Chapter 15 Machinery and Modern Industry

Abstract

Section 1. The Development of Machinery John Stuart Mill says in his ‘Principles of Political Economy’: ‘It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being.’ That is, however, by no means the aim of the...

Hideous Hobgoblins: Monstrous Form in Darwin, Marx, and Joyce

“…Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organization, deserve equal attention? 19 Marx wanted to write a history of technology in a similar spirit to Darwin's history of species, looking at technologies as unique organs of human history, which, for Marx, had transformed itself into a history of commodity production. While, for Joyce, shipping would serve as its own kind of figurative technology, through which characters sense the relations of production on a global scale, for Marx, similarly, a "critical history of technology" would also be a history of capitalism.…”

“…"History discloses no tragedy more horrible than the gradual extinction of the English hand-loom weavers," reads one passage, "an extinction that was spread over several decades, and finally sealed in 1838." 20 Another refers to the effect of English cotton machinery on India's working class: "The bones of the cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of India." 21 This is the ecological and evolutionary landscape of capitalism, strewn with the corpses of dead capital and roamed by mechanical titans; it is governed by savage contests, sudden mutations, survival of the fittest, and the extinction of all unsuccessful species -included classes within our own.…”

“…20 Another refers to the effect of English cotton machinery on India's working class: "The bones of the cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of India." 21 This is the ecological and evolutionary landscape of capitalism, strewn with the corpses of dead capital and roamed by mechanical titans; it is governed by savage contests, sudden mutations, survival of the fittest, and the extinction of all unsuccessful species -included classes within our own. The monster, within this setting, is the defiled human form, a natural body turned inside out by mechanical production, but it is also the collective embodiment of a subjectivity that reaches beyond the individual human, a monstrous figure capable of world-historic transformation.…”

“…In what might be the closest evolutionary antecedent to Bloom's speech, the centrepiece of the chapter on modern industry from Marx's Capital is an image of the factory system: "Here we have, in place of the isolated machine, a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demonic power, at first hidden by the slow and measured motions of its gigantic members, finally bursts forth in the fast and feverish whirl of its countless working organs." 23 This image is composed in a mixture of admiration and horror. In it can be felt the same affective intensity, that astonishing confrontation of wonderment and revulsion, which attends to Darwin's thinking about variform monsters of the middle paleolithic.…”

“…Fantasying a kind of high-noon shoot-out, HCE strives for proto-Darwinian self-preservation ("realising on fundamental liberal principles the supreme importance, nexally and noxally, of physical life" FW, 35. [21][22][23] in the face of what reads as revolutionary terror. Upon sighting the cad, HCE is reminded of local decolonization struggles ("the nearest help relay being pingping K. O. Sempatrick's Day and the fenian rising" FW, 35.…”