MDDM Ch. 50 Golem

[Dave Monroe]

>From Klaus Benesch, Romantic Cyborgs: Authorship and
Technology in the American Renaissance (Amherst: U of
Massachusetts P, 2002), "Introduction: Authorship,
Technology, and the Cybernetic Body," pp. 1-34 ...

   "As early as 1786, Dr. Benjamin Rush, founding
memebr and first president of the United Company of
Philadelphia for Promoting American Manufactures,
extended the structural pattern of the machine into
the realm of public politics,  'I consider it
possible,' he wrote in a proposal for American
education, 'to convert men into republican machines. 
This must be done, if we expect them to perform thier
parts properly, in the great machine of the government
of state.'  Rush, who signed the Declaration of
Independence and is said to have bestowed the title on
Thomas Paine's Common Sense, was among the many early
Americans to welcome the machine as a symbol of
well-regulated, controllable behavior, a role model
that allowed the Puritan's dream of the mind's
ultimate triumph over the body to come true.  As
educator, reformer, and physician, Rush deemed nothing
more appalling than the loss of self-control." (p. 24)

   "Since technology represented the antithesis of the
'natural' and organic, itv was increasingly
interpreted as a means to free the mind of the
devastating impact of its physical confines....
Through an interesting twist of signifiers, technology
and the machine thus came to serve as allies for
achieving the dominance of mind, of the
self-regulating mental faculties over the morbid and
rampant desires of the flesh.
   "It would be only a few decades, however, before
Thoreau wouyld expose the synecdochic confaltion of
machinery and state as tyrranical and therefore
essentially un-American.  The rhetoric as well as many
of teh arguments presented in his celebrated essay
'Resitance to Government' (1849) seem to respond
directly to Rush's technotopia.  Voicing his disgust
about the degree to which the heirs of the great
Revolution have been turned into corrupt little
machines, Thoreau dismisses the 'perfect' citizen as a
republican golem, an artificial monster that
'command)s) no more respect that men of straw or a
lump of dirt.'  As he writes in his classic protest
against the government's interference with individual
liberty: 'the mass of men serve the State thus, not as
men mainly, but as machines with their bodies.... They
put themselves on a level with wood and earth and
stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured
that will serve the purpose as well.... Yet such as
these even are commonly esteemed good citizens.... A
wise man will only be useful as a a man, and not
submit to be "clay."'" (pp. 24-5)

See ...

Thoreau, Henry David.  "Resistance to Civil
   Government."  Reform Papers.  Ed. Wendell Glick.
   Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1973.  63-90

http://eserver.org/thoreau/civil.html

http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/webtexts/civil/

... a.k.a. "Civil Disobedience."  Didn't want to leave
y'all high and dry, is all.  Okay, back to work ...

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