| What it means to make a line on the earth and, more specifically, what the difference is between inscribed lines---like the Mason-Dixon line---and "naturally drawn" lines---such as "coastlines, ridge tops, [and] river banks"---is the central question of Thomas Pynchon's 1997 novel, Mason & Dixon. Although in the first place this is a question about the difference between man-made lines and natural ones, insofar as both types of lines are understood as "texts," the real question is whether there is any significant difference at all. And this problem---in the more general form of the relation of the cultural to the natural---is in no way limited to Mason & Dixon. It is, in fact, central to a number of other major literary and non-literary works of the contemporary period---not only Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, but also Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology, and the earthworks and writings of Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer. Indeed, it might be said more generally to be central to the phenomenon of postmodernism, or at least to the canonized accounts that describe postmodernism as the critique of the natural. The point of "Lines in the Dirt," however, is to challenge this account of the natural or, to be more precise, to analyze how in major works produced between 1965 and 1975 the dissemination of the text is, in fact, a central mode of questioning not the primacy of nature but something more like the possibility of culture.; At the same time, however, I argue that these artists and writers are less concerned with the cultural as such than with the technological; indeed, for them, questioning the possibility of culture means addressing the problem of technology. And while the problem of technology in postmodernism has been understood as a continuation of the modern problematic of the machine, this dissertation argues that postmodernism is characterized by a re-engagement with the more basic, stripped-down problematic of the artifact. From Aristotle's Physics through Walter Benjamin's and Martin Heidegger's modernist theorizations of technology, the ability to produce artifacts---to make things and thereby install the artificial---has been assumed as the most basic qualifying attribute for technological status: traditionally, humans' capacity to make things has set them apart. In the contemporary works I discuss in "Lines in the Dirt," however, it is precisely this capacity and its attendant technological status that get called into question. Making (construction, modification, techne as such) gets called into question as a category by artifacts like the downed telegraph line of Of Grammatology , the A4 Rocket at the center of Gravity's Rainbow , and the exposed dirt lines that make up Smithson's and Heizer's earthworks, all of which not only fail to perform the particular functions they were designed to perform, but fail even to establish themselves as man-made things. Failed artifacts such as these, I argue, disclose how the real question concerning technology in the contemporary period is not how humans can adjust to having become instruments of their own (mechanical) constructions, but whether technology can, or even should salvage the category of the human. |
