, but where the alternative to the mob in
Twain is the man alone (think of the Sherburn episode in Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn), the alternative to the mob in Bellamy is the army,
consisting not of independent individuals but of individuals individualized by
their place within the system. It is mechanization, I argue, that in enabling
the imagination of an individuality that resists society makes possible at the
same time the vision of an individuality that is systematic: my central example
here is the discourse of “scientific” (or, more generally, “systematic”)
“management,” in which hostility to the group finds expression as enthusiasm
for the organization.
Individuality
now appears as an effect of standardization. The incoherence of Hortense’s
desires—she doesn’t realize that you can’t be an individual and classy at the
same time—is dispelled by an understanding of classes and individuals which
insists that in order to be either classy or individual you have to be both at
the same time. But, I argue in my last section, the Progressive transformation
of the independent individual’s disruptive energies into the organized
individual’s ambitious energies produces its own disruptions. Hortenses and
Sondras becomes Clydes and Robertas; the stabilizing differences of what Walter
Lippmann approvingly called “mastery” make possible the destabilizing desires
of what he disapprovingly called “drift.” Here my central example is An
American Tragedy.
.
. .
For
despite its frequent proclamations of the “power of training! of influence! of
education!” (180), it is with the power to resist training that Connecticut
Yankee is most concerned. The Yankee’s notorious reliance on violence and
physical force in his efforts to “civilize” the “white Indians” of Arthurian
England and his failure in these efforts are both effects of a conception of
individuality that systematically denies any power at all to training,
influence, or education. “A man is a man at bottom,” the Yankee reflects
happily, “Whole ages of abuse and oppression cannot crush the manhood clear out
of him” (279). The man in question here has resisted the tyranny of the sixth
century, but the Yankee’s admiration is as great for those who resist the
democratizing of the nineteenth: “English knights,” he tells the faithful young
products of his “man factory,” “can be killed, but they cannot be conquered”
(397). They cannot be conquered because no amount of physical abuse or coercion
can ever produce in them the educational advance that even an acknowledgement
of defeat would serve to mark. They are monuments to an individuality defined
by nothing but the powers of resistance.
It
is for this reason, rather than for their lack of civilization, that they are
plausibly seen as “white Indians.” “The Indian is hewn out of the rock,”
Francis Parkman had written in 1851, “You can rarely change the form without
destruction of the substance.” In principle ineducable, such men could only be
subdued by violence. Hence, as Michael Rogin has argued, Indian hunters like
Andrew Jackson identified with the Indians in the very act of—actually by
means of the very act of—hunting them; the violence of the Indian required
the violence of the Indian hunter who, in killing the Indian, became a version
of him. It is not hard to see a similar identification in the “withering
deluge” of machine-gun fire that kills the last ten thousand “white Indians” at
the end of Connecticut Yankee. But this massacre, so often identified by
critics and historians as a critique of late-nineteenth-century
industrialism—what Twain called “machine culture”—is in fact a tribute to that
culture and to its machines. Indians in Progressive America were increasingly
identified as paradigms of the American individualism that was understood to
have created Twain’s machine culture just because of the absolute inflexibility
that Parkman in 1851 had predicted would cause their “ruin.” Thus in Thomas
Dixon’s antisocialist dystopia Comrades (1909), it is the Indian Saka,
in addition to the capitalist Colonel Worth, who emerges as a hero of
“individuality”: having tried and failed to order him about, the socialist
“Brotherhood of Man saw Saka no more for many moons, but the crack of his rifle
was heard on the mountain side and the smoke of his teepee curled defiantly
from the neighboring plains” (175). Morgan’s recognition that his Indians
can be neither trained nor conquered is thus a recognition of their rocklike
character, and his commitment to exterminating them is not an attack on their
savagery but a tribute to their individuality. Only by means of the massacre
can Twain acknowledge the “microscopic atom” that is “truly me,” the selfhood
that cannot be altered and so must be destroyed.
. . .
A
Connecticut Yankee does not, then, express an attitude toward technology,
either the optimistic one of a Mark Twain who loved machines or the pessimistic
one of a Mark Twain who was getting nervous about the Paige Compositor and
beginning to worry about the ultimate value of machine culture. Rather it
embodies a commitment to the essential likeness of persons to machines, a
commitment embodied also in Twain’s own identification with the Paige and in
his vision of himself as a kind of writing machine: “I started the mill again 6
days ago and have ground out a good average,” he wrote Rogers, while waiting
for news of the Paige’s last try-out, “11,800 words” in a week. It is the aim
of Scientific Management,” Gilbreth wrote in 1912, “to induce men to act as
nearly like machines as possible.” In the Yankee’s failure, Twain predicts Taylor’s success; defending individuals, he prepares them for the
factory.
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