Terry Harpold and Kavita Philip

Department of English
University of Florida
tharpold@english.ufl.edu

 

Just So Stories

 

Three hundred million souls,… swarming on the body of India, like so many worms on a rotten, stinking carcase,–this is the picture concerning us, which naturally presents itself to the English official!

 

–Swami Vivekananda, East and West (1901)¹

 

The central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter. In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth–in the form of physical resources–has been losing value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things.

 

–Esther Dyson, George Gilder, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler, “Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age” (1994)²

 

Nineteenth-century Indian social reformer Swami Vivekananda’s choice of metaphor for his fellow subjects–teeming, disease-bearing maggots–reflects the horrified fascination for the native he perceived in the colonial gaze. Faced with the task of figuring the colonized Other, western social and ethnographic discourses of the period dwell, with symptomatic insistence, on a semiotic of grotesque and infectious bodies. A fundamental challenge to the integrity of the European psyche appears to have been: how could the colonizing subject imagine the radical alterity of the native without introjecting its forms, that is, without being seduced or infected by the traits of its difference? Christopher Herbert’s history of nineteenth-century ethnography links its strategies for narrativizing the primitive to Methodist founder John Wesley’s fantastical theology of sin–both, Herbert observes, were shaped by the violent desire for and the abomination of that which seemed to be beyond representation. The tropologies of colonial discourse, he writes, played against and within a field of forces “prior and alien to and implicitly destructive of symbolic order” (Herbert, 31).

 

The spectacular appropriation of technoscientific modernity by the postcolonial global citizen appears at first glance to have consigned images of the filthy and irredeemable autochthon to the discarded lapses of history.³ In place of insistence on an unbreachable ontological difference between peoples, narratives of twentieth- and twenty-first-century informational globalization announce the imminent arrival of an all-inclusive global community.⁴ Unlimited access to data, the unfettered movement of capital and labor, and liberal-democratic freedoms of speech and the marketplace will ensure–the proponents of this narrative claim–that all human beings may become subjects of the new civil information society. This happy narrative presumes a historical rupture with the psychic and political-economic orders of the Ages of Exploration and Colonialism, and celebrates the creation of a new ethnographic field in which to anchor the technological subject of our time. It openly acknowledges faults of distribution and access within the current state of the global network, but only as engineering problems–“bugs”–which will one day be corrected by technical mastery and/or entrepreneurial initiative.⁵

 

Euphoric claims of an emerging universal network are belied by statistics detailing the vast numbers of unwired global citizens, state and corporate control of network content, and gendered, raced, and class-bound disparities in access. Evangelists of the informational order predict a systematic rectification of these shortcomings; opponents of globalization worry that only those shortcomings which impede the machinery and flow of capital (or which are irrelevant to its dominions) will be eliminated. Recent cultural criticism of informational globalization has noted that global communicational and economic networks may be (depending on the analyst’s theoretical and political position) homogenizing and/or particularizing, totalizing and/or fracturing, radically novel and/or predictably repetitive.⁶

 

Rather than debate content-based significations of the cross-cultural encounter entailed in such understandings, we wish to step back from such formulations and ask why encounters with the cultural and technoscientific Other are structured in particular ways. We propose that the faults which fascinate enthusiast and opponent alike, far from being merely technical or developmental blockages, are, rather, constitutive elements of an imaginary which intensifies and refigures political-economic differentials along a familiar axis: that of civilization and savagery, cleanliness and filth, health and disease. Both utopian and dystopian dreams of techno-globalization attempt to govern a resistant material kernel, in relation to which are articulated anxieties and longings elicited by the permeability of human-natural-technological boundaries. Cybercultural narratives of desire for subjection to and fusion with the machinic are inseparable from the early- and late-modern subject’s fascination with filth–that is, with matter not susceptible to technological governance. This is precisely the matter that has proved vexing to colonial and post-colonial discourses of identity and alterity, and that continues to inflect the claims of popular cyberculture. The authors of the 1994 “Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age”–all prominent American apologists for the New Economy–proclaim that the landmark achievement of the twentieth century has been “the overthrow of matter” and the ascendency of “the powers of mind” over “the brute force of things.” The triumphalist tenor of this claim is shockingly (albeit predictably) inattentive to the historical association of the categories of mind and brute matter with raced and gendered identities, and to the ways in which applications of those categories have propped up many of the most disastrous political practices of the modern era: that inattention is, we think, a symptomatic trace of familiar conceptual strategies.

 

To claim that the content or aim of domination has simply remained the same across six centuries and enormous technological change would, of course, be naïve. We instead propose a fantasmatic homology, oriented around a structural constant of the technological field. Our method is coextensive with Slavoj Zizek’s, when he argues that a technique of formal decipherment is properly the domain of Marxist-Freudian critique:

 

There is a fundamental homology between the interpretative procedure of Marx and Freud…. In both cases the point is to avoid the properly fetishistic fascination of the “content” supposedly hidden behind the form: the “secret” to be unveiled through analysis is not the content hidden by the form (the form of commodities, the form of dreams) but, on the contrary, the “secret” of this form itself. (Sublime Object 11)

 

The “secret” of the forms of informational globalization and colonial othering lies in the desirous binary of horror and longing that constitutes the knowing, representing subject.⁷ This paper briefly (and, we freely admit, eclectically) delineates a space of trauma between knowledge of the body’s productive agency and belief in the body’s dangerous monstrosity. But we also mark the need to think beyond this fantasmatic binary–not to penetrate its resistant kernel, but to begin to reconceive future modes of political subjectivation and technoscientific practice.⁸

 

2. Of Bugs and Rats

 

Figure 1. “First actual case of bug being found.” (Detail of Smithsonian Image 92-13137. Used by permission of Smithsonian Institution.) Click image for larger picture.

 

Admiral Grace Murray Hopper, a pioneer of American computing best known for directing the development of the programming language COBOL, is also the source of an often-repeated anecdote which has become part of computer science folklore. As Admiral Hopper tells the story,

 

In the summer of 1945 we were building Mark II [an early electromechanical computer]; we had to build it in an awful rush–it was wartime–out of components we could get our hands on. We were working in a World War I temporary building [on the campus of Harvard University]. It was a hot summer and there was no air-conditioning, so all the windows were open. Mark II stopped, and we were trying to get her going. We finally found the relay that had failed. Inside the relay–and these were large relays–was a moth that had been beaten to death by the relay. We got a pair of tweezers. Very carefully we took the moth out of the relay, put it in the logbook and put Scotch tape over it. (Hopper 285-86)

 

The logbook recording this event was long kept in a display case at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, open to the page to which the moth was taped. Beneath the insect’s corpse, a handwritten entry noted dryly that it represented “the first actual case of a bug being found” (Figure 1). The logbook is now in the collection of the Natural Museum of American History, at the Smithsonian Institution.⁹

 

Consider now a more recent intrusion of the real into the informational domain:

 

KAMPALA, Oct. 13, 1998 (Reuters). Thousands of Ugandan students are unsure whether they have won university places after rats chewed through computer cables at the National Examination Board causing the system to crash, a newspaper reported on Tuesday. The New Vision Daily said senior board officials were very concerned that rodents were able to infiltrate areas holding such vital information. The hitch has affected students who were to be placed in teacher training colleges, polytechnics and medical institutions. It is not the first time that rats have eaten away at important installations in Uganda. Earlier this year they chewed through telecommunications wires, cutting off phone links to parts of western Uganda and Rwanda. Last week a workshop on law reform heard that reams of vital computerised court evidence had been lost in the same way.

 

The Reuters news story has none of the humor of Hopper’s anecdote. The image of a lone moth crushed in an electrical relay seems unlikely to elicit the sort of anxious frissons provoked by the image of rats swarming in the darkness, gnawing on electrical cables with implacable, intemperate appetite. The insect culprit of Hopper’s account is desubstantialized (desiccated, mounted, displayed) so as to fit easily into the tropology of modern technical discourse, within which a “bug” is something structural or procedural: a glitch in logic or function, which may be eliminated once it is identified. Rats, by comparison, are resistant to this sort of metonymy–there’s no getting away from the beady eyes, the gnashing teeth, the slinking tail, the piles of droppings; rodents seem uncannily out of place in the sterile abstractions of computing. The origin myth of the bug is, moreover, a story of computational victory: a bit of matter jamming the works is located by its human attendant and safely removed; the program continues, undeterred. If, on the other hand, rats are busy in the bowels of the machine–excretory metaphors seem appropriate here–eating away at its infrastructure, one might never locate all the damage they’ve caused before valuable data are lost forever. Sinister adversaries for the programmer, they could be anywhere in the dark, biding their time; no method of formal verification or debugging, no pair of tweezers and bit of cellophane tape, will help.¹⁰

 

The crucial difference between these stories of interrupted computing lies in how each figures a response to a material resistance responsible for the interruption. Programming bugs (in the most common sense of the term) may certainly have concrete effects, but they themselves are insubstantial, discernible only after an interruption of normal program execution, or in the calculation of an erroneous result.¹¹ Hopper’s “bug,” although initially figured as a material blockage of an equally material relay, is by her anecdote’s end rendered inoffensive, even irrelevant–by a verbal sleight of hand that amounts to a sort of signifying “relay.” The actual, historical moth is still around after the breakdown, but only as the evidence of the triumph of the informational order over the organic.

 

The Reuters account of rats chewing through Ugandan computer cables admits of no such wordplay. The rats–expressly because of their appetitive organicity, their uncanny “out-of-placeness” in the rationalized interior of the computer–are irreducibly, horribly tautological, a quality figured in the scientific name of the common black rat, host to the fleas whose bites transmit bubonic plague: rattus rattus. The residues they leave behind–flea-laden fur, disease-bearing saliva, stinking excrement–open the abstractions of informational space to an infectious materiality which threatens to exceed its symbolic closure.

 

The Reuters rats are, we think, negative forms of two other “rats” marking important moments in the history of informational practice. The first of these is rat-like only in name: Claude Shannon’s 1951 maze-solving machine, dubbed an “electronic rat” by the participants in the Macy conferences on cybernetics of the 1940s and 1950s.¹² This electromechanical device used a simple routing scheme to move a sensor within the confines of a small maze, in search of a target (a “cheese”) placed somewhere within it, thus demonstrating that a computing device can “learn” from prior calculations, and on that basis eliminate unsuccessful strategies of problem-solving.¹³ As Katherine Hayles observes, Shannon’s rat was a crucial support for a reductive rhetorical and conceptual strategy characteristic of the early years of cybernetics: the assertion that the inconsistent aims of (embodied, desirous) human beings may be reduced to lucid, normative–and computationally reproduceable–principles.¹⁴

 

The second informational rodent is more obviously rat-like, at least in its physical appearance: the figure of prosthetic transcendence introduced by Clynes and Kline in their landmark 1960 article on the “cyborg” (Figure 2).

 

Figure 2. Photograph from Clynes and Kline’s 1960 article, “Cyborgs and Space,” which introduced the term “cyborg” in print. Shown is “one of the first cyborgs,” a lab rat outfitted with a Rose Osmotic Pump “designed to permit continuous injections of chemicals at a slow controlled rate into an organism without any attention on the part of the organism.” (Source: Gray 30. Reproduced with permission of the author.)

 

This laboratorycyborg-rat–albino-white, sleek, and of a strictly-controlled genetic ancestry–seems a marvelous machinic-biological hybrid, at ease with the clumsy device grafted to its hindquarters, and able to function smoothly and efficiently (to quote Clynes and Kline) “without any attention on the part of the organism.” Describing this image as a “snapshot [belonging] in Man’s family album,” Donna Haraway finds in it evidence of an heroic anticipation of cyborg possibilities:

 

Beginning with the rats who stowed away on the masted ships of Europe’s imperial age of exploration, rodents have gone first into the unexplored regions of the great travel narratives of Western technoscience. (“Cyborgs and Symbionts,” xv)¹⁵

 

The rats of the Reuters story, on the other hand, seem less the vanguard of a new political order secreted in the hold of nascent capitalism than a material embodiment of resistant interruption of any systematic, abstracting order whatsoever. There is no room in this imaginary either for the programmed heuristics of information theory (Shannon’s rat) or for a hopeful symbiotic collaboration or triumphalist collectionism of machine and biological organ (Clynes, Kline, and Haraway’s rat).

 

The historical political-economic significations of both Hopper’s and the Reuters accounts of interrupted calculation are made clear when these accounts are read in relation to long-standing western narratives binding figures of contaminating materiality to fantasies of technological cleansing. We suggest here not that action and thought in these domains have been consistent across widely-separated historical periods, but rather that there is evidence of a consistent imaginary framed by historically-specific actions and thoughts. Discourses of alterity fixated on dirt and cleanliness have not of themselves determined the political and psychic economies of informational globalization. But they have propped up those economies with a class of reasonable, operational alibis essential to their structure.

 

One might explain away colonial fears of dirt and contamination as originating from the physical discomforts of life in the tropics–mixed, perhaps, with a regrettable element of outdated ethnocentrism. And one might rationalize the need to eliminate insects and rats from the interior of computing machines as a prerequisite to efficient, bug-free information processing, while citing the more extreme examples of such infestations as evidence of an unfortunate first-third world technological “divide.” However, the insistent tautology of the Reuters’ story of rats in the machine gives us pause. Pushing past explanations of the story’s content, we are compelled to inquire into the fantasmatic logic of this insistence.

 

3. The Monstrous and the Filthy

 

Figure 3. Images of human and animal monsters typical of the Alexander Romance. Left: “Ethiopia.” From Les secrets de l’histoire naturelle contenant les merveilles et choses mémorables du monde, fol. 20. France, 1480. (Source: Devisse and Mollat vol. 2: 227.) Right: From Sebastian Münster’s Cosmographiae Universalis, lib vi. Basel, 1554. (Source: Campbell 46.) Click image for larger picture.

 

The barbarian craps where he pleases; the conquerer emblazons his trails with a primordial prohibition: “No shitting allowed.”
 

–Dominique Laporte, History of Shit¹⁶

 
For over twenty centuries, western philosophers and travelers recorded supposedly factual accounts of fantastic creatures found to the east of Greek and European civilization: unicorns, dragons, chimerae, giants, human cyclopes, men with multiple or animal heads, men with faces in their chests, ape-like androgynous figures with grotesquely matted hair, and so on. The Alexander Romance tradition, initiated by narratives of Alexander the Great’s encounters with these and similar creatures in India, became the inspiration for stories of fabulous violations of “natural” forms, and influenced encyclopedists and theologians up through the Renaissance and Enlightenment (Figure 3).¹⁷

 

Images of the fabulous East and images of the devil at home often used the same language, sometimes borrowing specific figures and descriptions from each other. Travelers in seventeenth-century India saw, for example, “the lascivious Greek and Roman underworld of satyrs, Pan, and Priapus” (Cohn 4)–devils and the evil spirits of nature consorting with the natives, who themselves appeared as bizarre hybrids of the human and the animal. As McClintock observes, this tropic slippage among the alien, the monstrous, and the sinful encoded powerful libidinal energies which could not be expressed directly:

 

For centuries, the uncertain continents–Africa, the Americas, Asia–were figured in European lore as libidinously eroticized. Travelers’ tales abounded with visions of the monstrous sexuality of far-off lands, where, as legend had it, men sported gigantic penises and women consorted with apes, feminized men’s breasts flowed with milk and militarized women lopped theirs off…. Long before the era of high Victorian imperialism, Africa and the Americas had become what can be called a porno-tropics for the European imagination–fantastic magic lantern of the mind onto which Europe projected its forbidden sexual desires and fears. (22)

 

The specificity of overlap between the anti-Christ at home and the normative abroad suggests a fairly straightforward displacement of fears rooted in the western self onto an eastern Other. The insistence on the absolute strangeness of the Other, however, grew troublesome in the Ages of Discovery, Exploration, and Colonialism, as it became more difficult to maintain the literal existence of the monsters of the Alexander Romance. The medieval “fabulous” tradition lost its explicit links with theology and art, but none of its ability to evoke visceral horror, as seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travelers and twentieth-century administrators attempted to render difference tractable while still preserving its integrity. The autochthonic monster mutated, over time, into a less fabulous–but no less alien–part-animal or imperfectly human primitive, whose humanity was overshadowed by the traits of its variance from a Eurocentric norm: in physiognomy, skin color, manner of dress (meaning often, an absence of “modest” clothing), religious, cultural, and sexual practices (Figure 4).

 

Figure 4. Left: “Ourang Outang,” the Malay “man of the woods.” A “female satyr” described by Jakob de Bondt, in Willem Piso, De Indiae utriusque re naturali et medica, 1658. (Source: Lach 12.) Right: “The Black Gin.” Illustration to J. Brunton Stephens’s poem, “To a Black Gin.” Queensland Punch, October 1, 1890. (Source: Woodrow.) Click image for larger picture.

 

The monsters described by medieval and early Renaissance travelers had seemed to them evidence of the superabundant mystery of God’s creation. In an era increasingly dominated by the discourse of Reason, the alterity of the colonial native testified to a vexing disjunction between spiritual and scientific/anthropometric descriptions of the real. Examples of this disjunction appear in colonial writing across the globe, from the Congo to Australia. J. Brunton Stephens’s 1890 poetic puzzling over the humanity of an Aboriginal woman (“To a Black Gin,” Figure 4) is typical:

 

Thou art not beautiful, I tell thee plainly,
Oh! thou ungainliest of things ungainly;
Who thinks thee less than hideous dotes insanely.

 

Most unaesthetical of things terrestrial,
Hadst thou indeed an origin celestial?
Thy lineaments are positively bestial!

 

…

 

Thy nose appeareth but a transverse section:
Thy mouth hath no particular direction–
A flabby-rimmed abyss of imperfection.

 

Thy skull development mine eye displeases;
Thy wilt not suffer much from brain diseases;
Thy facial angle forty-five degrees is.¹⁸

 

Stephens’s poem enjoys a scientistic confidence in anthropometrically justified prejudices, which seem in their mode of representation very different from ancient botanical-geographic iconography and the medieval religious inflections of the fabulous monster narratives.

 

Accounts of the fabulous monster disappear soon after the Renaissance, and some scholars have suggested that modern scientific observation dispelled the myths of monsters forever.¹⁹ However, the image of the monstrous, the radically inhuman, and the unredeemably bestial persisted as a remainder inaccessible to the new linguistic economy of the Rational and the Real. The human and physical sciences were called upon to manage this remainder, so that procedures of resource- and population-management might proceed unimpeded by the recalcitrant bodies and vapors of the East.²⁰ Increasingly, the colonial domain itself was seen as constitutive of its horrors. When one was no longer contemplating the alien from afar but rather dwelling within it, the fear of its contamination intensified, expressed in colonial anxieties regarding the “miasmic” vapors of the tropics. Just as the medieval discourse of monsters had bled over boundaries with the Age of Reason, the “environmental” theory of disease persisted in the colonies long after it had been superseded in Europe by germ theory. India continued to be the site where many of these discourses emerged; they would travel, in remarkably stable forms, to other sites in the British Empire, to Southeast Asia, and to Africa.²¹

 

Historian of medicine David Arnold describes the colonizers’ fears of the pathogenic environment thus:

 

It was the lethal combination of heat and humidity and the hot, moist air’s capacity to hold poisonous, disease-generating “miasma” in suspension that appeared to make tropical regions so deadly. Bengal’s jungles, creeks, and marshes, its hot and humid climate, and the great variations in temperature between and within seasons seemed to provide an almost archetypal example of the savage effects a hostile environment could have on the human constitution. (33)

 

The Environmental theory of disease held that the causes of disease were in climate, topography, and vegetation, in conjunction with the effects of heat and humidity and the idiosyncratic nature of disease in India. It therefore rejected the direct application of western medicine, assuming an intrinsic difference in the nature of disease and therapeutics in the tropics (Arnold 58-59). Not only would Westerners have to behave differently in the East, it followed, they would have to preserve their vigor and strength if they wished to escape the torpid weakness of the native. In order to preclude contamination by the languor of the tropical vapors, an elaborate system of individual behaviors emerged, focused on preserving the boundaries between dirt and cleanliness, activity and torpor, production and decay.²²

 

The description of the pathogenic environment gradually came to include other markers of social and cultural difference, blurring the boundaries between ethnographic and climatic data. In nineteenth-century Congo, for example, fear of native excess (embodied, most famously, in European stories of cannibalism) was contained through Protestant missionaries’ obsession with “personal cleanliness and moral habits” (Hunt 131). Nancy Rose Hunt, drawing on Timothy Burke’s work on the cultural significance of soap in colonial and post-colonial Zimbabwe and Leonore Davidoff’s work on Victorian rituals of order and cleanliness, points out that such concerns “were aspects of a new imaginary born of the industrial revolution” (131). She traces soap’s doubled semiotic, as it stood in for both moral and commercial duties in the colonies, and for spectacularly scrubbed bodies, cutlerly, and surgical instruments. “The word ‘hygiene,'” she points out, “came into use in early-nineteenth-century Europe as the novelty of bathing with soap remade the distinction between clean and dirty” (131). Hunt traces the influence of colonial surgeons, missionaries, and ethnographers in the creation of colonial domesticity, arguing that cleanliness and domesticity were ways of taming the excesses of the native Other:

 

Women’s excess was scandalous, arousing hidden dark, desiring laughter. It was for certain and for always. The laughter was shameful. And the only hope was in dead serious, consistent rescripting of the human female narrative as dutiful, clean mother and wife. (158)

 

Colonial medicine, religion, and anthropology, thus intertwined, had a powerful effect on the public imagination in scientific as well as in popular contexts. Colonizers and their subjects followed rituals of everyday life carefully scripted according to the binaries of cleanliness and filth, technological containment and organic surplus. These anxious efforts at disease containment were, of course, continually thwarted in the everyday spaces of the colonized world. If they were not to allow themselves to be undermined, the discourses of scientific management had to entrench themselves in institutional spaces that were more easily regulated: jails, barracks, schools, and hospitals. Here were the sites these discourses could reliably discipline and sanitize.

 

The retreat of technoscientific practices to more reliably governable spaces marks a fear that is often characterized, straightforwardly, as the white colonist’s fear of the non-white body. It is obviously true that colonialism entailed assumptions of racial hierarchies. But tracing a critique through colonial fears of contamination by the Other–conceived of in terms of superficial racialized physical or behavioral traits–misses the structural constitution of those fears in the encounter of technoscience with human agency. We find Laporte’s argument, that markers of racial difference in this context were supported by figurings of the matter of the bodies involved, more persuasive:

 

For its subjects to participate in the body of the empire, their waste need not be subjected to microscopic scrutiny. The patrolling and controlling of orifices are sufficient strategies. It is enough to enforce a code of shitting–the master’s code, the code of he who knows; namely, he who knows how to hold it in. (63)

 

The white hygienist’s efforts to contain and eliminate the residual matter within the colonial domain is bracketed by an inevitable return of the repressed: in the skin color and body odors of the native servant (“To the white man, the black man has the color and odor of shit” [Laporte 59]), and in the waterlogged turd she carries away in the master’s chamber pot, the “remainder of earth” which belies his claim to civilized (that is, technical) transcendence of the body–“The white man hates the black man for exposing that masked and hidden part of himself” (Laporte 59).²³

 

The configurations of the cultural, natural, and technological that inform the specifically cybercultural binary of desire/horror/cleanliness/filth entail a quantitative shift in the scale of psychic identification of the self with the technics of the machine: the threatening contaminant is no longer identified with mobile bodies or sloshing chamberpots but with mobile, microscopic particles. Confronted with the stuff of an irreducibly messy agentified body, the technophile retreats into a space of disembodied, machinic cleanliness.

 

4. The Cleanroom

 

Figure 5. “This enlarged image of a grain of salt on a piece of a microprocessor should give you an idea of how small and complex a microprocessor really is.” Image and caption copyright (c)1999 Intel Corporation. <http://www.intel.com/education/chips/clean.htm>. (Photo courtesy of Intel Corporation.)

 

A single computer microprocessor is slightly smaller than a US penny and may include millions of transistors (Figure 5). Their small size and complexity make transistors extremely vulnerable to physical damage: a single speck of dust falling on a microprocessor can render it unreliable or unusable. Thus, much of the effort of commercial production of microprocessors is devoted to insuring that the environment in which they are manufactured is as free as possible from airborne contaminants. Critical stages of manufacture take place in strictly-controlled fabrication facilities (“FABs”) known as “cleanrooms.”²⁴ The atmosphere in a cleanroom is kept at a constant temperature and humidity, and is circulated as rapidly as 100 feet per minute in a uniform direction from floor to ceiling or wall to wall known as a “laminar flow.” Before it enters or is returned to the cleanroom, the air is passed through High Efficiency Particulate Air (HEPA) filters, which trap all but the very smallest particles. Exposed surfaces in the room are made of coated, highly-polished metal or non-porous synthetic materials, free of microscopic fissures and cavities that might collect debris. Machinery with moving parts or open reservoirs of liquid is kept to a minimum. All forms of paper–a notorious dust and microbe magnet–are prohibited. The most environmentally controlled cleanrooms, known as “Class 1” cleanrooms, contain no more than one particle larger than 0.5 microns (one millionth of a meter, approximately 1/25,000 inch) per cubic foot of air–several orders of magnitude fewer than the number of airborne particles permitted in a modern hospital operating room.²⁵

 

The primary sources of contaminants in the cleanroom are the human agents who supervise the machinery and ferry the delicate chips through the stages of manufacture: a human body can slough off from five to ten million particles of skin, hair, and dirt every minute.²⁶ Workers in cleanrooms devoted to commercial microprocessor production wear specially-designed full-body garments, known in the industry as “bunny suits” (Figure 6).²⁷

 

Figure 6. Cleanroom worker in “bunny suit.” Image copyright (c)1997 Intel Corporation. <http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/cn12297a.htm>. (Photo courtesy of Intel Corporation.)

 

Putting on a bunny suit requires adhering to a precise sequence.²⁸ Workers first minimize contaminants they might bring to the suit’s interior: getting rid of any gum, candy, etc.; rinsing the mouth and throat so as to remove stray food particles; washing all exposed skin surfaces to remove dirt, makeup, and loose hairs or flakes of skin; covering head and facial hair with lint-free hoods and masks; cleaning shoes carefully before covering them with multiple shoe covers; passing through a high-pressure air shower to blast away dust from their street clothing. This process takes place in spaces divided into progressively “cleaner” zones–a worker, for example, must not allow her shoe to touch the floor on the “clean” side of a bench until the shoe has been properly covered. The parts of a bunny suit–belted frocks, booties, gloves, hoods, protective goggles or facemasks–are donned in several stages, and workers must take care not to allow any article of clothing to make contact with a surface of the gowning room before it has been tucked in and fastened appropriately. Any misstep in these procedures will compromise the cleanliness of the suit, and may mean having to start over again. Production targets in most FABs are unrelenting and time-sensitive. Effective workers quickly learn that they cannot afford to dress carelessly.

 

This progressive insulation of the worker under layers of Dacron taffeta, latex, and polycarbonate anticipates the isolation and sensory deprivation of the cleanroom itself. There, the hum of the processing equipment and the steady rush of the laminar flow merge into a constant white noise Dennis Hayes calls “the crescendo”:

 

Casual conversation is difficult and the distraction often dangerous. Their mouths gagged and faces veiled (often above the nose), phrases are muffled, expressions half-hidden. The customary thoroughfares of meaning and emotion are obscured. Do furrowed eyebrows indicate pleasure or problem? Like deep-sea divers, the workers use hand-gestures, or like oil riggers, they shout above the din created by the refrigerator-sized machines and the hushed roar of the laminar flow. But mainly, the crescendo encourages a feeling of isolation, or removal from the world. (63-64)

 

In the most strictly-controlled cleanrooms, the confinement of the worker’s body is nearly complete: each suit is equipped with an individual filtering unit to purify the air she breathes out, trapping exhaled fluids and particles inside the suit.

 

The cleanroom and the bunny suit offer limited protection for the worker against the highly toxic chemicals used in the production of microprocessors.²⁹ But these barrier technologies serve primarily to isolate the space of production from the substance of the worker’s body. This targeting of the body as the primary source of contamination is the foundation of the cleanroom’s significance as one of the principal fantasy spaces of the informational order. Ideological and libidinal urgencies of the informational order masquerade in the cleanroom as operational necessity and purposive design. Within this scheme, the fantasmatic function of the cleanroom is to calm the anxieties of the technoscientific subject with regard to her own body, by masking–literally and metaphorically–a problematic organic materiality with an apparatus of technical governance.

 

The precise technical strategies of this masquerade–the methods of cleanroom practice specific to different stages of microprocessor manufacture are, in this regard, merely stylistic variations on an underlying strategy of estrangement of the substance of the body.³⁰ These ritual techniques establish an informational cordon sanitaire freed of material difference and its dangers, in which human labor is subject to principles of cleanliness in keeping with the demands of a machinic order: a grain of dust poses no threat to the human organism, but may be fatal to the computer chip; the most elementary human activities–simply breathing and moving about–must therefore be bracketed by the demands of manufacture.³¹ The cleanroom governs the threat of stray matter by containing it within a strictly-limited space identified with the unruly organic processes of the worker’s body, insofar as they are removed from the field of production.

 

Moreover, the bunny-suited worker is decorporealized in a manner fully in keeping with the deracialized and genderless utopia celebrated by the evangelists of the “virtual community.” Traces of the worker’s gender and race are also sealed off from the field of her labor: the bunny suit’s mask or helmet obscures her face; the baggy suit’s frumpy, unisex appearance hides the contours of her body.³² In its best-known instance, the suit serves another kind of concealment of the body. The disco-dancing “BunnyPeople” of Intel’s 1997 ad campaign for the Pentium II® Processor are costumed in shiny, brightly-colored outfits (Figure 7).³³

 

Figure 7. Television commercials from Intel’s Superbowl XXXII “BunnyPeople” advertising campaign. Copyright (c)1997 Intel Corporation. Used by permission. Click images to play commercials.

 

“Real” cleanroom garments are nearly always white, though pastel shades are sometimes seen. The rainbow hues of the BunnyPeople’s suits substitute appealing, synthetic signifiers of difference for the actual gender or racial traits that the suits conceal. The ad campaign’s soundtracks further domesticate the marks of racial identity, clumsily stripping the lyric of Wild Cherry’s 1976 hit, “Play That Funky Music,” of its famous in-joke. “Play that funky music, white boy,” goes the original lyric; in the Intel commercials, the first half of this line is sung twice, replacing the song’s tongue-in-cheek reference to racial stereotype (white boys aren’t supposed to be able to play funky) with a pacifying tautology.

 

The BunnyPeople are not monstrous. They are, rather, cheerful and reassuring, even cute and cuddly. Slogans of the BunnyPeople campaign insisted that the new chips “put the fun in computing” and would “make your multimedia dance,” and the BunnyPeople are eminently fitted to making those claims seem truthful.³⁴ Though the Pentium II campaign has been superseded by campaigns for newer, more-advanced microprocessors, one can still purchase BunnyPeople beanbag dolls, jewelry, handbags, T-shirts, and the like, from Intel’s corporate web site.

 

We suggest, however, a filiation between ludic images of the hyperclean, hermetically-sealed BunnyPerson and the monstrous, ungovernable Other and filthy savage of medieval and Renaissance travel narratives (Figure 3). Both forms are oriented by a fundamental fantasy relating the boundaries of the subject to threatening extremities of matter. In the case of the cleanroom, the danger is attributable to any body, regardless of its familiarity: in the domain of informational production, the residue of all bodies is dangerous, infectious, and repellent. The leftover of the organic order poses a risk to the smooth working of the informational system of production; it must be eliminated or–at least–contained and expelled. The subject position of an ideal, clean, and normative body which served to distinguish the European colonialist from the native and the miasmic landscape is, in the tropology of the cleanroom, mapped onto the position of the microprocessor.³⁵ The position of the infectious, filthy primitive which must be governed or contained, is mapped onto the position of the worker, sealed within the cordon sanitaire of her suit. The cleanroom functions as a fantasy-space when it supports positive and negative variants and subject positions of the relation of technological agency to material resistance: the cleanroom as necessary precaution for informational production (the “reasonable” narrative of the microprocessor industry); the cleanroom as a toxic space of isolation and disempowerment (Hayes’s narrative of the discontented Silicon Valley worker); the cleanroom as the site of ecstatic celebration of the new order of labor (as exemplified by the dancing BunnyPeople–a form which, we suspect, fuses the narratives of reasonableness and discontent).

 

5. Cyber-cleanliness and Cyber-squalor

 

At all the more important moments while he was telling his story his face took on a very strange, composite expression. I could only interpret it as one of horror at pleasure of his own of which he himself was unaware.

 

–Freud, “Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional
Neurosis [The Rat-Man]” (1909)

 

This remainder of earth [Erdenrest],
it’s distasteful to bear it;
even cremated,
it would still be impure.

 

–Goethe, Faust II, 11,954-11,957

 

The technophilic fantasy of a decontaminated agent of production logically concludes in the eschatological myth which fascinates contemporary discourses of computing technology: that of the subject whose consciousness has been “uploaded” into the network, where she roams freely without the encumbrances of a real body.³⁶ In its positive and negative forms (“cyber-cleanliness” and “cyber-squalor”), the fantasy of decorporealization–and we propose that this is a constitutive element of the tropology of the cleanroom–binds informational subjectivation to informational production, in the interest of the latter’s need for absolute efficiency and material mastery.³⁷

 

But what sort of subject is a BunnyPerson, we wonder, and what is it celebrating in its frenzied dance? If, as the Intel commercials seem to suggest, the BunnyPerson dances to eulogize the unpleasures of embodied labor (computing, and the making of computers, are finally fun), then what is to be done with–and made of–the thingness of the microprocessor, and the irreducible materiality of the worker’s body? These are precisely the remainders that the cleanroom fantasies attempt to govern. To imagine that they may be someday purged, or transformed into the immaterial stuff of a pure agent of the network–everywhere and nowhere, the perfected subject of the informational order–is to beg the question: what forces are served by the apparent necessity of one or the other formulation: cyber-cleanliness or cyber-squalor?

 

We suggest a displacement of the question of technological agency, away from its articulation in the tradition of cyborg studies established by Haraway’s manifesto and the criticism it has inspired. The hope of cyborg agency, Haraway has suggested, lies in “attention to the agencies and knowledges crafted from the vantage point of nonstandard positions (positions that don’t fit but within which one must live)” (269). The nonstandard positions Haraway emphasizes are desirous structures; within them, the agency of the modern subject–“agency” conceived as purposive, intentional action, grounded in technological extension of the intellect and the body–is deeply problematic. That model of agency is, we think, modelled on a heuristic reductiveness that is also characteristic of Shannon’s electromechanical model of the rat-in-a-maze. Rather, the longing and revulsion encoded into the satisfactions and anxieties of the field within which the technoscientific subject operates are, in a sense, two articulations of the same process of desiring-constitution of the self. This is the sense of Freud’s astonishing insight (cited above) into the obsessional structure of the Rat-Man’s fascination with an obscene form of torture involving the insertion of a hungry rat into the anus of the condemned. The spectre of the foulest, most unruly appetite may reward the fantasizing subject in two senses, and at the same time: as the image of the Other’s implacable, hateful alterity; and as the truth of the subject’s most intimate passion.

 

Does such a re-staging of the “agency” question in terms of the inconsistency of desire displace and subvert the political promise of cyborg studies? Again, Zizek anticipates a version of this question:

 

To philosophical common sense, such a procedure appears, of course, like “evading the real issue”; whereas the dialectical approach recognizes in the scenic dramatization which displaces the question, replacing the abstract form of the problem with concrete scenes of its actualization within a life-form, the only possible access to its truth–we gain admittance to the domain of Truth only by stepping back, by resisting the temptation to penetrate it directly. (For They Know Not 145)

 

If the aim of critique of informational globalization were simply an epistemological revolution based on pluralistic democratic passions, we would not need to complicate commonsense understandings of the technological imaginary. The “temptation to penetrate it directly” grows stronger–and is often satisfyingly fulfilled–when one professes solidarity with non-hegemonic voices confronting the limitations of technological progress. Nevertheless, novel morphings in the global flows of capital and in the modes of technological progress reveal a sophisticated extension of the fantasy of belonging to those who might earlier have been “non-hegemonic” actors. We believe there is a need in this domain for careful, critical investigation of the historical and symbolic antecedents of an emerging imaginary which is in some senses new (in its compression of time and space), and in others, very familiar (in its replaying of well-worn tropes of the division of the clean from the unclean, the civilized from the primitive). Within the imaginary of the cleanroom-as-technologically-perfect-cordon sanitaire, subjectivity is constructed by occluding and repelling barriers, and human agency is confined to a definite, idealized space of production, from which every trace of abject materiality–literally, the unproductive leavings of organic life–is excluded.

 

Homologous with its elimination of the messy specificity of the body, these barrier technologies flatten out bodily traits of race and gender–not, we would contend, in the interest of a progressive social policy (the “happy,” communal form of the virtual community), but rather in the interest of eliminating every troublesome aspect of the body, its drives and its residues (the evidence of an “unhappy,” excessive, agonistic kernel of the virtual socius, the very thing it must exclude from consciousness in order to imagine itself a community).³⁸ They render every BunnyPerson, as it were, equal–at least within a radically sanitized domain. (Which is to say, every body is rendered equally offensive.)³⁹

 

The rat persists–the real, to paraphrase Lacan, is that which stays with us, stubbornly refusing to be exhaustively symbolized and so gotten rid of. The rat–the rat of the real, not the rat of cyborg dreams–feeding and shitting in the bowels of the machine, is the macroscopic, aporetic figure of the contaminating particle that the cleanroom would seek to govern. Unlike Hopper’s moth, its effects cannot be dissipated in the masquerade of wordplay, re-presented as a ludic prop for the regime of machinic efficiency. Its appetite and intractability point to an anchor or pivot in the fantasized spaces of cybernetic agency. As in the fantasies of the autochthonic monster and the filthy savage, the fantasies of cyberculture turn on the dual effects of a kernel, marking from one perspective that which must be excluded at any cost, and from another, that which will return as the very thing defining the logic of exclusion: the “remainder of earth” of cyberculture. A crucial task for theorists is not to undertake the unambiguous penetration of that kernel, but, on the contrary, to reconceive the emerging fields of technological, economic, and political subjectivation in ways that take account of their irreducible inconsistency: the mutual constitution of their horror and pleasure.

 

Notes

 

1. Cited in Arnold, 284.

 

2. See also a version of this text with critical annotations by Phil Bereano, Gary Chapman, David Gelernter, and Katherine Hayles, at <http://www.feedmag.com/95.05magna1.html>.

 

3. See, for instance, Kumar, Rekhi, and Murthy’s cover story for the April 2000 siliconindia, which celebrates that fact that some of the wealthiest members of Silicon Valley’s information technology boom are post-colonial Indians; or Goonatilake, who suggests that “East and West” can now (as a result of “globalization”) be combined by “mining” each for their scientifically meritorious elements.

 

4. Our use of the adjective “informational” to describe the nexus of late capitalism and cyberculture follows Manuel Castells’s use of the term. See Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 1-28.

 

5. For extended critiques of this narrative, see Stallabrass and Castells.

 

6. For representative positions, see: Jameson and Miyoshi, Sassen, and Mittelman.

 

7. Is this subject, we might ask, the sole, necessary and inevitable subject of history? Clearly not; that would be not only a gloomy prospect but also a transhistorical and idealist claim. However, the field of alternative subjectivities is not rich.

 

8. This essay extends arguments of other of our published essays on scientific visualization of global Internet diffusion and Imperial colonial scientific and hygienic discourses. (See Harpold, “Dark Continents,” and Philip, “English Mud.”) It is excerpted from a book-length project that aims to problematize binaries that characterize critical analyses of the content of technoscientific globalization.

 

9. See <http://www.americanhistory.si.edu/csr/comphist/objects/bug.htm>. The episode is often cited as the first use of the term “bug” in the sense of a defect or malfunction in a machine. As the logbook entry suggests, this was not the case; “bug” had had a long history of being used in this way. The OED, for example, records one such use in an 1889 newspaper account of Edison troubleshooting the phonograph.

 

10. The dual logic of the Reuters account–horror of the implacable appetite of the organic and bemusement at the eternal recalcitrance of non-western technological agency–are commonly repeated in descriptions of other technical spheres. A June 6, 2000 BBC News story entitled “Indian Phone Users Smell a Rat” announced the discovery of rats feeding on Indian telecom networks. The story slips effortlessly from a description of the brute technical breakdown to relocating the most resistant aspects of the failure in the Indian bureaucratic machine and its inability to control human laborers:

 

Rats with a taste for fibre optics have affected important telecom links between the Indian capital, Delhi, and the commercial hub of Bombay. Telecom officials say the rodents, lured partly by the smell of optical fibre, are nibbling away at underground cables connecting Delhi and Bombay. Telecom workers have tried controlling the problem. But that may take some time. As it happens, the telecom workers are on a strike themselves. They say a cohesive strategy for dealing with the problem cannot be worked out as technically-qualified people are denied top posts in the telecom department.

 

11. See Neumann, Perrow, Peterson, and the essays collected in Colburn, Fetzer, and Rankin, for discussions of the irreducibility of design faults in computer software and hardware, and of the influences of material factors on real-world computing applications.

 

12. See Hayles, ch. 3, for an overview of the Macy conferences, and a discussion of Shannon’s important role in them. A photograph of Shannon adjusting a later version of the rat appears on the dust jacket of his Collected Papers.

 

13. Echoing the material-informational “relay” trope noted earlier, the “brain” of Shannon’s rat was made up primarily of a telephone relay switch, the same sort of device jammed by Hopper’s moth.

 

14. “By suggesting certain kinds of experiments, the analogs between intelligent machines and humans construct the human in terms of the machine.… Whether they are understood as like or unlike, ranging human intelligence alongside an intelligent machine puts the two into a relay system that constitutes the human as a special kind of information machine and the information machine as a special kind of human. Presuppositions embodied in the electronic rat include the idea that both humans and cybernetic machines are goal-seeking mechanisms that learn, through corrective feedback, to reach a stable state. Both are information processors that tend toward homeostasis when they are functioning correctly.” (Hayles 64-65)

 

15. As if to confirm its mascot status for an optimistic vision of cybernetic transcendence, Clynes and Kline’s cyborg-rat appears on the cover of Chris Hables Gray’s classic essay collection, The Cyborg Handbook. Haraway’s “Cyborgs and Symbionts” essay introduces the collection.

 

16. 57. Laporte’s remarkable monograph sketches a history of the political economy of filth and disease parallel to the one we outline here. His emphasis on the psychic-symbolic resistance of excremental materiality to technical-economic domestication admirably distinguishes it from most analyses of the use/exchange value alchemy of capital. This essay is in one regard an effort to extend Laporte’s analysis into a specifically cybercultural domain.

 

17. “India” served as a geographical trope for all lands at a great distance from the civilized world. Wittkower traces the earliest surviving origin of the “Marvels of the East” tradition to the 5th century BC (Herodotus, Bk. IV, 44). “India” and “Ethiopia” were widely used as synonyms even up to the medieval period, a confusion Wittkower traces to Homer (Odyssey I, 23).

 

18. …And so on. The full text of the poem is cited on Ross Woodrow’s “Race and Image” web site. See <http://www.newcastle.edu.au/department/fad/fi/woodrow/compare1.htm>.

 

19. Wittkower explains that as “people slowly learned to discriminate between fictitious and trustworthy matter,” the reports of marvels ceased to come from India, retreating to still-unexplored areas of the world (197).

 

20. Thus, for instance, the newly developed science of craniology, with handy new statistical methods, allowed anthropometrists to measure primitivity to the second decimal place, by computing skull and nasal indices. See, for example, Gould’s discussion of this history.

 

21. Imperial medicine offered one of the strongest discourses of the native body and its infectiousness. As an episteme of tropical hygiene emerged, it was carried by British botanists, surgeons, and administrators from one colony to another, and back to the metropole. For parallels in Africa, see Coombes and Hunt; in Australia, see Griffiths and Robin; for a French construction of the savage, see Bullard.

 

22. Bernard Cohn cites the “first Indian ethnographer of the British,” Golam Husain Khan, who observed that the British “locked themselves up in their offices and houses”: “When the Englishmen went out, they were invisible, shut up in their carriages or being carried hurriedly in a palankeen with its shutters drawn” (20). Cohn also notes that the British typically preferred to travel by river, as it enabled them to view the colorful and picturesque from a distance, “without the smells, din, and constant presence of Indians all about them” (20).

 

23. This “remnant of earth” [Erdenrest] of which the more-perfect angels complain at the end of Goethe’s second Faust (11, 954-11, 957)–these lines are cited by Freud in his 1913 preface to Bourke’s Scatological Rites of All Nations–is a recurring element in Laporte’s book. See Section 5 of this article.

 

24. The cleanroom technologies we describe in this essay are not unique to microprocessor manufacturing. They are also used in research and manufacture which require strict control of particulate and microbial contaminants, for example: life sciences applications involving infectious disease organisms, pharmaceutical production, aerospace satellite assembly, and the manufacture of surgical implants.

 

25. Cleanrooms are classified under U.S. Federal Standard 209D according to the number of particles 0.5 microns (5m) or larger per cubic foot of air: the least restrictive classification is “Class 100,000” (100,000 such particles per cubic foot); the most restrictive is “Class 1” (1 such particle per cubic foot). Cleanroom classifications also regulate the number of permitted particles smaller than 0.5 5m–for example, a Class 1 cleanroom can have only 35 particles 0.1 5m or larger per cubic foot of air. By way of comparison: unfiltered room air can contain as many as 5 million particles larger than 0.5 5m. In 1999, U.S. standards (now 209E) were revised to use a metric nomenclature. New ISO standards (applying to all countries in the EU), were also released in 1999 and provide for a new classification below Class 1, called “M1,” which limits particles 0.5 5m or larger to only 0.3 per cubic foot. Because the ISO standards are relatively new and based on more complex formulae, most cleanroom industry literature still uses the 209D/E categories. See Cleanroom.com’s “A Cleanroom Primer,” <http://www.cleanroom.com/learning_center/partone.html>, for a brief introduction to cleanroom equipment and practices.

 

26. See Ljungqvist and Reinmüller, 37. Efforts to fully automate cleanroom microprocessor manufacture have had limited success. For the time being, Mathas notes, the flexibility, adaptability, and economy of the human worker outweighs the inconveniences of her dirtiness.

 

27. The etymology of the name is uncertain. Intel has trademarked the term “BunnyPeople,” to describe their cleanroom-suited workers.

 

28. An Intel web site devoted to “working in a cleanroom” lists 43 separate steps involved in putting on a bunny suit and entering a cleanroom. See <http://www.intel.com/education/chips/cleanroom.htm>.

 

29. Many of the substances used in the manufacture of computer chips are dangerous to living organisms and long-lived in the environment. It is one of the ironies of the high-tech economy that the manufacturing technologies which support it are equally or more ecologically toxic as those of traditional industrial practices. See, for example, Sachs’s overview of the environmental damage of unchecked growth of the computer industry in California’s Silicon Valley. Hayes, ch. 3, describes the poisonous and mutagenic chemicals used in microprocessor manufacture (many of which are outgassed in dangerous concentrations in the course of normal production), and the high risk–and occurrence–of chemical injury among workers in the industry.

 

30. They are thus correlative to national differences in toilet design noted by Zizek as variants of the same strategy of estranging the most intimate of human matter: “In a traditional German toilet, the hole in which shit disappears after we flush water is way in front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is in the back: shit is supposed to disappear as soon as possible. Finally, the American toilet presents a kind of synthesis, a mediation between these two opposed poles–the toilet basin is full of water, so the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to the unpleasant excrement which comes from within our body is clearly discernible in it” (“Fantasy as a Political Category” 90).

 

31. This is one of the ways in which the cleanroom spaces of microprocessor production differ from cleanrooms and “containment rooms” used in the handling of infectious organisms. In the latter case, the technologies involved serve to protect the worker from infection, rather than to protect the space of production from the debris of the worker’s body.

 

32. Hayes (71-73) cites industry statistics showing that electronics assembly workers in the U.S. are overwhemingly female and disproportionately drawn from immigrant and racial minority populations. The electronics industry in general is the second largest U.S. employer of women, surpassed only by the apparel manufacturing and clothing industry.

 

33. The BunnyPeople campaign was produced for Intel by DSW Partners, who also produced Intel’s landmark “Intel Inside” campaign. (See <http://www.dsw.com/> for examples of the print, radio, and television ads included in the BunnyPeople campaign.) The television campaign was launched with broadcasts during the 1997 SuperBowl.

 

34. See <http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/cn12297a.htm>.

 

35. Intel’s 1998 television ad campaign for the Pentium III carried this mapping to the next level. The first ad in the campaign featured a robot, who begins as a lusterless, somewhat clunky figure. After entering through a door in the center of the Pentium III chip (“through this door lies the power to make your Internet come to life”) the robot is “upgraded,” and passes through a series of Adobe® Photoshop® filters. At the end of the commercial, the robot is shiny, golden-colored, and smiles broadly at the viewer as it shows off its new outfit. During the commercial, an uptempo version of West Side Story‘s “I Feel Pretty” plays in the background. (Sondheim’s original lyric is, however, changed: “I feel pretty, and witty, and gay” is replaced with “I feel pretty, and witty, and bright.” The revision substitutes a sexless, inorganic adjective for one which might, in 1998, be interpreted as erotically charged.) Intel’s principal slogan for the Pentium III campaign, “Don’t just get onto the Internet, get into it,” recaps in straightforward language of the ad’s fantasy narrative of decorporealization. In this vein, the song’s second verse (with which the commercial concludes) seems disconcerting, even sinister:

 

I feel charming,
Oh so charming,
It’s alarming how charming I feel,
And so pretty
That I hardly can believe I’m real.

 

36. To name only a few examples in which this fantasy is articulated: in fiction, William Gibson’s “Sprawl” novels, Rudy Rucker’s “ware” tetralogy; in nonfiction: Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines and Hans Moravec’s Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind; in film and television: Max Headroom, the Lawnmower Man films, Strange Days, The Thirteenth Floor.

 

37. This fantasy of decorporealized, sterile subjectivity is also the logical telos of the historical-technical-symbolic process Joseph A. Amato calls “The Great Cleanup”: nineteenth- and twentieth-century efforts to identify and eliminate the smallest particulate and biological contaminants of lived human spaces. As Amato emphasizes repeatedly in his popular history of dust, the technologies of the Industrial Revolution were responsible for a massive increase in the density and variety of particulate contaminants assaulting the human body; moreover, dissimilar representations of the “natural” and the “technical” supported by those technologies were at the root of the distinctively modern fantasy that the body is under assault by very small, often invisible, things. This process is, Amato notes, accelerated by twentieth-century physical and biological sciences: a host of invisible environmental contaminants and pathogens (radioactive particles, industrial pollutants, viruses, prions, etc.) are generated and/or identified by technical practices which are then turned to the control of those threats. Amato concludes that, despite its modern dethronement from the position of the privileged measure of the “infinite granularity of all things” (177), dust will remain central to the discourse of the small and invisible, because it is the measure most meaningful to the human body. This assertion insufficiently addresses, we think, the role of human subjection to the demands of the machinic: dust is all the more relevant to human practice in this historical moment because it is increasingly threatening to the efficient work of the machines upon and within which human agency is defined.

 

38. Cf. Laclau’s discussion of the “constitutive outside” of social formations, in the title essay of New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time.

 

39. One political-economic sense of the decorporealized order of production is evident in the expansion of the use of the term “cleanroom” within a domain we have not discussed here: the legal discourses of intellectual property. Reverse engineering of a competitor’s product is often performed under so-called “cleanroom” conditions, meaning that no data which might be traceable to the competitor’s technologies or employee know-how is permitted to “contaminate” the engineering process. Obviously, there is room here for further investigation of the semiotic constellation joining cleanliness (as in propre) with “property.”

 

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