Reading the Techno-Ethnic Other in Don DeLillo's White Noise

BIMAN BASU Reading the Techno-Ethnic Other in Don DeLillo's White Noise IN his classic statement, Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson makes an argument against both industrialization and immigration. He would "let our work-shops remain in Europe" (165), and he warns against the "importations of foreigners" (83). In the opposition between "agriculture" and "manufacture," the "manufacturers " or "artificers" become the "mobs of great cities" who are, of course, the potential immigrants, the "foreigners." The argument against industrialization, a social, political, and economic argument, is unleashed in an amazing rhetoric which is both physiological and epidemiological. A "pure government" is here projected as a "human body" in a state of "vigour" which will be reduced by "sores" to a state of "degeneracy." The "healthy parts" of the "husbandman" will be exposed to "corruption" by a "canker" which "eats" into the hearts of the "chosen people of God" whose "breasts" are the "peculiar deposit" of "genuine virtue" (164-65). In such an early document ofAmerican letters, then, the anxieties articulated are simultaneously directed toward technology and otherness , or rather, these technologies are embodied in the corrupt body of the other which then infects a healthy self. Against the contamination of the other, Jefferson prescribes the prophylactics available in the "industry of the husbandman," "labour in the earth," and the working of "their own soil" (164-65). The vivid contrast between this projection of a halcyon agrarian vision and the virulence of the epidemioArizona Quarterly Volume 61, Number 2, Summer 2005 Copyright © 2005 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-1 610 88 Biman Basu logical rhetoric signals the intensity of the anxieties provoked by a perceived threat. What is threatened here, fundamentally, is the integrity of a self-adequate and pure subject grounded in nature and endowed with consciousness. This is the subject that serves as a model for individual and nation, for body and body politic, for libidinal and political economy. The threat posed here is the encroachment of an industrial ethnic otherness which is, of course, at this point, that of an urban, industrial, European otherness, that is, still, a techno-ethnic otherness.1 To cite such an early text is simply to mark a moment in which this sort of encroachment had already begun and was to progress steadily through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first term of the technoethnic threat is perceived as a technological intrusion. We might best describe the technological component of the techno-ethnic as a disaggregating procedure, a numerical seizure, which will increasingly be turned from the space of production to the body of the worker and his/her home life and to the population at large. At about the turn of the next century, this numerical grid placed on the space of production is intensified, and made decidedly American , in Taylorist-Fordist practices by the implantation of technology on the body. Disaggregation begins with the Taylorist segmentation of the body, its movements, and its functions. The implantation of an algorithm of spatio-temporal coordinates on the body yields a sort of anatomical precision. The body becomes "arms," "muscles," "blood," "tissues"; movement becomes "walk," "sit," "push," "pull." This practice ofdisaggregation has, ofcourse, evoked different types ofresponses, and a writer like Gramsci recognizes that Taylorist-Fordist practices represent an effort "unmatched in history" to create "a new type of worker and of man" (302). This "new man," he observes, "cannot be developed until the sexual instinct has been suitably regulated" (297). Most responses to disaggregation have subordinated the body and mobilized the subject predicated as consciousness, and to this extent, they have been moral objections. Nietzsche, however, identifies the "deep-seated malady" of human beings when all instincts "turn inward" in a process he calls "man's interiorization," when they are "reduced to their weakest, most fallible organ, their consciousness!" (GM 217). Nietzsche's observation leads him to a critique of ethics and his "scandalous and virulent" assertion that "it is ethics itself which is the ideo- The Techno-Ethnie Other 89 logical vehicle and the legitimation of concrete structures of power and domination" (Jameson 114). Nietzsche offers a model of the body that does not respond to disaggregation...