Untitled - witz cultural

331THE POLITICS OFHYPERTEXTtion demonstrate, contemporary Marxist theory has drawn upon the kind ofmaterials Kernan, Mcluhan, and other students of information technologyhave made available.a For this reason, when other Marxists like |ameson daimthat examining the effects of technology on culture inevitably produces technologicaldeterminism, one should suspect that such a claim derives morefrom widespread humanist technophobia than from anything in Marxistthought itself. fameson's statements about technological determinism beardirectly on the reception of ideas of hyperte>'t within certain portions of theacademic world for which it has most to offer but which, history suggests,seem most likely to resist its empowerment. This rejection of a powerful analytictool lying ready to hand appears particularly odd given that, as MichaelRyan observes, "technology-form-giving labor-is, according to Marx, the'nature' of human activity, thereby putting into question the distinctionbetween nature and culture, at least as it pertains to human life."sln Marxr.sm and Form, Jameson reveals both the pattern and the reasonfor an apparently illogical resistance to work that could easily support hisown. There he argues thathowever materialistic such an approach to history may seem, nothing is farther fromManism than the stress on invention and technique as the primary cause of historicalchange. Indeed, it seems to me that such theories (of the kind which regardthe steam engine as the cause ofthe Industrial Revolution, and which have beenrehearsed yet again, in streamlined modernistic form, in the works of MarshallMcLuhan) function as a substitute for Marxist historiography in the way they offer afeeling of concreteness comparable to economic subject matter, at the same timethat they dispense with any consideration ofthe human factors ofclasses and ofthesocial organization of production. (74)One must admire ]ameson's forthrightness here in admitting that his parodiedtheories of Mcluhan and other students of the relations of technologyand human culture potentially "function as a substitute for Marxist historiography,"but the evidence I have presented in previous pages makes clearthat Eisenstein, McArthur, Chartier, Kernan, and many other recent studentsof information technology often focus precisely on "the human factors ofclasses and of the social organization of production." In fact, these historiansof information technology and associated reading practices offer abundantmaterial that has potential to support Marxist analyses.fameson attacks Mcluhan again a decade later in The Political Uncon'scious. There he holds that an old-fashioned, naive conception of causality,which he "assumed to have been outmoded by the indeterminanry principle