The Machine-Phallus: Psychoanalyzing the Geopolitical Economy of Masculinity and Race

Abstract

In Freud the fetish is not only a “protection” against castration; it is also a “memorial” to it: the fetish may occlude recognition of castration, but it cannot erase it; sometimes the fetish reinscribes castration in its very form. The trauma is never undone, its threat never exorcized. And so it is with the machine: it may figure a new totality, a dynamic phallic body, but it cannot rectify the old fragmentation nor make good the originary castration of the subject. In this way the double logic of the prosthesis may replicate that of the fetish: the prosthesis cannot undo its reason for being; it may even underscore that the subject is defined in lack. [Foster, 1997, pp. 14-15]

Notes

¹ Existing artisanal industries in colonized areas that could have been capitalized on were outlawed, taxed, and/or otherwise destroyed. For instances of this in colonial Africa, see Rodney (1972).

² See Adas (1989), chap. 4.

³ See Adas (1989).

⁴ Thomas (2011) goes on to say that:

[t]he backbreaking work of grading, digging tunnels, and laying track went forward almost exclusively with enslaved labor in the South. But as railroads were completed across the region, other changes followed. The buying, selling, and hiring of slaves in the 1850s were also transformed by the railroads and telegraphs. If railroad companies were buying slaves by the hundreds, and leasing them by the thousands, they were also shipping them from one part of the South to another as part of a modernized slave trading system and market… [S]lave trading took on the characteristics of other markets. [p. 32]

⁵ Between 1857 and 1865, more than 10,000 slaves a year worked on southern railroads (Kornweibel, 2010). See also Licht (1983) and Nelson (2006).

⁶ In Capital, volume 1, Marx (1915) writes: “In so far as machinery dispenses with muscular power, it becomes a means of employing labourers of slight muscular strength, and those whose bodily development is incomplete. … The labour of women and children was, therefore, the first thing sought for by capitalists who used machinery” (p. 431).

⁷ In replacing variable capital (labor) with constant capital (machines), Capitalist interests lowered the socially necessary labor time required to produce commodities and hence the commodity’s real price. Because capitalism is impelled by competition, capitalists then vie to adopt ever more efficient machine capital, which increases its pricing advantage and, hence, market share. Those unable or unwilling to compete are driven from the market by competitors quicker to seize that advantage. See Marx’s (1915) extensive discussion of the working day in Chapter X of Capital, Volume 1.

⁸ See, for instance, Freedman’s (1994) discussion of early nineteenth-century initiatives to outlaw child labor in the US. But also see Bartoletti (1996) for how such initiatives were a hardship for families that depended on children’s labor to survive.

⁹ As Marx notes, the state was initially the main force pressing for public education, in light of the extreme exploitation of children. In Capital, volume 1, he writes that “this desolation finally compelled even the English Parliament to make elementary education a compulsory condition to the ‘productive’ employment of children under 14 years, in every industry subject to the Factory Acts” (Marx, 1915, p. 436). Without any means of enforcing the Acts, he avers, the compulsion is, “illusory, in the opposition of the manufacturers themselves to these education clauses, and in the tricks and dodges they put in practice for evading them” (p. 436-437). He goes on to document the conditions of many of the first schools–small crowded rooms with students taught largely by illiterate schoolmasters. See also Zelizer (1994).

¹⁰ See also Berg (1991).

¹¹ See Welter (1966) and the large literature that followed this important work. See also Zelizer (1994).

¹² As Stephanie Coontz (1993) points out, this sanctioning primarily applied to married women—not single women or widows who often had to work. Further, she notes how working class women’s and men’s endorsement of the family wage made marginal the voices of single women for many years to come. See also Connell (1995).

¹³ Du Bois’ (1935) Black Reconstruction in America for a detailed analysis of how race was instrumental in suppressing White workers’ wages.

¹⁴ See, for instance, Le livre sans titre (1830).

¹⁵ See Wigley’s (1992) account of how the architecture of the male study emerged en force in the fifteenth century as a site associated with male conception-as-thought, something similarly evident in the many Renaissance paintings of map-makers and engravers in their studios.

¹⁶ E. P. Thompson’s ideas have been reworked and changed over the years, though not in a way that affects my argument. See for instance Glennie and Thrift (1996).

¹⁷ I am grateful to the distinguished scholar of time, Jo Alyson Parker, for sending to me this passage and for discussing with me ideas about the libidinized sadistic qualities of clock time.

¹⁸ As Ettinger (2006) explains, maternal castration is about three primary fantasies—not-enoughness, devouring, and abandonment—even if Freud and Lacan never formulated these characteristics specifically in maternal castration terms. She writes that while “Freud remarks [on] ‘the surprising, yet regular, fear of being killed (devoured?) by the mother’ (Freud 1931, p. 227) and Lacan remarks that ‘there is no other real relation with the mother than that which all present psychoanalytical theory puts in relief, that is, the relation of devouring’ (Lacan, 1994, p. 380)”, neither made the “radical step of realizing that these phantasies correspond in each and every criteria to the requirements of primal phantasy” (p. 106).

¹⁹ See also O’Brien (1993).

²⁰ World War I was the war in which the machine gun, long-range rifles, gas, and other technologies were first deployed, forging clear links between industry and death.

²¹ Symptomatic of this suturing is psychoanalysis’ fascination with the machine. See, also the work of psychoanalyst, Szasz (1958) for his fascinating polemic on the ontological similarities between the machine and men.

²² Cost of Livin’. Written by Ronnie Dunn & Phillip Coleman. © 2011 Sony/ATV Tree Publishing, Showbilly Music, & Publishers(s) Unknown. All rights on behalf of Sony/ATV Tree Publishing & Showbilly Music administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

²³ The Minute Men—the civilian paramilitary group in the US that patrols the US-Mexico border, for instance, is small in numbers but has had a sizeable impact in cultivating a vengeful atmosphere of castigation and fear.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Heidi J. Nast

Heidi J. Nast, Ph.D., is Professor of International Studies at DePaul University. Her interests lie in connecting theoretical considerations of the maternal in geopolitical economic contexts with those of psychoanalysis. She has published widely across disciplines, her most recent work examining economic trauma in relation to the global manufacture and consumption of sex dolls and what she sees as a related rise in pet-related commodity production and demand.