Anonymous History?

I find Gidieon's project strange. Or perhaps, since the book is so old, that the cycles of literary criticism have kind of lapped him already. He spends a lot of time denying a Hegelian form of history (ever onward and upwards to perfection) and claims that one must make an 'anonymous' telling of events. He acknowledges that there will be holes in the 'story' and in this manner he previews the ideas of the deconstructionists like Derrida and Foucault. But as Foucault much more convincingly showed in Discipline and Punish and Power/Knowledge, among others. The anonymous history always has an author, however elusive. And to track the voice of this author is to outline the power structure in a society. Thus, Gidieon only presents half the task: he lists the events of the mechanization of society, but fails to seek out the power motives behind the acts themselves. Thus, I think the book reads more like a laundry list of patent applications, rather than in inquiry into a cultural history (america's). Anyway, at least he was in the ballpark. On to the questions:

When computerization proceeds unchecked, like any other mechanization, the result, I believe in the West at least, is an eradication of the body. As he showed with the bath, western society does not use ablution as a moral device and in fact spends much of its time trying to deny that the body exists, wiping out all traces and residues. This is particularly actue in Puritan America. Is it any surprise that we invented deodorant? Or teeth whitening toothpaste? We, as Americans, constantly seek to deny the body's existence (equating sex with dirt) and use mechanization, and lately, computerization, to achieve this project. As Gidieon correctly pointed out, the end result is a removal of death as an event of life. What also occurs, however, is a devaluation of the unique icons of the body, and turns these icons into objects of fashion. Since we all must have a perfect, standardized athletic toned body, it no longer matters what the individual idiosyncracies of our real bodies our, because there is not only one standard, whose particularites are dictated by Melrose Place, Vogue and Madonna. Enthusiastic mechanization, in its demand for ever greater output as ever cheaper cost, produces uniformity, and ironically, raises the level of waste. Waste increases because the level of standardization has made large areas of life now 'inferior' and useless. What would have passed as a perfectly adequate 486 machine three years ago, is now an object of scorn suitable only for the junkpile. I wouldn't be caught dead working on one.

When computerization encounters the everyday, I think Gidieon is accurate in pointing out that it is always the organic that determines the law. We may be able to intellectually project ourselves into the brave new world, but when it comes to its details, it is always the flesh that will dictate. Ironically, the more one tries to eradicate the body, the more it come back in spades. I think this will be the lesson of the 20th century. There's nothing more (i'm being facetious) annoying or horrifying that all those holocaust bodies or the Hiroshima fallout skin lesions: Progress must always take into account the body, or it is useless. In the future, I believe that computerization will try to push that envelope of what is bodily private and what can be publicly interfaced with the net, but the result will always be the body redrawing the lines. Chat rooms and avatars will result in people being more savvy with their virtual personalities. Eventually, even though we think that we are getting closer to someone through electronic communication, the truth will be that the other person has just erected a more sophisticated wall.

This points out a way in which form and content emerge however. Generally, I propose that the mechanical first models the contemporary and the physical, improves upon it on its own terms and then ultimately finds a new metaphor to replace it. An example is the bread kneeder. Original designs had the mechanical kneeder modeling and duplicating the action of the hands. It then speds this up. Finally, however, a new metaphor was required because the increase in speed resulted in actions which were physically impossible for the hands to do, but not for other objects like rotors. The machine then came into its own right and transcended the body. However, as a last step this transcendance must be correlated with the physical: it does no good to create a bread kneeder that humans can't operate, so the body wins anyway. So I think that the 'pillars' in question are the body and the mechanical metaphor itself.