Technology, Culture, and the Body in Modern America
Elspeth H. Brown · American Quarterly · 2004
The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American. By Carolyn Thomas de la Peña. New York: New York University Press, 2003. 329 pages. $35.00 (cloth). Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars. By Joel Dinerstein. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 415 pages. $80.00 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). The relationship between technology and culture is one of the most venerable areas of inquiry in the historiography of American studies.1 Yet it's fair to say that recent work in the history of technology has been slow to adopt the questions framing other fields in the humanities and social sciences, especially those stemming from conceptualizations of difference as an analytic category. A major, important exception here is the influential work by a generation of feminist historians, currently led by Ruth Oldenziel and Arwen Mohen, which interrogates the relationship between gender and technology.2 Although the historiography of race and digital culture technologies is growing exponentially each year, the number of historically based, American studies-inflected studies of race and technology can, sadly, be counted on one hand.3 Fortunately, two recent books extend the American studies interest in the history of technology and culture in important ways. Carolyn de la Peña's excellent The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American extends the technology and culture tradition to the [End Page 449] fields of public health and popular science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Joel Dinerstein's brilliant Swinging the Machine is the first American studies project that puts race in the middle of the technology and culture intersection. Both books, inspired by and working within an older American studies tradition, help link the long-standing interest in technology and culture with a newer American studies focus on subjectivity, difference, and the body. The Body Electric and Swinging the Machine, covering overlapping time periods yet different cultural expressions, are both concerned with how the body accommodates, resists, and incorporates new technologies. The books explore the flip side of technology and aesthetics, in that both look at how everyday Americans used technology to fashion modern subjectivities that made room for individual adaptation. They represent an important response to the call made in the late 1980s and early 1990s concerning the human-machine nexus, when Mark Seltzer's Bodies and Machines, Cecelia Tichi's Shifting Gears, and Martha Banta's Taylored Lives all sought to understand how machine age technologies framed American subjectivity and cultural production.4 In the dialectic between bodies and machines, however, both of these fine books, while acknowledging the structuring impact of mechanization and mass production, emphasize the body's playful, utopian accommodations, as well as incorporations, of modern technology. Carolyn de la Peña's superbly researched project examines how Americans in the period between 1870 and 1935 sought to supplement their physical energy through engagement with a variety of popular health technologies, including muscle-building machines; electrical invigorators, such as belts and collars; and radioactive elixirs. As she persuasively argues, historians' understanding of the modern body in this period has been generally understood as a narrative of decline. The classic argument, drawn from George Beard's American Nervousness (1881), is that modern technologies (including electricity) enervate rather than invigorate the body; Beard's cure for neurasthenia in white, middle-class women was, as Charlotte Perkins Gilman made famous, the rest cure. But as de la Peña argues, our understandings of the period are overdetermined by these few chapters in American Nervousness; not all Americans interpreted the relationship between modernity and the body in such dystopic terms. Both health experts and enthusiasts viewed the new technologies of the 1870-1930 period optimistically and in fact sought to harness the power of these new technologies on [End Page 450] behalf of the body's internal energies. De la Peña helps explain how the utopian thrill with which Americans greeted the...