CHAPTER TWO
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: Prototype for a Black Cyborg Subject
Rethinking “Postmodern Blackness”
In “Postmodern Blackness,” hooks recalls an argument at a dinner party where she and one other guest were the only black people present. hooks’s unnamed interlocutor asserts that hooks’s attempt to understand “the significance of postmodernism for contemporary black experience” is a waste of time because “th[at] stuff does not relate in any way to what’s happening with black people.” hooks argues that “racism is perpetuated when blackness is associated solely with concrete gut level experience conceived either as opposing or having no connection to abstract thinking and the production of critical theory.”
I agree with hooks that theories of blackness should be in dialogue with postmodern critical theory. As she notes, because postmodernism questions theories of identity based on essence, it is positioned to “challenge notions of universality and static over-determined identity within mass culture and mass consciousness.” hooks is concerned to further a “radical postmodernism [which] calls attention to those sensibilities which are shared across the boundaries of class, gender, and race, and which could be fertile ground for the construction of empathy—ties that would promote recognition of common commitments and serve as a base for solidarity and coalition.”
My own approach in this chapter will be to extend theories of cybernetic identity in ways that account for the racial character of a cyborg described in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Ellison’s novel is particularly important because its experimental modernist style makes it a progenitor of the postmodern subject. Invisible Man’s lack of identity and radical alienation from the systems of capital which attempt to appropriate him anticipate the alienation of postmodern subjectivity from the systems (language, capital, the Symbolic, etc.) which compromise its agency. Invisible Man is one of the most important literary parables regarding African-American identity in post-war American literature, and its influence extends into the more generalized theater of the literary exploration of subjectivity through narrative experimentation. Given its experimentation with language, innovation of narrative technique, investigation of matters of race, articulation of the relationship between the individual and post-Industrial capital, and its remediation of non-print and electric media, Invisible Man initiates a radical mutation of the subject produced by print subjectivity, anticipating the further mutation of print subjectivity in works such as Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Ellison’s study of the reformation of African-American subjectivity in post-war, post-industrial America is located at the intersection of forces so powerful that even articulations of this cybernetic subject can be found in popular culture, namely Dwayne McDuffie’s and Gregory Wright’s Deathlok.24 The prototype of this cybernetic subject is Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the first hacker to appropriate and redirect the flows of the American power grid in an effort to communicate to subalterns like himself.
Invisible Man is especially important because it is one of the first American novels to examine the relationship between an individualized self and a network. What normally are markers of individuality—speech patterns, gustatory predilections, locomotive behavior, sartorial appearance, physiological idiosyncrasies, melanin productivity—become markers of group association, of membership within a network. It is easy to read Invisible Man’s plight as a personal struggle to find identity within a modernizing social framework, but to read that struggle for identity also as one that produces network effects is to read somewhat against the grain of liberal humanistic individualism, to raise at least a partial objection to the obvious traces of Emersonian self-reliance laid down in the novel and to reconceive Invisible Man as a prototype of a racial schizoid subject, one whose relation to other (potential) schizoid subjects constitute a rhizome of a specific kind, a pack.
Building upon the work of Elias Canetti, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between masses comprised of paranoid individuals and packs comprised of schizoid subjects. For mass multiplicities (as opposed to singular or individual multiplicities such as a self), Deleuze and Guattari recognize the qualities of “large quantity, divisibility and equality of the members, [. . .] one-way hierarchy, [and] organization of territoriality or territorialization,” characteristics which contrast with the characteristics of packs such as “small or restricted numbers, dispersion, [. . .] qualitative metamorphoses, [. . . the] impossibility of a fixed totalization or hierarchization, a Brownian variability in directions, [and] lines of deterritorialization” (Thousand Plateaus 33). Organizations like The Brotherhood, Liberty Paints, and the college that Invisible Man attended are masses whereas the young black men who fight each other in the Battle Royal, the gathering of people at an eviction in Harlem, and the subjects who occupy a space similar to that occupied by Invisible Man at the novel’s beginning and end are schizoid members of packs. The affiliated members of these packs are nodes of rhizomatic networks where hierarchy is indeterminate (multiple, shifting) and individuality subordinated to location within the system. Between these two forms of social organization, Invisible Man discovers a form of agency that enables him to game the system in ways that destabilize it.
The systems between which Invisible Man finds his identity use race as a way of distinguishing its members, most obviously the system of capital which constructs race as a category of labor. Individuals who appear to be black are plugged to the system of capital as machines. Lucius Brockway asserts in the Liberty Paints factory, “[W]e the machines inside the machine” (217). American capital dehumanizes individuals who are (identified as) black, transforming them into automatons and incorporating their labor into a larger system of machines. In the realm of schizoanalysis, all organisms are, of course, machines. But some of those organs-machines are also human. The racist system of capital which prevails in post-Reconstruction America strips black organs-machines of their humanity. Read another way, the history of the North American slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries was the transformation of human organs-machines into non-human machines, a process that deracinated organs-machines from their native production networks, subjected them to a dangerous migration (the Middle Passage), and attached those organs-machines which survived to an alien network, one in which the power of determination lay outside the control of these reterritorialized organisms. Once upon the North American continent, native black Africans were then subjected to further processes of dehumanization to facilitate their functioning on the body of American capital as slaves. Such protocols of dehumanization which under slavery augmented available surpluses of labor continue to operate even after the ensembles which instituted them (plantations) have transformed into alternate systems of capitalization. Invisible Man dramatizes the processes that dehumanize African-Americans and turns them into zombies attached to the body of capital in an attempt to call attention to them. The automatization and zombification of black organs-machines is one of the novel’s most important themes, and the novel’s protagonist is able to some extent to resist being so appropriated only after understanding how post-Industrial capital can be subverted by assuming a role in the system. At first, however, Invisible Man is unaware of the means by which he is dehumanized even as he believes he is fulfilling his destiny as one of Booker T. Washington’s educated elite.
One of the subjects who does recognize this process of automatization happening to Invisible Man is the veteran outside the Golden Day who declares to Norton, a “trustee of consciousness,” that Invisible Man
has eyes and ears and a good distended African nose, but he fails to understand the simple facts of life[. . . .] He registers with his senses but short-circuits his brain. Nothing has meaning. He takes it in but he doesn’t digest it. Already he is—well bless my soul! Behold! a walking zombie! already he’s learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity. He’s invisible, a walking personification of the Negative, the most perfect achievement of your dreams, sir! The mechanical man!” (94).
There are other examples of the mechanization and automatization of humans throughout the novel: Tod Clifton’s Sambo doll, Mary’s Jolly Nigger Bank, Invisible Man’s himself when he first descends into his hole. All of these are products of the transformed, rearticulated, and extended machinery of conversion used to turn African organisms into slave-machines.
The boundary between animal and machine is often construed as an ontological barrier. Ellison’s Invisible Man reconfigures this boundary as an interface whose primary substance is electricity. The transformative capacity of electricity was not widely acknowledged until McLuhan, nearly twenty years later, identifies it as a medium whose “implosive factor [ . . .] alters the position of the Negro, the teen-ager, and some other groups. They can no longer be contained, in the political sense of limited association. They are now involved in our lives, as we in theirs, thanks to the electric media” (Understanding Media 5). McLuhan recognizes that electricity has the ability to couple disparate ontological orders, thereby operating as what Mackenzie and Simondon identify as transducers. McLuhan’s remark conceives of teenagers and blacks as orders distinct from, presumably, the order of adult, white males. Ellison explores how electricity, as an interface between organism and machine, mediatizes blacks (black men) into the system of capital and the effects this mediatization has upon the subjects so transformed. Most importantly, Ellison finds a cyborg identity in Invisible Man that apprehends race as a transdermal effect of network connections. As a result of this, Invisible Man is able to negotiate an unprecedented subject position, that of a hacker who occupies the first node of a network yet to come. In his hole of 1,369 lights powered by energy he appropriates, undetected, from Monopolated Light & Power, Invisible Man is perhaps American literature’s first bona fide network hacker.
Hot Wired: Plugging Blacks into the body of Capital
Concerning the conjunction of lived black experience and the often theoretical discourses which comprise postmodernity, Ellison’s Invisible Man provides a literary model of precisely the kind of subject for which hooks seems to be searching. Invisible Man is a subject caught between worlds and his in-betweenness forces him to abstract his lived experience as a black in terms that reflect the forces of post-Industrialization, the physics of light and electromagnetism, and the concepts of cybernetics (even at the same moment Norbert Wiener is creating the field of cybernetics). In addition the empirical and abstract discourses that contribute to his subjectivity, Invisible Man is also a subject caught between the worlds of black and white, print and electricity, human and machine. Published in 1947, two short years after World War II, Invisible Man is a novel that stands between modernism and postmodernism, making Invisible Man one of the progenitors of the postmodern subject. He exists in the spaces between well-defined subjectivities, a space where racial and cybernetic hybrids proliferate.
The medium that connects, or plugs, Invisible Man to the system is electricity. His injection inside the electrified flow of capital happens at a smoker attended by “[a]ll of the town’s big shots [who] were there in their tuxedos, wolfing down the buffet foods, drinking beer and whiskey and smoking black cigars.” These big shots enact their power first in the form of a prelude which opens onto a “battle royal” between Invisible Man and nine other anonymous and blindfolded black men. This first tableau is a fantasy of (foreclosed) interracial sexual desire wherein black male sexual interest is provoked then repressed through humiliation and fear, and the agency of a white female is erased, replaced by a form of automatism. The process of dehumanization to which the “stark naked” “magnificent blond” is subjected parallels the dehumanization of the black men, who are forced to repress their involuntary sexual responses. This process of dehumanization, or automatization, is replicated in the battle itself as well as the electrified money-grab that follows. What is not immediately obvious is the way in which electricity figures both as a form of currency and a structuring mechanism in the system of capital. The flow of electricity traces lines of motive force between one system and another, thereby articulating a connection between disparate ontological orders.
It is important to keep in mind that the categories of currency, electricity, organism, and mechanism are terms that describe the conditions of capitalist production in Invisible Man, and that the novel studies the mediation of subjects within a system that extracts, stores, and recirculates labor. Invisible Man understands that entertaining the white men gathered at the smoker is, in fact, labor. Invisible Man recalls that
In those pre-invisible days I visualized myself as a potential Booker T. Washington[. . . .] I felt superior to [the other nine fellows] in my way, and I didn’t like the manner in which we are all crowded together into the servants’ elevator. Nor did they like my being there. In fact, as the warmly lighted floors flashed past the elevator we had words over the fact that I, by taking part in the fight, had knocked one of their friends out of a night’s work (18).
The unidentified black men here resent Invisible Man just as the Luddites resented the knitting frames. The resentment cuts both ways, as Invisible Man distinguishes himself from the other black men in the elevator as a “potential Booker T. Washington.” Washington’s vision for African Americans was referred to by W. E. B. DuBois as “The Great Compromise” because it envisioned blacks as essential service providers for a white bourgeoisie. While Washington’s vision subordinates blacks to whites in the network of production, it would have secured economic relevance for an entire class of blacks, with people like Washington and Invisible Man at the top of that class. Early on, Invisible Man believes his future will involve securing a place for blacks within the American system of production that would reflect, and so maintain, the racist attitudes of the nation as a whole. Due to his educational achievements and aspirations, Invisible Man identifies himself apart from other elements of this black entertainment network, a symptom of his selfishness and naivete. For now, Invisible Man’s anonymous black companions resent his presence because he has taken the operational place of an element with whom the others are familiar. The identification that the others feel with the replaced element manifests as hostility to the replacement in the same way that Ned Ludd’s followers expressed hostility toward the machines designed to replace them. Invisible Man’s sense of superiority only emphasizes that he, in fact, does not belong in this network, and the events which transpire testify to this.
Invisible Man recalls that the appearance of the “stark naked” “magnificent blonde” is attended by
a dead silence[. . . .] I tried to back away, but they [the nine other black men] were behind me and around me. Some of the boys stood with lowered heads, trembling. I felt a wave of irrational guilt and fear[. . . .] Yet I was strongly attracted and looked in spite of myself. Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked. The hair was yellow like that of a circus kewpie doll, the face heavily powdered and rouged, as though to form an abstract mask, the eyes hollow and smeared a cool blue, the color of a baboon’s butt[. . . .] I wanted at one and the same time to run from the room, to sink through the floor, or go to her and cover her from my eyes and the eyes of others with my body; to feel the soft thighs, to caress her and destroy her, to love her and murder her, to hide from her, and yet to stroke where below the small American flag tattooed upon her belly her thighs formed a capital V. I had a notion that of all in the room she saw only me with her impersonal eyes. (19)
Invisible Man and the other young men are confronted with an icon of sexual desirability in a context where black male sexual desire is taboo, provoked under the watchful eyes of powerful white men. Taken as an allegory for the preparation of black males into the system of American capital, this prelude to the battle royal trains these young black men-about-to-become-machines to not behave in accordance with their organismic impulses when in the presence of a sexual fetish. One of the first steps to making a better cyborg, where better means ready for insertion into a system of racist capital, is to repress the organism’s sexual impulse. Similarly, The sexual fetishization of the white woman depends upon her dehumanization. Though the value of sexual signing is opposite in each case—a hyper-sexualized blond kewpie doll and neutered black boxers—they both exist in the space of cyborg ontology.
In Invisible Man, light, electricity, and sound are the primary media in which the components of cyborg ontology is constructed. Concerning the domain of the visible, lines of sight are generally paths toward disempowered subject positions. For example, in his specular identification with the automatized woman, Invisible Man finds (Modernistic) primitivist characteristics which signal that the woman has affinity with descendants of Africans, a group disempowered in the context of American capital. Invisible Man’s identification comes at the precise moment when Invisible Man notices that “the face [was] heavily powdered and rouged, as though to form an abstract mask.” The mask abstracts the woman’s racial identity in the same way that DuBois’s veil abstracts black identity and, more to the point, the same way that DeKooning’s, and Picasso’s “African masks” abstract the personhood of the female figures they paint. The veil theme is made explicit as she begins to dance with “the smoke of a hundred cigars clinging to her like the thinnest of veils” (19). A further hint of her “blackness” comes in the smear of “cool blue” which suggests to Invisible Man a “baboon’s butt,” an animal native to continental Africa and whose associations with primitivism and signaling of a trickster identity are patent. In conflict with these intimations of the exotic, the woman is branded as a domestic product by the “American flag tattooed upon her belly,” below which Invisible Man wishes to “stroke.” The point of connection and so alienation comes in his imagined sense that he is the only object in her visual field, but the specular identification Invisible Man shares with the kewpie doll woman is undercut by the fact that what he imagines to be an intimate and singular connection—“of all in the room she saw only me”—comes to him through a set of “impersonal eyes.” Despite her being in his presence, her gaze is no more penetrating than the gaze of a two-dimensional image, and Invisible Man’s sense of significance is equivalent to the feeling he might have while gazing into the eyes of a pin-up girl.
In this scene, the alienation of specular identification finds its motivating object in the actions of the white men who have staged this sexual fantasy. The fetishization of race under the sign of sexuality forces a large, powerful, black man to “plead to go home” because his “dark red fighting trunks [are] much too small to conceal the erection which project[s] from him” at the same time it allows a drunken white man to sink his “beefy fingers” into the “soft flesh” of a sexualized automaton (20). The tactile aspect of the sexual and racial fetishization is in this instance separated from its visual aspect.
The woman, in particular, has an ocular reaction that contradicts her facial reaction and it is this separate visual signal which Invisible Man reads as subjectival affinity. Invisible Man narrates that the drunken white men
caught her just as she reached the door, raised her from the floor, and tossed her as college boys are tossed at a hazing, and above her fixed-smiling lips I saw the terror and disgust in her eyes, almost like my own terror and that which I saw in some of the other boys (20).
Here, the woman carries in her eyes a look of terror “almost like” the terror Invisible Man feels. Here there is an equivalence between the sexual fetishization of the woman as a blonde kewpie doll—an icon of sexual desirability and white supremacy—and the half-naked young black men about to box each while other blindfolded. The repression of black male sexual desire and the provocation of white female sexual disgust are products of the maintenance of an oppressive white male sexual power, a power predicated by the transformation of the white woman and the black men into desirable objects. While the woman’s dehumanization is complete once she has been transformed into a hypersexual automaton, the black men’s sexualities are further channeled into disorganized violence. The scene, then, traces a logical pathway between black male desire for a white female sexual fetish and incoherent, black-on-black violence. The desiring apparatus of the black males is disconnected from the production of desire and reconnected to human boxing machines.
Their desires disconnected from desiring-production, their abilities to determine the directions of their actions nullified, their lines of sight obscured by blindfolds, and their senses of perspective limited to the spectacle of the battle royal itself, these young black men have been taken off the grid, so to speak, their labor and desiring-production decoupled from any network not connected to the system of capital controlled by the white bankers, lawyers, and priests who both desire and fear the young blacks they have recruited. In the interregnum of their disconnection from systems of production, the black boxing machines fight one against the other as schizoid subjects, members of a pack who are together in their aloneness. Invisible Man recounts that “[e]veryone fought hysterically. It was complete anarchy[. . . .] No group fought together for long. Two, three, four, fought one, then turned to fight each other, were themselves attacked” (23). Disconnected from each other, these blind, black men form a schizoid pack of automatons who randomly aggregate into unintentional cooperatives and only to dissociate back into radicalized nomadic components. Disconnected as they are, these black boxing machines are now ready to be plugged to the electrified body of capital.
After Invisible Man is KO’d by Tatlock, “attendants in white jackets [roll] the portable ring away and [place] a small square[. . .] rug” in the boxing ring’s place (26). The M.C. then calls, “Come on up here boys and get your money.” Invisible Man sees “the rug covered with coins of all dimensions and a few crumpled bills,” but finds himself especially excited about “the gold pieces” (26). The rug and the objects upon it are a metaphor for the body of capital, and the fact of the rug’s electrification makes it a literary illustration of what Deleuze and Guattari identify as the body without organs. The connection of things to the rug is made palpable by the invisible force of electricity. Invisible man recalls that he
lunged for a yellow coin on the blue design of the carpet, touching it and sending a surprised shriek to join those rising around me. I tried frantically to remove my hand but could not let go. A hot, violent force tore through my body, shaking me like a wet rat. The rug was electrified. The hair bristled up on my head as I shook myself free. My muscles jumped, my nerves jangled, writhed. But I saw that this was not stopping the other boys. Laughing in fear and embarrassment, some were holding back and scooping up the coins knocked off by the painful contortions of others. The men roared above us as we struggled. (27).
The young men cannot easily “let go” of the objects which they have chosen to grab. Their muscles involuntarily contract once they have come into contact with conductive objects lying upon the rug. Considered in terms of the equivalence of electricity and capital networks, attachment to commodified objects “plugs” one into the system. Connection to the system of capital represented by the electrified rug and the tokens that can transmit capital produces a muscular cathexis onto the (represented) body of capital. This cathexis is an investment in the system of capital that exceeds the intentions and awareness of those who come into contact with the system. The young black men are unaware of how they are being manipulated in their attempts to grab the most highly conductive signifiers of capital. This scene provides a model of the ability of capital to attach objects, in this case organisms, to its recording surface. Once capital comes into contact with an organism, the organism attaches to the system by means of its own motive force, as if electrified into place. The circulation of capital forces muscles to connect and stay connected to the capital-conducting objects arrayed upon its surface.
Increasingly aware of the system which grabs at him with the very same force he uses to grab at it, Invisible man begins “trying to avoid the coppers and to get greenbacks and the gold,” and he makes the counterintuitive discovery that he “could contain the electricity—a contradiction, but it works” (27). Invisible Man’s ability to contain the shocks that the system sends to his body threatens to limit or disrupt the spectacle of (at least) his involuntary twitching. Just as Invisible Man makes this discovery and uses it to limit the recoil his body experiences when it comes into contact with electricity-conducting objects, he notes, “the men began to push us onto the rug. Laughing embarrassedly, we struggled out of their hands and kept after the coins. We were all wet and slippery and hard to hold (27).” This recalls the blonde woman’s efforts to avoid the beefy fingers of the men chasing after her. Just as the woman first eludes the clutches of the drunken men by “mov[ing] around the floor in graceful circles, [. . . ] slipping and sliding over the polished floor” (20), so do the black men initially elude the men who try to push them back onto the rug in order to laugh at the spectacle of their “connecting” to the system. Once the men catch the woman, they “raised her from the floor, and tossed her as college boys are tossed at a hazing.” A similar scene takes place when the men finally grab one of the young black men, with the exception that after he is “lifted into the air, glistening with sweat like a circus seal,” he is then “dropped, his wet back landing flush upon the charged rug” (27). Invisible man “hear[s] him yell and [sees] him literally dance upon his back, his elbows beating a frenzied tattoo upon the floor, his muscles twitching like the flesh of a horse stung by many flies.”
As mentioned earlier, the parallels between the fate of the woman and the black men suggest that both are fetish objects produced by a system controlled by powerful white men. Importantly, both types of people—white women and black men—are transformed into things whose agency is overwhelmed by the system to which they are connected. In this sense, they are automatized, a point that is underscored when the M.C. tells the men that “You get all you grab,” and one blond man affirms with a wink, “ ‘That’s right, Sambo’ ” (26).
The Sambo doll’s grotesque gestures and gyrations are comparable to the bodily behavior of real African Americans who are connected to the system of capital and whose struggle in that system is entertainment for the wealthy and powerful. The stereotype of the black entertainer, especially the black entertainer in blackface, is a metonymic crystallization of the figure of the Sambo that produces by entertaining and whose show is a series of hideous facial exaggerations and grotesque physical contortions. Also of interest is the teratogenic property of electricity in this scene. Electricity induces involuntary dancing, transforming young black men into dancing machines whose paroxysms makes them laughable monsters, parodies of self-possessed humans.25
The spectacle of the young men jerking and spasming on the electrified rug provides the white men with some assurance that their own place in the system of capital is not a bad one. After all, they are above the humiliating positions in which the black men find themselves, and it is for their pleasure that the black men “labor.” However, it is not enough that their bodies react to the invisible electricity. The white men want the connection to be stronger, want to eliminate the margin of indetermination in which Invisible Man recognizes that the charge of the rug can be momentarily “contained” and that the electricity flowing through the rug does not racially discriminate. By forcing the black men into the rug, the white men reduce the black men’s ability to contain the shocks to their bodies and prevent them from seeing the possibility of extending the reach of the electric network to the spectators themselves. Invisible man responds to the intensified efforts of the white men to force them onto the rug by “grabb[ing] the leg of a chair. It was occupied and [Invisible Man] held on desperately” (28). Invisible Man recalls that the chair’s occupant then shouted
“Leggo, nigger! Leggo!”
The huge face wavered down to mine as he tried to push me free. But my body was slippery and he was too drunk. It was Mr. Colcord, who owned a chain of movie houses and “entertainment palaces.” Each time he grabbed me I slipped out of his hands. It became a real struggle. I feared the rug more than I did the drunk, so I held on, surprising myself for a moment by trying to topple him upon the rug. It was such an enormous idea that I found myself actually carrying it out. (28)
Invisible Man’s spontaneous and intuitive impulse to extend the reach of the electric network to include the men who have staged the spectacle is, of course, doomed to fail since the rules which control how the network may be populated is determined by the white men. Even so, the point is clear that the energy which makes a real-time framework out of the bodies and tokens through which it runs can be extended to include any body, black or white. Like capital, electricity has an inherent ability to appropriate the flows with which it comes into contact.
In other words, electricity tends to mediatize objects, to inject them into a media network. Unlike the social networks that are hierarchical at their core, the structure of electric networks can easily be affected by rearranging and establishing connections at a lower level. As a result, electric networks resemble rhizomes whereas social networks more closely resemble trees, what Deleuze and Guattari identify as arboreal structures. Tree structures distinguish between leaves, branches, trunks, and roots. Systems of control in arborescent networks tend to be centralized and to privilege trunks, whereas systems of control in rhizomatic networks focus on communication between nodes. Invisible Man’s reflex to topple the owner of the cinematic and theatrical entertainment networks, Mr. Colcord, into the power grid manifested by the electrified rug and its connected elements is also an attempt to remediate the structures of media power itself. The audacity of Invisible Man’s move is matched only by his naivete in attempting to do so under the surveillance of Mr. Colcord himself. By the end of the novel, which is also the novel’s beginning, Invisible Man has learned to do his hacking surreptitiously, secretly stealing energy from the power grid in his hole of lights.
In the battle royal, black men are turned into fetish objects whose labor is entertainment. The organizers of the battle royal reshape these black men first in terms of their sexuality. The young men are trained to repress their sexual desire. That repressed desire is then connected to the production of disorganized violence and, later, random clutches at signifiers of capital some of which turn out in the end to be the simulation of the representation of capital: “the gold pieces [Invisible Man] had scrambled for were brass pocket tokens advertising a certain make of automobile” (32). The electricity that in 1947 was being used to establish a power grid to drive dispersed mechanical elements of American capital also was being used to build a media network to connect organisms to that system of capital. Unavoidably, the dermal qualities (e.g. presence of melanocytes) of networked humans affect both the content transmitted through those media connections and the reception of that content. However, this passage suggests that race may be a transdermal effect when the melanocyte-deficient Mr. Colcord is nearly toppled onto the electrified rug. Had this occurred, he, too, would have beat “a frenzied tattoo upon the floor” as readily and with as much dexterity as any young black man.
The notion of blackness not just as performance, but as an effect of the circulation of electricity suggests that blackness is not a category intrinsic to subjects who are black. Rather, blackness is the result of the way in which flows cause certain organs-machines to behave and that the interpretation of such behavior as one thing or another (in this case blackness) depends upon the framework which is constituted by the very enactment of such behaviors. In other words, blackness is neither intrinsic nor extrinsic to any individual or even group of individuals, but is the product of the articulation of networks which populate the “black” networks on an ad hoc basis. This explains why notions of race are so susceptible to destabilization: race is not static but the dynamic effect of the flow of invisible forces, like electricity and capital, across intricated organs-machines.
Invisible Man and the nine other black men who participate in the Battle Royal and who are disconnected from each other in preparation for their reconnection to the system of American capital are network subjects whose ontologies are subject to the flux of electricity, capital, and sex. Invisible Man is unique among these men because he, unlike the others, can be distinguished by his failure/refusal to occupy the subject position in which he finds himself at the smoker. Later, when Invisible Man is forced to leave college, his attempts to find identity as a laborer in the reproductive system of capital is thwarted both by Bledsoe’s damning letters of recommendation and by Invisible Man’s subjectival intractability, a condition so pernicious that doctors use electroconvulsive therapy to rehabilitate him. The notion of race as a transdermal effect of network connection, the ability of electricity to prepare organisms for connection to the system of American capital, and the teratogenic properties of electricity as a transformative agent are key themes in both the Battle Royal scene and in Invisible Man’s rehabilitation in the Liberty Paints factory hospital.
Paint, Drops, Heartbeats, and Ontological Hybridization: Invisible Man’s Revenge
After having become part of a machinery used to produce pigment for other machines and artifacts, Invisible Man is issued a new identity by the doctors and scientists of the Liberty Paints factory hospital. Keeping in mind Invisible Man’s brief employment under the supervision of, first, Kimbro and, later, Lucius Brockway, Invisible Man’s reculturation by the doctors in the factory hospital can be understood as a the surgical removal of Invisible Man’s organism from a cybernetic network designed to maintain the supremacy of racially white persons and physically white institutions. At the same time Invisible Man is removed from this network, he is also enabled to live without direct connection to external networks, to live “off the grid,” so to speak, and this freedom is apparent in his attitude toward Bledsoe and Norton, two of the most powerful and oppressive figures in Invisible Man’s life as a networked organism.
Talking about Invisible Man in terms of networks and cybernetic organisms may seem, at first blush, the overextension of a metaphor or even the distortion of the text under the view of a thickly ground critical lens, but a closer look at the language Ellison uses with regard to Invisible Man’s cognizance of the significance of his work for Kimbro reveals spatio-temporal relationships which draw out similarities between organisms and organizations. These relationships become apparent to Invisible Man as he considers the significance of his being in the Liberty Paints factory, mixing ten drops of black dope into every bucket of Optic White paint. Such cognitive synthesis is potentially threatening to the system, and for this reason Kimbro warns Invisible man, “You have to follow instructions and you’re going to be doing things you don’t understand” (199). When Invisible Man points out the visibly obvious—that black drops are being added to the white paint—Kimbro yells, “You just do what you’re told!” Where Kimbro trusts the chemistry by which Optic White is produced, Invisible Man cannot let go of the apparent contradiction in the production of a colorless pigment. More importantly, Invisible man intuits that his factory work establishes connections between bodies and buildings, skin and surfaces, and paint and blood. He understands that his work in Liberty Paints is to some extent an act of hybridization, and in his indignity at being told not to think Invisible Man hybridizes Kimbro himself.
Peeved, Invisible Man figures “[t]o hell with him. Just a flunkey, a northern redneck, a Yankee cracker!” (200) and directly returns to his thinking. Invisible Man’s mental slurring of Kimbro is not as throwaway as it might first appear, containing as it does a strategy of hybridization by which Invisible Man seeks to gain control of a more powerful white man, Norton, a trustee of the college Invisible Man attended. Invisible Man weakens Kimbro’s authority by pointing out to himself that Kimbro is a “northern redneck,” a species of being whose hybridity gives Kimbro a social rank lower than other northern whites. Kimbro is a “Yankee cracker,” a northern version of an undereducated farm laborer. Invisible Man crystallizes the discrepancy between Kimbro’s white skin and Kimbro’s position as a factory “flunkey,” which separation is identical to the one which obtains between Optic White paint and the buildings it is used to cover. The paint which gives government buildings their pure white appearance is a skin for the objects underneath, much like the melanin-rich dermis that renders persons of African descent invisible. The distance between what should be Kimbro’s right of access according to his skin and Kimbro’s position within the workings of the paint factory is also the gap between blacks’ theoretical access to civil rights and the actual positions they occupy in the production of American capital. Race and class are inextricably intertwined, and a low ranking in the hierarchy of production hybridizes and compromises the social prophylaxis white skin usually provides.
Invisible Man connects the skin of people with the oil-based “skin” he mixes at the factory. His first thought is whether the Optic White Liberty paint he mixes is the same “used on the campus,” or
something made exclusively for the government. Perhaps it was of a better quality, a special mix. And in my mind I could see the brightly trimmed and freshly decorated campus buildings[. . . .] The buildings had always seemed more impressive because they were the only buildings to receive regular paintings; usually, the nearby houses and cabins were left untouched to become the dull grained gray of weathered wood. And I remembered how the splinters in some of the boards were raised from the grain by the wind, the sun and the rain until the clapboards shone with a satiny, silvery, silver-fish sheen: Like Trueblood’s cabin, or the Golden Day . . . The Golden Day had once been painted white; now its paint was flaking away[. . . .] Damn that Golden Day! But it was strange how life connected up; because I had carried Mr. Norton to the old rundown building with rotting paint I was here. If, I thought, one could slow down his heartbeats and memory to the tempo of the black drops falling so slowly into the bucket yet reacting so swiftly, it would seem like a sequence in a feverish dream[. . . .] (201)
The regular application of paint to the exterior of the college’s buildings make the buildings “more impressive” than the surrounding buildings. The maintenance of the college’s building’s surfaces protects those buildings from falling into decay, certainly, but it also serves an ideology that propagates and maintains class division by aesthetic means. Because the college’s buildings are so carefully maintained, they stand out in Invisible man’s mind to the point that he can “see the brightly trimmed and freshly decorated campus buildings as they appeared on spring mornings—after the fall painting and the light winter snows, with a cloud riding over and a darting bird above—framed by the trees and encircling vines” (201). The interplay between the buildings and the organic elements of the landscape (“fall painting,” “light winter snows,” and “a darting bird above”) signal a conventionalized academic architectural aesthetic which stands in stark contrast to “the splinters in [. . . ] the boards” and “the dull grained gray of weathered wood” which characterize the structures inhabited by lower-class blacks, buildings which include Jim Trueblood’s cabin and the Golden Day.
The Golden Day, of course, is a symbol suggesting both apocalyptic event and utopian afterworld. According to one patient/veteran, 5:30 at the Golden Day is where and when the “all-embracing, absolute Armistice, the end of the world” will occur (74). In the Golden Day all persons and their myriad fates are intertwined. From the vantage of hindsight, Invisible Man recognizes the intrication of lines of influence and historical outcomes in the figure of the Golden Day, though Invisible Man at first is unable to comprehend the fact that a black veteran with some talent for neurosurgery had been beaten by ten masked whites for saving the life of (presumably) a white man and forced to flee his city of residence (93). When Invisible Man responds dumbly to the veteran’s plight, the veteran remarks that Invisible Man is “a walking zombie,” that “he’s learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity” (94). To Norton, a trustee of the college, the surgeon/veteran presents Invisible Man as “the most perfect achievement of your dreams, sir! The mechanical man!”
As a representative of the college, Norton’s “destiny” is to transform organisms into mechanisms, zombifying blacks by educating them to serve white benefactors. The veteran challenges Norton on this point, accusing Norton of being insensible. The veteran tells Norton
You cannot see or hear or smell the truth of what you see—and you, looking for destiny! It’s classic! And the boy, this automaton, he was made of the very mud of the region and he sees far less than you. Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. To you he is a mark on the scorecard of your achievement, a thing and not a man; a child, or even less—a black amorphous thing. And you, for all your power, are not a man to him, but a God, a force— (95)
According to the veteran, the transformation of humans into mechanisms dehumanizes the transformer as well as the transformed. The cybernated human loses any claim to humanity by the very fact of being an automaton while the technologist is deified, turned into a force. The veteran criticizes Norton for his hubristic ambition to automatize blacks and Invisible Man for allowing his humanity to be so appropriated and deployed.
When Invisible Man recalls this trip with Mr. Norton to the Golden Day in the Liberty Paints factory, he associates flaking paint, white privilege, and black squalor. Invisible Man traces from a past event the spatio-temporal threads that are knotted within the Liberty Paints factory. Invisible Man connects the fact that institutions like the college maintain their white appearance using paint produced in factories like the very one in which he finds himself with the fact that his interaction with Norton resulted in his ejection from the college and later placed him in the paint factory. Both literally and figuratively, Norton’s and Bledsoe’s manipulation of Invisible Man maintains the black college’s whiteness, the whiteness of its buildings and the myth of whiteness that a well-educated black servant class supports. After contemplating the entanglement of Norton, the college buildings, and his mixing of black drops into white paint, Invisible Man fantasizes for Norton a cyborg anatomy.
Invisible Man considers “it was strange how life connected up,” but he does not consider that his brain is the thing that establishes these connections. The first part of Invisible Man’s fantasized anatomization involves him gaining control over both Norton’s autonomic system and cognitive apparatus. Invisible Man thinks about the possibility of “slow[ing] down [Norton’s] heartbeats and memory,” and it is clear that Invisible Man wishes he had such control. Invisible Man’s fantasy of controlling so significant a component of the system of capital in which he is himself embedded is symptomatic of Invisible Man’s real world oppression and his invisibility. In his fantasy, Invisible Man synchronizes Norton’s neurobiological activity with the broken flow of “black drops falling so slowly into the bucket.”
In his fantasy, Invisible Man transforms Norton into a racial cyborg by slowing Norton’s heartbeat and thoughts—two of the most important processes in any organism—and then synchronizing those neurophysiological processes to the production of paint, itself a metaphor for the construction of a racial purity that depends on racial hybridization. Norton becomes a cyborg whose cardiovascular system and psychological apparatus are tied to the rhythms of a factory that in its turn produces the substance of racial purity by absorbing a racial other, and Invisible Man’s fantasy is the means by which Norton’s cyborg constitution is realized. Because Invisible Man’s fantasy ends with his explicit acknowledgement of the fantasy’s dreamlike aspect—”it would seem like a sequence in a feverish dream”—and he locates that fantasy within the realm of simulacral production, Invisible Man’s fantasy can be identified as a desiring-machine that recodes the territorialized flows of an ideologically racist organ-machine by coupling a white cyborg’s neurophysiology with the production of the material substrate used to symbolize racial purity and white supremacy. To some degree, the fantasy is a fulfillment of Invisible Man’s wishes to have control over so powerful a white man and his desire to get revenge for being turned into “the perfect achievement of [Norton’s] dreams”—a “mechanical man” (94). Just as Norton’s desiring production created Invisible Man (transforming his organism into a mechanism), Invisible Man’s fantasy, in fact, turns Norton into a cyborg. Invisible Man’s simulacral fantasy is an anti-racist machine engaged in desiring production. The downside of Invisible Man’s desiring production, however, is that though it raises his awareness of Norton’s machinic couplings and the contributions his production makes to the myth of white supremacy, it does little to change the actual production of these components of American capital. This “problem” is characteristic of much of the novel and is largely the result of Ellison’s taking the first steps necessary to rearticulating the relationship between African Americans and the production of American capital in a post-slavery economy.
Maureen F. Curtin also takes note that Ellison’s literary technique is perhaps more than it might seem. According to Curtin, Ellison does not use invisibility strictly in terms of metaphor which she argues that many critical readings of Invisible Man do in order to “make assertions about the novel’s universality and value” (10). Curtin argues that Ellison’s notions of invisibility are developed “in the context of x-ray, a powerful technology that had long since captured the popular imagination.” Being an invisible technology, x-ray may be relevant, especially insofar as the “glass and nickel box” (233) Invisible man finds himself in recalls the x-ray apparatus with which Ellison was familiar (Curtin 53 N19). However, it is without question that invisible x-ray energy is subordinated to invisible electrical energy insofar as the novel never explicitly names x-ray energy. My interest in Curtin’s work here applies to her sense that Ellison, by developing a poetics of x-ray, was directly opposing the work of writers like Hemingway who wrote in a “style stripped of unessentials” that for Ellison was “opposed to the deep thought and feeling necessary to profound art” (qtd in Curtin 47). Examining Ellison’s remarks in Shadow and Act, Curtin notes that
[i]n a curious turn, Ellison predicts that the writer’s progeny, his literature, will display the marks of his exposure, apparently suffering deformities such that the literature will lack any number of vital organs. Although such a state might invoke, for some, Deleuze Guattari’s concept of the Body without Organs, the juxtaposition would seem unfruitful since Ellison deems the condition degenerative and not suggestive of a “body all the more alive and teeming . . . populated by multiplicities.”26 (47)
Of course, my disagreement with Curtin could not be stronger. While Ellison does consider a poetics of x-ray as degenerative, it is by no means settled that those who pursue such (according to Ellison’s measure) have articulated BwOs. Avoiding the inevitable back-and-forth of describing the product of a poetics of x-ray, it is clear that Invisible Man finds his sense of self enabled by the interconnection of organs-machines by electricity, regardless of whether such network subjectivities can be evaluated as good or bad. In fact, it is important that Invisible Man uses the electricity which once connected him to the body of American capital to produce a subaltern network identity, suggesting that networks and BwOs are neither good nor bad but only contextually determined as such.
Returning to Invisible Man’s disconnection from the body of capital in the Liberty Paints factory, the relationship of individuals to the larger system of industrialized production is dramatized in the story Lucius Brockway tells of his history with the factory. Brockway is Invisible Man’s second supervisor, and he is from the start paranoid about being replaced. Brockway tells Invisible Man that he has
to watch them personnel fellows. One of them thinks he’s going to git me out of here, when he ought to know by now he’s wasting his time. Lucius Brockway not only intends to protect hisself, he knows how to do it! Everybody knows I been here ever since there’s been a here—even helped dig the first foundation. The Old Man hired me, nobody else; and, by God, it’ll take the Old Man to fire me! (209)
Brockway’s placement within the Liberty Paints factory is mythical, going back before the company even had an apparatus of production in place. Given the metaphorical nature of the Liberty Paints factory, Brockway can be recognized as a representative for those whose technical knowledge was essential to building the infrastructure of American capitalism but whose racial and class status deprived them of both recognition fair compensation. Brockway and those he represents are systems experts whose expertise is as important to the growth of American capital as those investors, managers, and bosses at the top of corporate hierarchies. More to the point, while the “heads” of such corporate systems have been comprised nearly exclusively by whites, the “works” of these corporations were populated by blacks and other persons of color in addition to whites.
With “the roar of [its] furnaces” and its “intricate network of pipes” (208), the works within which Brockway labors suggests Liberty Paints’ corporate loins more than its corporate head. Brockway and his hydro-mechanical network of valves, furnaces, pipes, and gauges occupy the center and foundation of everything that comprises Liberty Paints. In many ways, Brockway can be interpreted as the spiritual, mechanical and hydraulical father of the company. He did, after all, help “the Old Man make up that slogan. ‘If It’s Optic White, It’s the Right White’ ” (217), which slogan gives the lie to Liberty Paints’ interest in “tryin’ to work up something about the other colors, talking about rainbows or something[. . .]” (217-218). Liberty Paints is fundamentally concerned in generating capital by synthesizing and distributing material that promotes a system of white supremacy. Ironically, the material substrate that advances the company’s reputation as the provider of “the Right White” not only has absorbed blackness, but it also represents the concentrated labor of Lucius Brockway’s black hands.
A great deal of Brockway’s importance to Liberty Paints is his influence on the production of the Right White. Brockway explains that even the Old Man
knows the reason our paint is so good is because of the way Lucius Brockway puts the pressure on them oils and resins before they even leaves the tanks[. . . ] They thinks ’cause everything down here is done by machinery, that’s all there is to it. They crazy! Ain’t a continental thing that happens down here that ain’t as iffen I done put my black hands into it! Them machines just do the cooking, these here hands right here do the sweeting. (218)
While Brockway syntactically distinguishes between “the machinery” and his own hands, he understands that his organism is embedded in the works, a component part of the factory. For Brockway, this embeddedness transforms him into a machine. Brockway’s assessment of his importance to Liberty Paints is that his are the hands that “do the sweeting,” putting an essential but hard to define finishing touch on the base material of the resins and oils which go into Optic White. On a fundamental level, Brockway takes so much pride in his role in the production of Optic White he overlooks the obvious, that his are also the hands that do the sweating.
Committed to his job, Brockway warns Invisible Man to keep close watch on the gauges, “to keep an eye on ’em. You caint forgit down here, ’cause if you do, you liable to blow up something. They got all this machinery, but that ain’t everything; we the machines inside the machine” (217). Brockway understands that the intrication of organism and mechanism transforms humans, but he fails to grasp the fact that for all of his indispensability he is undercompensated. Essential to the operation of a company that maintains the appearance of government monuments and college buildings, Brockway is satisfied to have received a mere “three-hundred-dollar bonus” for helping coin the slogan upon which the company is built. His failure to estimate accurately his intrinsic worth is related to his failure to recognize that he is connected to the other humans in the employ of Liberty Paints at the same time he is connected to the factory’s machinery.
When Brockway learns of Invisible Man’s encounter with the union the other workers are forming, he reacts violently not necessarily because his job is threatened. With his knowledge of the intricate network of valves in the factory’s basement, Brockway is, after all, indispensable. Rather, Brockway understands that contact with the union will ultimately transform him, coupling him to a subnetwork of the factory. On the one hand he says that the union is “after my job,” but on the other he recognizes that “[f]or one of us to join one of them damn unions is like we was to bite the hand of the man who teached us to bathe in a bathtub!” (228). The union threatens to disconnect Brockway from “the hand of the man” and to reconnect him to a network of humans who are also embedded in the factory’s machinery.
Though Brockway knows Invisible Man poses no real threat to his job, Invisible Man is doomed from the start to become Brockway’s victim. Brockway’s identification with the “Old Man” does not allow him to alter his connection to other components in the system. Brockway’s dedication and subservience to the production of a material that helps advance a racist ideology prevents him from recognizing his real worth and his connection to others. Brockway sabotages the machinery used to “sweet” the paint and blows Invisible Man right out of the network. A man like Brockway, who refuses to network with other organisms like himself though he recognizes his embeddedness in a larger network of organisms and machines, could only be expected to dismantle whatever part of the machine that threatened to transform him. Invisible Man’s experience in the workings of the paint factory is a metaphor for his unfitness to exist within the machinery of capital, and Invisible Man’s final ejection from the conventional framework of American capital is made complete with his reconditioning in the factory hospital.
Invisible Man’s reconditioning in the factory hospital is pivotal to my understanding of the novel as a whole. Invisible Man’s encounter with the doctors and scientists of the factory hospital is a metaphor for both Invisible Man’s poor fit with the system of capital, insofar as that system can be understood as a network of machines and organisms, and as a symbol that prefigures his literal relationship to the Brotherhood. In the factory hospital, Invisible Man is transformed into the “voice” of the machine and this transformation anticipates and elucidates the topology of Invisible Man’s position within the Brotherhood.
“A machine my mother?”: Screams, Machines, and Electrified Blackness
The sense of dislocation which begins Invisible Man’s surreal experience in the factory hospital is due partly to his violent extrication from the factory’s system of production. Invisible Man experiences the factory explosion as a “wet blast of black emptiness that was somehow a bath of whiteness” (230). The blast lifts him from the factory’s basement floor, but rather than perceiving that he falls back onto the floor, Invisible Man senses a kind of “suspension.” He recalls that after this suspension
I seemed to sprawl in an interval of clarity beneath a pile of broken machinery, my head pressed back against a huge wheel, my body splattered with a stinking goo. Somewhere an engine ground in furious futility, grating loudly until a pain shot around the curve of my head and bounced me off into blackness for a distance, only to strike another pain that lobbed me back. And in that clear instant of consciousness I opened my eyes to a blinding flash. (230)
Where before the explosion, Invisible Man was coherently integrated within the apparatus of the paint factory, afterwards Invisible Man finds himself atop an incoherent and nonfunctional heap of goo-spattered components. The explosion completes Invisible Man’s radical alienation from a network which produces a material substrate used to maintain the whiteness of government and academic buildings, which maintenance is associated with the maintenance of white racial supremacy.
Unfit for a position in the Liberty Paints factory apparatus, the factory’s doctors seek to rehabilitate Invisible Man by means of electricity. Initially, readers are as disoriented as Invisible Man must have been when he first wakes to the fact that he “was sitting in a cold, white rigid chair” with a man “looking at [him] out of a bright third eye that glowed from the center of his forehead” (231). Invisible Man finds himself the object of a disinterested scientific gaze. In Ellison’s novel, this detached scientific attitude is reified in the reflector attached to the doctor’s head, the “eye” of scientific objectivity, the opening of which will bring about the dissolution of Invisible Man as a subject of capital and begin his reconstitution as an embedded component in the machinery of the hospital.
In the first phase of his reconstitution, Invisible Man finds he has been placed inside “a kind of glass and nickel box” (233). There is “a panel arrayed with coils and dials” (232) which presumably allows the hospital staff to control the electricity running through the box. In what follows, Invisible Man is transformed from a subject recently disconnected from a machinery of production into an organ contained within an electrified rehabilitative apparatus. Invisible Man’s disorientation is an extension of his alienation from the machinery of production, and it manifests itself here as a disconnection from his own body even as it is being subjected to agonizing jolts of electricity. Invisible Man recalls
I raised my eyes, seeing two indefinite young women in white, looking down at me. A third, a desert of heat waves away, sat at a panel arrayed with coils and dials. Where was I? From far below me a barber-chair thumping began and I felt myself rise on the tip of the sound from the floor. A face was now level with mine, looking closely and saying something without meaning. A whirring began that snapped and cracked with static, and suddenly I seemed to be crushed between the floor and ceiling. Two forces tore savagely at my stomach and back. A flash of cold-edged heat enclosed me. I was pounded between crushing electrical pressures; pumped between live electrodes like an accordion between a player’s hands. My lungs were compressed like a bellows and each time my breath returned I yelled, punctuating the rhythmical action of the nodes. (232)
Invisible Man’s human identity dissolves as he is assimilated by the machine and, in the process, turned into a machine.
For example, there are Invisible Man’s yells which “punctuated the rhythmical action of the nodes.” Invisible Man’s very voice here activates in reaction to the electricity-producing apparatus. This scene is a metonym for Invisible Man’s experience in The Brotherhood. That is, after Invisible Man leaves the paint factory he becomes a speech generator plugged into the machinery of The Brotherhood. This situation is anticipated by his rehabilitation in the factory hospital, where he finds that he has become the machinery’s “hidden organ.” Invisible Man recalls being subjected to “the stabbing pulses of the machine,” and at some point hearing “[s]trains of music, a Sunday air, drift[ing] from a distance. [. . . .] The voices droned harmoniously. Was it a radio I heard—a phonograph? The vox humana of a hidden organ? If so, what organ and where?” (233-34).27 The irony here is that where vox humana usually refers to the stops used to imitate human voices in a musical instrument called the organ, Invisible Man is the human component of a machine that produces human sounds. Invisible Man is himself the machine’s hidden “organ,” and his machinic integration immerses him in a simultaneous field of “voices dron[ing] harmoniously.”
Elsewhere, I have remarked upon McLuhan’s theories that subjects of print culture apprehend the world visually and in linear succession whereas as subjects of non-print cultures (and oral cultures in particular) apprehend the world aurally and as a simultaneity. In this scene, Invisible Man is disconnected from the strictly visual domain of print and immersed in the simultaneous field of song and music. Invisible Man is removed from the successive linear realm of print culture and reinscribed in the simultaneous field of electric harmonization. He hears “[s]trains of music” and sees “a uniformed military band arrayed decorously in concert” (234). Invisible Man’s identity has been so destabilized by his exposure to electricity and his subjectival shift from the linear and successive modalities of print to the simultaneity of music and dance that when the hospital doctors interrogate him about his identity, he cannot recall his own name.
Unable to elicit an answer regarding his name, a factory doctor scribbles on a card “what is your mother’s name?” causing Invisible Man to think
Mother, who was my mother? Mother, the one who screams when you suffer—but who? This was stupid, you always knew your mother’s name. Who was it that screamed? Mother? But the scream came from the machine. A machine my mother? . . . Clearly, I was out of my head. (240)
Invisible Man is not so much out of his head as his head has been made part of a cybernetic being whose boundaries overlap the threshold of his own biological body. Invisible Man focuses on the screams as clues to the identity of his mother, but those screams erupt from his own lungs and have as their motivation surges of electrical current which run between the nodes of a machine. If mother is the “one who screams when you suffer,” then Invisible Man’s mother is his own cybernetically extended self. Invisible Man is born of a machine that dissolves his former organic identity and integrates him in such a way that he becomes its “hidden organ.” The application of electricity to the organism of Invisible Man produces a larger cyborg body from the components of an integrated and networked machinery.
Invisible Man’s integration into the machine also destabilizes his status as a person of African descent. The integration of his literate being within an electrified vox humana suggests, of course, the use of military instruments such as the trumpet and the trombone by black jazz artists. This electrified harmony which uses Invisible Man’s voice to play music also causes Invisible Man to dance. Invisible Man recalls
My teeth chattered. I closed my eyes and bit my lips to smother my screams. Warm blood filled my mouth. Between my lids I saw a circle of hands and faces, dazzling with light. Some were scribbling upon charts.
“Look, he’s dancing,” someone called.
“No, really?”
An oily face looked in. “They really do have rhythm, don’t they? Get hot, boy! Get hot!” it said with a laugh.
And suddenly my bewilderment suspended and I wanted to be angry, murderously angry. But somehow the pulse of current smashing through my body prevented me. Something had been disconnected. (237)
Invisible Man’s indignation for being racially stereotyped is a theme repeated throughout the novel. Here, the jerks and spasms of his electrocuted body are interpreted as signs of his ability to dance, that he really does have rhythm. Invisible Man knows, of course, that whatever rhythm he has has been given to him by the power of electricity and that his white auditors mistake his dance as a symptom of blackness when in fact his blackness is electrified performance. Curtin reads this passage in a similar way, arguing that Invisible Man’s electroconvulsive performance as “a kind of blackface that prompts his ostensibly disinterested doctors to adapt x-ray film and electric shock therapy together, to induce an ‘unmistakable’ performance of blackness and then capture it as an interior essential truth” (41). Eric Lott discusses the performative nature of blackness in Love and Theft with regard to Frederick Douglass’s dissatisfaction with the performance of a blackface troupe. According to Douglass, the troupe’s presentation was “not even a tolerable representation of the character of colored people” (qtd in Lott 36). Lott suggests that Douglass’s ability to discern that the troupe’s “attempts at [performing blackness] showed them to possess a plentiful lack of it” indicates that “ ‘[b]lackness,’ [. . .] is not innate but produced, a cultural construction,” and that this cultural construction can be performed. In Invisible Man’s case, he dances as if he were black, which is to say that he is acting black. In the instance of his electrically-induced dancing, Invisible Man is involuntarily black, as would be anybody exposed to the same electrical pressures. The scene is one wherein race is the effect of network connections, as is the electrified money grab scene wherein Mr. Colcord nearly becomes black himself.
In the Liberty Paint factory hospital scene, then, Invisible Man’s exposure to electricity destabilizes his identity as a black man by connecting his involuntary response to electricity to racial performance while at the same time bolstering that racial identity when he finds himself immersed in the simultaneous field of music as opposed to the successive and linear progression characteristic of print media. In McLuhanian terms, Invisible Man finds himself retribalized through the medium of electricity into the cyborg body of capital, and his interrogation concerning his origins and identity is a lesson in electric literacy.
In addition to destabilizing his status as a subject of print literacy, the scene in the Liberty Paints Factory hospital also establishes electricity as a media interface between organism and machine. It recalls the way in which the electrified rug in the Battle Royal scene connects black men to the representation and flow of capital. Ellison’s representation is not so much critique as it is observation, wherein the condition of blackness becomes a transdermal effect, more the product of connection between inorganic and organic systems that determine the subjectivity of networked bodies than the result of the innate essence of those bodies. Admittedly, the novel to a large degree focuses on optical networking. Invisible Man notes that the “invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality” (3). However, the invisibility of the medium of electricity suggests that it is as important a medium as light. Indeed, light is the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum which in other circumstances is invisible, just as laboring bodies and their connected machines are the visible aspects of pervasive but invisible capital.
Network of One: Hacking the Grid for Fun and Profit
When Invisible Man “discovered that [he] could contain the electricity—a contradiction, but it works” (27), he is caught in a spectacle of extending capital and he just begins to recognize that its medium of dissemination is electricity. His next encounter with electricity knocks him off the grid of conventional labor and re-places him in the machinery of a rehabilitating apparatus. He becomes the voicebox, the hidden organ, of a cybernetic network at whose controls sit white-clad white nurses and doctors. The parallels to the post-Reconstruction resocialization of blacks under the paternal eye of social science are unmistakable. But this second exposure to electricity does retrain Invisible Man. He learns that his involuntary actions can be read as black. His actions are interpreted by a racist culture as black, and this sets the stage for him to make the discovery that he can, in fact, change his identity by acting and dressing in ways that suit his purpose: he becomes both “rind and heart” (498).
Reverend B. P. Rinehart is a “Spiritual Technologist” who advertises that he can help followers “BEHOLD THE INVISIBLE!” (495). Rinehart and his many avatars are the key to revealing the invisible, which, in the end is still the invisible. To enjoin one to behold the invisible is to encourage one to see nothing at all. Looking at “the polished lenses of the glasses” he wore while mistaken for Rinehart, Invisible Man admits, “I had been trying simply to turn them into a disguise but they had become a political instrument instead; for if Rinehart could use them in his work, no doubt I could use them in mine. It was too simple, and yet they had already opened up a new section of reality for me” (499). Invisible Man understands that “somewhere between Rinehart and invisibility there were great potentialities” for political and social change (510-11). Invisible Man finds that one of the best places to effect such changes is as a machine within the system, as a hacker hooked up to the network.
Invisible Man resists the idea that certain factions of people (the black people of Harlem in particular) should be sacrificed in The Brotherhood’s larger struggle for power. When Brother Hambro insists that The Brotherhood “judge[s] through cultivating scientific objectivity,” Invisible Man chides Hambro, “Don’t kid yourself[. . . ] The only scientific objectivity is a machine” (505). Hambro unconvincingly distinguishes The Brotherhood’s approach as “[d]iscipline, not machinery,” but Invisible Man has heard enough after having been exposed to the spiritual technology of Rinehart who encourages people to behold the invisible. Once he sees the fact of his own invisibility, Invisible Man recalls
So I’d accept it, I’d explore it, rine and heart. I’d plunge into it with both feet and they’d gag. Oh, but wouldn’t they gag[. . . .] I’d overcome them with yeses, undermine them with grins, I’d agree them to death and destruction[. . . .] That was a risk they had never dreamt of in their philosophy. Nor did they know that they could discipline themselves to destruction, that saying “yes” could destroy them. Oh, I’d yes them, but wouldn’t I yes them! I’d yes them till they puked and rolled in it. All they wanted of me was one belch of affirmation and I’d bellow it out loud. Yes! yes! yes! That was all anyone wanted of us, that we should be heard and not seen, and then heard only in on big optimistic chorus of yassuh, yassuh, yassuh! All right, I’d yea, yea, and oui, oui, and si, si and see, see them too; and I’d walk around in their guts with hobnailed boots. Even those super-big shots whom I’d never seen at committee meetings. They wanted a machine? Very well, I’d become supersensitive confirmer of their misconceptions, and just to hold their confidence I’d try to be right part of the time. (508-09)
Invisible Man accepts the rind and heart, the revealing of the invisible (which remains invisible), at the same time he accepts his invisibility. He interprets this position as being on the inside of their system. He would “walk around in their guts with hobnailed boots.” By affirming “their” discipline, he would situate himself on the inside of their organs-machines, the interior spaces of their collective cyborg body. The degradation of his humanity into an automaton, a Sambo doll, would be not be a sacrifice like Brother Tod Clifton’s death, but a strategy. Invisible Man understands that the desire to make of him and others like him an obedient “confirmer of [. . .] misconceptions” is to become “a machine.” And so he becomes one. Notwithstanding an earlier assertion that Invisible Man rejects a cyborg subjectivity, Curtin also reads this passage as a moment where “the invisible man dedicates his energy to re-creating his hospital hybridity; this time, though, he becomes a man-machine so that he can penetrate the Brotherhood’s opaque mechanisms and sabotage their activities[. . . ]” (57). Here, Curtin’s arguments align directly with mine own, which is that Invisible Man has understood that he can use cybernation and hybridization against the system that seeks to subordinate him using the same means.28
Having fully embraced his cyborg ontology, Invisible Man leaves the surface world and instead of choosing to give in to the “passion to return into that ‘heart of darkness’ across the Mason-Dixon line” (579), he chooses to occupy his hole of darkness. That hole, of course, is full of the invisible which, he explains,
is why I fight my battle with Monopolated Light & Power. The deeper reason, I mean: It allows me to feel my vital aliveness. I also fight them for taking so much of my money before I learned to protect myself. In my hole in the basement there are exactly 1,369 lights. I’ve wired the entire ceiling, every inch of it. And not with fluorescent bulbs, but with the older, more-expensive-to-operate kind, the filament type. An act of sabotage you know. I’ve already begun to wire the wall. A junk man I know, a man of vision, has supplied me with wire and sockets. Nothing, storm or flood, must get in the way of our need for light and ever more and brighter light. The truth is the light and the light is the truth. When I finish all four walls, then I’ll start on the floor. Just how long that will go, I don’t know. Yet when you have lived invisible as long as I have you develop a certain ingenuity. I’ll solve the problem. And maybe I’ll invent a gadget to place my coffee pot on the fire while I lie in bed, and invent a gadget to warm my bed[. . . ] Though invisible, I am in the great American tradition of tinkers. That makes me kin to Ford, Edison, and Franklin. Call me, since I have a theory and a concept, a “thinker-tinker.” (7)
Invisible Man battles the powers-that-be by siphoning energy from the power grid controlled by a utilities monopoly. His act of “sabotage” is an ongoing project of wiring the walls, ceiling, and floor of his hole to fill it with “light,” with truth. At the end of this passage, Invisible Man lays claim to a venerable ancestry of American hackers (all of them white), thus completing his third encounter with electricity and effecting the modulation of electricity through incandescent bulbs into light. This modulation is identical to the modulation of other invisible energies, such as the voice, into visible forms, such as print. Though electricity cybernates Invisible Man in a field of simultaneity—“If a sharecropper could attend college by working during summers as a waiter and factory hand or as a musician and then graduate to become a doctor, why couldn’t all those things be done at one and the same time?” (509)—Invisible Man is able to “contain the electricity—a contradiction”—and transform it back into print. Invisible Man modulates and demodulates energy from one form to another, changes electricity to light, voice to print, monopolation to radicalization, turns masses into packs. Invisible Man is a modem, and in his room with 1,369 lights (an anagram of the year, 1936, that Ellison moved from Tuskegee to New York) he reminds us that “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” (581).
24 For example, Maureen F. Curtin briefly discusses Invisible Man’s relationship to The Brotherhood as “a cyborg position” which he abandons in favor for the possibilities for subjectival redefinition offered by “x-ray’s multiple trajectories” (58 N28; I discuss Curtin’s reading of Invisible Man in light of x-ray technology later in this chapter).
25 Curtin also makes a connection between the “frenetic dancing” of the Battle Royal and the doctors who “derive pleasure from manipulating” Invisible Man “ ‘until [he] fairly danced between the nodes[. . . ]’ ” (54), though she does not comment of the significance of electricity as a medium.
26 The embedded quote is from Deleuze’s and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (30; cited in Curtin 47 N11).
27 Curtin documents Ellison’s “preoccupation with electronics and with radio specifically an obsession” in his essay “Living with Music.” There, Curtin finds a source for the “opening motif of Beethoven’s Fifth—three short and one long buzz” in an acoustic war Ellison waged against a singing neighbor. In that war, Ellison “fought live sound with recorded” (51).
28 Curtin argues that Ellison challenges racism by “making his protagonist something of a cyber, who uses his technological hybridity as a tool against the systemic racism that characterizes the Brotherhood’s principles and operations” (60). My argument extends Curtin’s by reading The Brotherhood as an apparatus of racist capital and the entire novel as a parable of the interconnection of machines, organisms, and material.
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