Haraway’s bass line was her constant citation of “high-tech culture.” She was pretty sure that it had displaced all the dualisms (e.g., subject/object, mind/body) invented by Western civilization, which, as the deconstructionists always insisted (see chapter 3), reinforced hierarchy among humans. Here is how she put it in that bizarre and profound manifesto: “To recapitulate, certain dualisms have been persistent in western traditions; they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals—in short, domination of all constructed as others, whose task is to mirror the [white man’s] self. Chief among these troubling dualism are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female,
civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong, total/partial, God/man. . . . High-tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways.”
But what exactly is high-tech culture? We all experience it, every day and almost every hour, as we sit at our “personal” computers looking up the most esoteric information, even Googling ourselves from time to time, or watching cable TV via satellite, or visiting the ATM down the block, or text-messaging on our cell phones. We write and receive e-mail, we’re surprised when someone we know calls us on the land line—that thing is for fund-raisers—and we take for granted the extreme abstraction called the Internet, the once-distant geography of cyberspace.
We should remember, however, that it was only toward the end of the twentieth century that we could begin to inhabit or apprehend the whole world in this way, as something close by, not next door but right there in the room with us, bright, blaring, invasive. We did not have to experience that invasion as an anal probe or as the Tar Baby from hell, to be sure, but we knew it was something that was having an effect on our interiors. The “personal” computer was then, and is now, the technology of globalization, just as it is the device that forced us to confront, or clarify, or adjourn the difference between machines and men, outside and inside, them and us. In the next chapter, we’ll get to the foreign policy implications of these newly imagined differences. For now, let us ask how computers changed the way we think about, and feel in, the world that is no longer elsewhere.
Once upon a time, a computer was a huge machine housed at the Pentagon or IBM; it filled entire rooms, it spit out millions of perforated cards that were not supposed to be bent, folded, or mutilated on pain of death; it counted everything except your calories. And then, that big, imposing, quasi-public thing became “personal,” by way of Texas Instruments, Apple, Microsoft, and other strange companies, in the 1980s. So almost everybody went out and bought a computer and a printer (it usually weighed about eighty pounds) and started word processing. “Electronic mail,” once the property (also the invention) of U.S. intelligence agencies and the Defense Department, meanwhile became available to the declassified among us, causing local epistolary outbreaks of sincere and useless prose, all of which will someday be understood as the inarticulate beginnings of the blogosphere. Then, in the last decade of the twentieth century, e-mail became the norm of interpersonal communication. By 1998, words printed on paper and delivered in an envelope began to look either quaint or threatening—it was probably a phone bill.
How then did the personal computer and cyberspace change us? In at least three ways. First, as Richard Lanham has brilliantly demonstrated, they reunite words and images, sound and color, and thus revolutionize what he calls the “economics of attention.” Like comics, cartoons, and movies, they move us away from the attitude of “sensory denial” that makes us read the book for the ending and search the author for his intention—the attitude in which we are always trying to look through the style and the rhetoric to get at the substance buried somewhere else, under layers of the annoying ornament we know as language. In that sense, the cultural effect of computers is comparable to the graffiti that adorned the surfaces of New York subway cars in the 1970s, for both create a new “alphabet that thinks,” or, rather, a set of letters—every one another abstraction—that makes us think differently about the purposes of words, which are already icons.
Now we can look at the performers as well, as if style, movement, rhythm, timbre, and grace matter as much as the words they utter or sing—again, as if the form they adopt determines as well as reveals the content of what we can see and hear when they perform. On the laptop in the airport, Surfaces R Us. If you want to go deeper, that’s fine; just remember that your computer and its artificial intelligence have made the distinction between surface and depth, or outside and inside, or machine and man, or style and substance problematic. This technological effect has the same import as the poststructuralist urge in academia to dispense with “the” subject who was the “man of reason” in the era of the ego.
Second, the personal computer disperses power, it lets us all participate in the debates of our time, and it makes electoral politics almost an afterthought, a footnote to the blogosphere. Cultural and identity politics become the norm, so the goal of political activism is no longer to rewrite the party platform but to rethink subjectivity itself. The demographic decline of the three TV networks that once organized political discourse became almost pathetic in the 1990s, but meanwhile, “news,” understood as both means and end—in the newsroom you now report on the reporting of events and on the reporters themselves—became much more important at the end of the twentieth century. Cable television had emerged from obscurity, probably because all those retired folks who watched Dan Rather on CBS could not wait for the next word on the weather in the middle of the day, when they were contemplating the possibilities of a walk with the dog or the spouse.
Meanwhile the Internet had also emerged as a constant stream of information, news of a kind, to which you could respond, not merely watch. The democratic, interactive character of these developments should not be exaggerated. But neither should it be dismissed. Newspapers as such are now in deep financial trouble, in part because almost everyone gets his or her daily reports on the world from elsewhere: “online,” in a space that can’t be inhabited except virtually, marginally, anonymously, and also urgently, in a “place” where sentences matter more than they do on the printed page, a place where sounds, motion, and images have both changed and enhanced the significance of words.
Third, orality, literacy, and the larger sensory regime in which these capacities of communication get stored and developed are transformed by our deployment of the computer’s articifical intelligence. Once upon a time, knowledge was stored and transmitted in song, in epic verse, in stories, in gossip, because the people who could read and write were few and far between—they were priests, scribes, monks, men who claimed exemption from the necessities of this world. Mass communication happened in speech or song or not at all (and this is why rhetorical or musical skill was so important). Then the codex book came along, and everything changed—well, almost. Everybody started reading the Bible in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or tried to, but until the end of the eighteenth century, speech and song were still the media in which knowledge was conveyed and stored.
Now, if speech and song are knowledge as such, then reciprocity is the rule. You’d better be listening closely and responding physically to the sounds and the gestures of the person who’s talking or singing. Either you situate yourself in a relationship to the speaker or the singer, or you are ignorant. Hearing was more important than seeing under this sensory regime. But when the printed word—the codex book, the pamphlet, and the newspaper—became the principal means of conveying and storing knowledge, the sense of sight attained a new privilege, a new command, over all others and reorganized them accordingly (note that our bodies, our selves, were thus changed). This new sensory regime made distance and withdrawal from others—from the objects of our scrutiny—both possible and necessary. It enabled modern individualism.
The personal computer allows abstraction, just like cartoons, but it troubles, and perhaps disables, moder
n individualism. Here’s how. It restores sound and lets us, even forces us, to respond to the more complicated, reciprocal world where we can hear those voices and see those simultaneous responses that disappeared into the codex book. It completes cartoons and comics; it is video when you want it and feedback when you don’t , but the sound track is, in this sense, always present, always audible. That new, computerized “orality”—the word comes from Walter Ong, the great scholar of literacy—makes a social, public self more available, more plausible to users of the Internet than it can be to advocates of the codex book. So it complicates the meaning of individualism; it promotes a social self as against the private self that is prior to society, language, political traditions, or communities. As Will Eisner noticed in 1985, “Historically, technology has always had the effect of expanding the artists’ reach while challenging their individuality. With the arrival of machines (computers) capable of generating artwork, rather than simply reproducing it, came a new impact on individuality.” At least the personal computer keeps us moving between the opposite extremes of individualism, one private and the other public—it keeps us guessing as to where the boundary between them lies. It keeps us toggling, as Lanham puts it.
In these terms, the “personal” computer is anything but. It allows anyone an identity that can be anonymous and yet perceptible so that the performance of the self on screen is its only significance—the doer behind the deed or prior to the sentences and the sounds is irrelevant to understanding the deed, the sentences, and the sounds. Those nicknames, or “handles,” that everybody adopts are enactments of this performative principle; they say, “As I speak in this voice and this venue, I step outside myself, but as I do I make myself by asking you to recognize me as the sum of my affect and my utterance, not my origins.” In these terms, the personal computer is the physical, palpable, technological
embodiment of the intellectual innovations specific to the late twentieth century, when Friedrich Nietzsche’s rendition of the end of modernity became commonplace—when the “man of reason” passed away. And in its insanely various and strangely productive usages, we might detect the revolution that is contained, in both the inclusive and the exclusive sense, by American thought and culture at the end of the twentieth century.
chapter six
The Ending
of the “American Century”
The American Century Revisited
The historian Martin J. Sklar has called the “American Century” a twice-told tale: one that got started in the very early twentieth century, another that got going in the 1940s, when the United States finally became the indispensable nation because it won the Second World War. Almost all other historians think of this imperial phenomenon as something that began in the throes of that war, right around mid-century, when Henry Luce, the editor of Time magazine, announced its advent. Here is how Luce characterized it in a famous essay for Life magazine: “Once we cease to distract ourselves with lifeless arguments about isolationism, we shall be amazed to discover that there is already an immense American internationalism. American jazz, Hollywood movies, American slang, American machines and patented products, are in fact the only things that every community in the world, from Zanzibar to Hamburg, recognizes in common. Blindly, unintentionally, accidentally, we are already a world power in all the trivial ways—in very human ways. But there is a great deal more than that. America is already the intellectual, scientific and artistic capital of the world.”
Luce was right, of course. He published this essay, called “The American Century,” in 1941. But follow Sklar’s lead and listen now to Frank Vanderlip, the vice president of the National City Bank of New York, the origin of what we know as Citcorp—probably the source of your credit card—speaking in February 1902 at the Commercial Club of Chicago about “the Americanization of the world.” This phrase was neither a promise nor a threat nor a fact. The man was merely quoting the title of a book by the British editor of the Review of Reviews. “The twentieth century is America’s century,” Vanderlip said, and then quoted another English journalist to prove the point: “The century which has just closed is Great Britain’s. The century which has just begun is yours.”
Vanderlip understood the impending superiority of the United States as an economic phenomenon driven by the large corporations that had erupted from the wreckage of late-nineteenth-century market crises in the great merger movement of 1898 to 1903. On the one hand, “America’s century” was a matter of “industrial progress,” “commercial invasion,” “growth, development, the conquest of markets”—not a Pax Americana signified and enforced by military power. On the other hand, it was the result of the new corporate-industrial social order: “I believe in the great corporation,” he said. “I believe there is no more effective way for us to impress ourselves on the trade situation of the world than through these great industrial units that can project into the world’s markets the strength of their commercial position with irresistible force.”
Frank Vanderlip was not a diplomat with credentials from the State Department when he visited the United Kingdom and returned home to announce the advent of a century in which the American idea of enterprise would reshape the world. But as Sklar notes, and as other historians such as Walter LaFeber and Lloyd Gardner have demonstrated, this banker—Vanderlip was once a journalist, then a Treasury Department bureaucrat—“personified an intersecting of the spheres of intellect, government, and modern [corporate] business.” In this sense, he already spoke the language of U.S. foreign policy in the twentieth century. Or, rather, he was one of its inventors, and then again one of its architects, because he stood at the heart of the changes that happened at the turn of the last century.
Let us now revisit the principles of U.S. foreign policy as they were enunciated once upon a time, just two years before Vanderlip spoke in Chicago, so that we can interpret his prophetic language and decide accordingly whether our current policy-relevant vocabularies need improvement. When our language skills are good enough, we can decide whether, or how, things changed at the ending of the savage moment we call the twentieth century. And even if we can’t decide, we’ll know we have a good argument going one way or the other.
The Economic Logics of Globalization
The Open Door Notes that founded twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy were circulated in 1899 and 1900. They were written by John Hay, who had begun his career as Abraham Lincoln’s secretary and who became William McKinley’s secretary of state in 1897. Hay was not their singular “author,” however—he was part of a political and intellectual scene that included Frederick Jackson Turner, the theorist of the American frontier; Alfred Thayer Mahan, the influential historian of empires and sea power; Theodore Roosevelt, the supposed Rough Rider who, like Turner, believed that the idea of new frontiers had somehow become the American Dream; Woodrow Wilson, Turner’s roommate in graduate school at Johns Hopkins; and sophisticated businessmen like Frank Vanderlip.
These men understood that the United States was an inherently expansionist nation. It had developed by displacing indigenous peoples and conquering (or buying) territory, so that by the 1860s it was already a continental polity. “Extend the sphere,” James Madison had urged his fellow patriots in 1787—if you keep incorporating more factions, interests, peoples, states, and territories into the constitutional fabric of American politics, majority rule becomes more difficult but more durable. But now what? In the 1890s, it was clear that a frontier defined by territorial expansion was over (this was Turner’s special insight, but everyone also knew that Mexico and Canada were not ripe for military conquest). How to preserve the dynamism of American life in the absence of that frontier?
The related question was, where do we sell our goods? By the 1890s, it was clear that American industrial capacity was more than sufficient to supply the entire continental market; prices and profits had been falling since the 1870s. Would overseas markets offset this deficiency of demand, raise prices, and restore profits?
If not, persistent economic crisis might deform the political system by making class conflict look normal. Arthur T. Hadley, the president of Yale University (he was an influential economist who also served on the finance committee of the Pennsylvania Railroad), explained the difficulty this way in 1896: “A republican government is organized on the assumption that all men are free and equal. If the political power is . . . equally distributed while the industrial power is concentrated in the hands of a few, it creates dangers of class struggles and class legislation which menace both our political and our industrial order.” At the end of the nineteenth century, then, “an entirely new era in national life,” as Vanderlip put it, was dawning. Americans had reached another verge.
Meanwhile, the European powers were carving up the world into exclusive “spheres of influence”—that is, colonies. France, Germany, and Great Britain were already scrambling in Africa and Asia to create new outposts of their business enterprises, from which the trade and investment of other countries would be barred. The German thinking on the issue was especially interesting because, as articulated in the intellectual agenda of Mitteleuropa, it proposed to reproduce both the American experience of the nineteenth century—let’s conquer the whole continent!—and the Napoleonic dream of an empire that would encompass the entire Eurasian land mass. This intellectual agenda animated German diplomacy from the 1870s to the 1940s and produced two world wars.
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