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.
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