The Ideology of the Machine and the Spirit of the Factory: Remarx on Babbage and Ure Author(s): Andrew

Zimmerman Source: Cultural Critique, No. 37 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 5-29 Published by: University of Minnesota Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354539 Accessed: 27/04/2010 08:47
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The Ideology of the Machine and the Spirit of the Factory:Remarx on Babbage and Ure

AndrewZimmerman

Tf, as historians have recently argued, the industrial revolution happened both later and more slowly than has previously been assumed, then we cannot explain early political economic texts commenting on this industrial revolution merely as ideological distortions of economic reality.' Indeed, our very understanding of ideology has largely been inspired by a tradition beginning with Marx's reading, especially in Capital, of classical political economy as an apologetic distortion of a historically real industrial revolution. Thus, I see a need for a return to two of the texts Marx criticizes in Capital, Charles Babbage's On the Economyof Machineryand Manufactures (1832) and Andrew Ure's Philosophyof Manufactures (1835). By way of this return, I reopen their cases in light of what we now know to have been the case-that the all-encompassing system of industrial manufacture that Babbage and Ure allegedly justified and that Marx took to be real in fact probably did not exist at the time of their apologies. In this article, I want first to decouple Babbage's and Ure's texts from the section of reality they claim to represent (mechanized factories specifically and capitalist
? 1997 by CulturalCritique.Fall 1997. 0882-4371/97/$5.00.

AndrewZimmerman

production generally) and then to suggest ways in which one might recouple them with a historical reality to which they belong.2 By rereading these texts, and by reopening the question of their relation to the history of capitalism, I hope to shed light both on our understanding of machinofacture and on the practice of dialectical materialist ideology critique. I focus on Babbage and Ure because they, unlike other political economists in early-nineteenth-century Britain, center their theorizing of capitalism on an understanding of machinofacture.3 Classical political economy generally did not focus on factories and industrial production, but rather, as Keith Tribe has shown, on the production and distribution of grain. Babbage and Ure themselves both possessed wide expertise in industrial technology and manufacture. Babbage (1791-1871), a professor of mathematics at Cambridge, was particularly interested in machines and is remembered as the inventor of a calculating engine, a kind of proto-computer. Ure (1778-1857) was an industrial chemist and the author of a well-known dictionary of chemistry. Their insistence that mechanized industrial production, rather than the grain market, formed the central phenomenon of the economy can thus be read as part of an attempt to make their expertise appear more essential to Britain's economic future than it might otherwise have seemed. However, my interest in Babbage and Ure is not biographical but rather ideological. Their texts seem to be the first, and certainly the most widely received, political economic theories that represent capitalist relations of production in the context of mechanized industrial factories. The biographical background for this shift seems less interesting than its consequences for both capitalist ideology and the critique of ideology. To assert that Babbage and Ure were simply the first to notice the results of the first industrial revolution would blind one to the constructive work of these two writers. It is not clear precisely how industrialized Britain was in the 1830s, or even exactly how one would measure "industrialization." However, indicators such as the number of steam engines in various cities or estimations of the percentage of capital bound up in machines support the view that what we would today recognize as machinofacture played only a small role in British capitalism at that time. This does not mean, however, that what we today might identify as factories did not

The Ideology of the Machine and the Spirit of the Factory

exist in the early nineteenth century. As both Berg and Braudel have shown, the concentration of parts of certain production processes under a single roof, and even the introduction of machinery, had already existed for several centuries. Indeed, the meaning of the word "factory" remained as heterogeneous as the factory's real role in commodity production before Babbage's and Ure's systematic theories of machinofacture. Before Babbage and Ure, the term "factory" more commonly referred to a warehouse or a trading outpost than to a building containing machines for the production of commodities, although both meanings of the term can be traced back to the seventeenth century (OED). It seems likely that the understanding of the factory as a warehouse preceded the understanding of the factory as a center of machinofacture, since the term "factory" relates to the person of the "factor,"a merchant acting on behalf of another party. One originally referred to a center of production as a "manufactory," which perhaps facilitated the nineteenth-century slip to the word "factory."However, this transformation also parallels a discursive shift in political economy from a focus on circulation to a focus on machinofacture, and should not be dismissed as a mere contraction. Babbage and Ure redefine the term "factory" while preserving its position in the center of political economic discourse. They thus radically transform political economy by centering it on a factory understood not as a center for the circulation of grain but rather a center for the mechanized production of commodities. Babbage and Ure construct not merely a political economic theory of machines, but also an ontology,an understanding of reality prior to machines, humans, and the economy, and, indeed, prior to both history and nature. I understand "ontology" in the most literal sense of that term: speaking (logos, from legein) about Being (ontos). To speak is to legislate (both from legein), and all -logies are, therefore, political arguments. I use the concept of ontology because Babbage's and Ure's texts do far more than merely justify a cruel and exploitative system of production. They also, more importantly, reconceive the mechanical as a political-ontological category prior to historical and economic reality. My attempt to understand the mechanical ontologically will, I hope, more thoroughly carry out the kind of historicizing that led Heidegger to the concept of "enframing" in his lecture "The Question

AndrewZimmerman

Concerning Technology." While the approach I take to Babbage's and Ure's texts is partly inspired by some of Heidegger's questions, especially his insight that "the essence of the technical is by no means itself technical" (287), I do not want to ask what the "essence" of technology is, but rather how it is that we have come to think technology has an essence at all. It is particularly important to foreground the ontological asof Babbage's and Ure's texts because it is here that their most pect important ideological move is made. Conventionally, ideology criticism has focused on discovering concealed relations to the economic base in apparently apolitical texts. Political economic texts, by contrast, presuppose an explicit relation to the economic base: their ideological effectivity is predicated on an overt relation to the base. The claims of political economic texts to refer to the world are, thus, of special interest to the critic of political economy. Babbage's and Ure's texts reveal this ontological claim with particular clarity because they found a novel ontology, centered on the machine. The inventiveness of Babbage's and Ure's arguments can only be understood, however, when their ostensible referentiality to any external real condition is first bracketed out. To thematize the ontological claims of these texts thus requires separating the economic base and the ideological superstructure. Though ultimately unknowable apart from its representations, historical reality must necessarily be regarded as separate from its representations. Not to separate the two would be to reify, and indeed to blind oneself to, both the superstructural nature of ontology and the ontological nature of the superstructure. Separating base and superstructure allows me to historicize the texts at a more fundamental level than that of the explicit claims they make about the world. This separation allows me to comprehend the historical specificity of the construal of the world in the texts and the texts own construal of their relation to that world. I will begin my account by presenting the ontological projects of Babbage and Ure. Babbage and Ure center their representations of the factory on representations of machinery; for both, the machine is a means of disciplining labor, and the factory an assemblage of such machines. They respectively advocated the mechanized factory as a site of production because machinery disciplines human labor.

The Ideology of the Machine and the Spirit of the Factory

Babbage writes: "One great advantage which we may derive from machinery is from the check which it affords against the inattention, the idleness, or the dishonesty of human agents" (Economy 54). Because machines work regularly and without human vices and weaknesses, humans attached to machines in the labor process will also have to work regularly and without their usual vices and weaknesses. Machinery, for Babbage, is a "check" on humans; it sets limits to the variety of human actions, which Babbage believes disrupt production. For Ure, on the other hand, machines do not merely limit the role of human labor in controlling the production process, but actually reverse the relations of control between worker and the productive apparatus. Instead of skilled workers directing machines and thus controlling the processes of production, the mechanized factory directs workers. Ure characterizes industrial production as follows: "every process peculiarly nice, and therefore liable to injury from the ignorance and waywardness of workmen, is withdrawn from handicraft control, and placed under the guidance of self-acting machinery" (Philosophyx). In this passage, Ure does not so much imagine labor being displaced by machines as he imagines labor integrated into a mechanized factory and, thus, unable to disrupt factory production. The key terms of this argument are controland guidance. Certainly machines displace the handicraftworker, but this person is then reconstituted as the factory worker, a subject differing from the former primarily in its relation to the controlof production, not in the extent of its participation in production. For both Babbage and Ure, the factory limits the autonomy of workers-in Babbage's case as a "check,"in Ure's as "guidance." Neither author imagines a factory that runs without labor, but rather one in which human labor is placed under mechanical control. A more familiar argument for the introduction of machinery into the production process rests on the greater productivity of machinery. Adam Smith, for example, argued that machines "facilitate and abridge labour" (Smith 7). Neither Babbage nor Ure chose to ignore the labor-saving potential of machines, for this aspect of machinofacture actually presents a problem for their vision of machines disciplining workers. If machines increase the productivity of workers, then workers spend increasingly less time under the disciplinary force of machinery. Mechanized factory labor

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tends to make itself obsolete, assuming a steady demand for, and a steady value of, goods. The problem of discipline becomes centered on leisure rather than labor to the extent that labor can produce enough leisure to make itself mostly obsolete. Both Babbage and Ure solve this problem of increasing leisure by following Ricardo in assuming that the value of a commodity does not inhere in the good itself, but rather depends on the labor necessary to produce it (Babbage, Economy 147-48, 160-61, 163-68; Ure, Phi433ff). This theory of value means that laborers must always losophy work the same amount of time no matter how efficient production becomes, because the less they have to work to produce a good, the less that good is worth, and the less they are paid for it. Since both Babbage and Ure assume an elastic demand for goods, a worker's tasks can never be completed. Machinery reduces the amount of work necessary to produce a given commodity, thus reducing the price of that commodity, which means that demand increases: instead of labor fulfilling a need and then being complete, need itself continually expands. Babbage writes that even if a machine saved half-an-hour's work, the worker would not gain a half hour of leisure, but instead would use the half hour to fulfill a previously unfulfilled demand: He who has habituallyworkedten hours a day,will employ the half hour saved by the new machine in gratifyingsome other want; and as each new machine adds to these gratifications, new luxuries will open to his view,which continued enjoyment will as surely render necessaryto his happiness. (Economy 335) Even if demand for a commodity were somehow finally satisfied, a new demand would arise, so that labor still would gain no leisure. Because demand can never be satisfied, work can never end. Both Babbage's and Ure's political economies tend towards the total induction of the human into a mechanized labor process. Babbage imagines the factory as a way to organize skilled human labor. Babbage's most famous contribution to economic theory is his addition of a concept of skill levels to Adam Smith's analysis of the division of labor. In The Wealthof Nations, Smith argues that the division of labor speeds up production because each step of the process is carried out by a worker specializing in that partic-

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ular step, and because workers need not shift activities after completing each step. Thus, for Smith, the division of labor actually of skill in the production process. For brings about an intensification the division of labor also allows each task to be divided Babbage, up into subtasks that require different levels of skill, so that no one labors beneath his or her level of skill. When labor is divided according to skill levels, a factory owner need not pay skilled laborers for tasks that less skilled laborers will complete for a lower wage (Economy169-210; Passages 436-37). Babbage sees in the division of labor the possibility of an inclusive distributionof skill that incorporates all varieties of workers into the factory, and by doing so reduces the costs of production. For Babbage, then, the factory is primarily a way of organizing and disciplining variously skilled human laborers. Ure's notion of the role of skill in the factory represents a more radical break from previous political economy than Babbage's does. Ure applauds mechanical factories for excluding human skill from manufacturing. He refers to the Babbage principle of the division of labor according to skill as "scholastic dogma" (Philosophy23). A "factory,"for Ure, consists of an assemblage of self-acting machines, only tended by human workers: in technology,designates the combined opThe term Factory, eration of many orders of work-people, adult and young, in tending with assiduous skill a system of productive machines continuouslyimpelled by a central power.... [T]histitle, in its strictestsense, involvesthe idea of a vast automaton,composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs ... all of them being subordinatedto a self-regulatedmoving force. (Philosophy 13-14) Although Ure does use the word "skill" in this passage, he uses it to refer not to a particular productive skill, but rather to a competence at machine-tending. The factory, for Ure, is not an organization of productive humans disciplined by machines, as it is for Babbage, but rather a "self-regulating automaton" merely tended by humans. For Ure, the factory does not involve the division of labor so much as the coupling of labor with "a peculiar mechanism, so self-regulating, that a child may superintend it" (19). Ure does not advocate this system on the basis of its greater productivity, but

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rather because it deskills workers, and, in what is perhaps Ure's most famous phrase, "the more skillful the workman, the more self-willed and intractable he is apt to become" (20). Ure makes this connection between automation and the discipline of humans most explicitly in his description of the effect of the introduction of the self-acting mule on striking textile workers. Ure describes this "spinning automaton" as a machine apparentlyinstinct with the thought, feeling, and tact of the experienced workman-which even in its infancy displayed a new principle of regulation, ready in its mature state to fulfill the functions of a finished spinner. Thus, the IronMan, as the operativesfitly call it, sprung out of the hands of our modern Prometheus [Ure is referring here to an engineer who improved the spinning mule] at the bidding of Minerva-a creationdestined to restoreorder among the industrious classes, and to confirm to Great Britain the empire of art. The news of this Herculean prodigy spread dismay through the Union, and even long before it left its cradle, so to speak, it strangled the Hydra of misrule. (Philosophy 367) That the self-acting mule can actually spin seems secondary to its ability to "restore order among the industrious classes." Ure notes only that the machine can "fulfill the functions of a finished spinner," rather than that, as one might expect, it can produce more or better goods. He attributes human qualities to the machine"thought," "feeling," "tact,""infancy,"and maturity-and its virtue lies partially in the accuracy of its simulation of the human. Ure refers specifically to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,using the subtitle of that work, the "modern Prometheus," to describe the inventor of the self-acting mule. Apparently Ure did not read Frankenstein as a warning against natural philosophical or political hubris. Rather, in the mechanical construction of a human body, he sees a means of subjugating real humans. Ure may have read Shelley's novel with particular interest, for he himself had conducted experiments similar to those of Dr. Frankenstein. In November 1818, the year Frankensteinwas published, Ure tested the effects of electricity on the corpse of a man executed for murder. While the effects of electricity on various organisms had been tested long before these experiments, Ure's own

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electrical studies shed light on his views of the human and the machine. Ure conducted four experiments in which he exposed various nerves of a cadaver to electricity from a "voltaic pile" or "galvanic experiment," which today we would identify as a battery. In one of these experiments, a facial nerve of the cadaver was exposed to electricity, at which point "every muscle in his countenance was simultaneously thrown into fearful action; rage, horror, despair, anguish, and ghastly smiles, united their hideous expression in the murderer's face" ("AnAccount" 290). Ure describes this electrical manipulation of facial muscles as if it were the mechanical operation of human emotions, perhaps the most direct expressions of the human will. Ure's experiments seem to demonstrate that emotional and even physical life operate according to natural philosophical and mechanical principles. During another experiment, Ure used electricity to induce "full, nay, laborious breathing" in the cadaver and, he speculates, had the cadaver not been so damaged in the course of the experiments, "there is a probability that life might have been restored" (292). Ure concludes his description of these experiments by suggesting that "ajudiciously directed galvanic experiment" might be able to restore those suffering from "cases of death-like lethargy, or suspended animation, from disease and accidents" (292-93). Humans, like other machines, can be operated and repaired, and perhaps even built, by engineers. Ure describes industrial machinery not as arising from the improvement of tools or from the division of labor, but rather as the application of the principles of automata to the production of commodities (Philosophy9-12). The mechanical human, the automaton, provides a model that allows Ure to speak of humans, machines, and factories as ontologically similar, as uniformly mechanical. In the first pages of The Philosophyof Manufactures, Ure admiringly describes various automatons, concentrating especially on a mechanical duck built by Jacques de Vaucanson, the famous eighteenth-century French automaton maker. According to Ure, the duck "not only imitated the different movements of this animal . . . but also represented faithfully the structure of the internal viscera for the digestion of food." Apparently the duck could eat and digest grain, which was "finally subjected to excrementious actions" (10-11).4 The defecating duck is as important to Ure's account as the self-acting mule. Ure represents "excrementious

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actions" as mechanically reproducible, so that, like all labor, the labor of the bowels can be subjected to "the system of decomposing a process into its constituents, and embodying each part in an automatic machine" (22). This mechanist vision of the body extends the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mechanistic visions of, for example, Descartes, Hobbes, and La Mettrie by grasping the body not merely theoretically as a machine but also practically, as a mechanically manipulatable machine. Ure secularizes "l'Homme machine" to a greater extent than even La Mettrie: humans, for Ure, do not merely resemble machines; they can be constructed and operated like machines. Ure's is a mechanical universe, but one constructed by humans, not by God. For Ure, not only does the machine serve as a model for the mechanized human body, but the human body also serves as a model for the machine. In several places in ThePhilosophy of ManuUre detailed to anatomical describe the factures, develops images workings of a machine: the main-shafting,and wheel-gearing [of a mechanized mill] ... are, in fact, the grand nerves and arteries which transmit vitalityand volition, so to speak, with due steadiness,delicacy, and speed, to the automaticorgans. Hence, if they be ill-made or ill-distributed,nothing can go well, as happens to a man labouringunder aneurismaland nervous affections. (32) For Ure, both the human body and the mechanized factory can be comprehended as a great automaton. Elsewhere in the book, Ure describes the entire manufacturing economy as a biological body, complete with "the muscular, the nervous, and the sanguiferous systems" (55). In this automatic body, there appears a unity of humans and machines that was not, in fact, at all apparent in the contemporary economy, even by Ure's own account. By reconstituting both the human body and productive machines as a single automaton, Ure imagines a monologically organized society, free from class and other social conflicts. Babbage is not as concerned as Ure to reconstitute humans as machines, since for Babbage, humans, and indeed the entire universe, are already machine-like, in that they are calculable and Babbage subject to rules. In his unofficial Ninth BridgewaterTreatise,

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proposes a natural theology particularlysuited to his understanding of humans and machines. In that work, he argues that absolutely regular laws govern the world, although humans have not yet comprehended these highest laws. In addition, Babbage contends that apparent discontinuities in the world are in fact "the necessary consequences of some far higher law"than the known natural laws (43). Babbage suggests that even supposed miracles are not "deviationsfrom the laws assignedby the Almightyfor the government of matter and of mind" but rather are "the exact fulfillment of much more extensive laws than those we suppose to exist" (92). For Babbage, the calculabilityand the mechanical quality of both humans and machines are merely instances of the calculability and the mechanical quality of the universe itself.5

Babbage'smost famous project, his attempt to build a "calculating engine," relied on such a conception of the calculable and rule-governed nature of reality.Babbage hoped this engine would mechanicallyproduce and print logarithmicand other mathematical tables (used at the time, for example, in navigation,astronomy, and surveying).Mechanizingthis production process would, Babbage hoped, prevent the large number of errors usually found in such mathematicaltables. Although Babbage never succeeded in implementing his scheme, he did seem to gain much inspiration from his attempts. He held that his calculating engine would be
able to play "games of skill" such as chess or tic-tac-toe, which to him implied that it would meet common standards of human reason (Passages465-71). Babbage's high estimation of the potential intelligence of machines rested on his view that both human thought and the universe that it thought about were rule-governed phenomena. Like Ure, Babbage transformed a conventional view of a mechanistic universe by presenting the universe as a machine that humans can construct and control. Babbage, then, held a more developed metaphysical theory than did Ure and thus represented more explicitly the ontological a priori on which his understanding of humans and machines rested. The absence of such metaphysical musings from Ure's writings should not, however, be taken to mean that his work is less ontological: ontology need not be explicitly theorized in order to happen. Any identification of humans and machines, a move common to both Babbage's and Ure's texts, rests on a specific ontologi-

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cal a priori, regardless of whether a metaphysical apparatus is subsequently invented to support this identity. The belief that a machine can represent a human presupposes that humans are somehow already machinelike, or at least that there is a common denominator between humans and machines, a means of circulation, so that they can be exchanged. Any assertion of resemblance, any comparison, presupposes a common ground between both terms, so that a possibility of comparison exists. In much capitalist economic theory, to use an example close to the subject of this article, money constitutes such a common ground between commodities, labor, capital, and the possession of land (in the form of rent). Money, Keith Tribe suggests, allows these widely disparate terms both to be grasped by a common theoretical apparatus and to operate in a common system. A mechanical, technical, or automaton ontology similarly allows Babbage and Ure to grasp humans and machines in a single theoretical and, they seem to hope, productive system. The machine, then, constitutes not just a productive apparatus, but also an ontological category that provides the key to understanding the very world of which it is a part. Beyond studying production in the world, the political economies of Babbage and Ure reproduce the world as a production, as produced. They thus understand the world itself as an automaton, as a mechanical reproduction of an apparently nonmechanical being. Neither Babbage nor Ure confine their accounts to descriptions of actually existing commodity-producing machines. They both understand automata and productive machinery as existing on a single continuum (Ure, Philosophy9-13; Babbage, Passages 364-66). The modern reader may also be tempted to identify automata with productive machinery, for indeed, Babbage's and Ure's understanding of machinery as simulation seems to have exercised a wide and considerable influence. An automaton, however, cannot be classified as equipment in the same way as a machine for commodity production can, for it does not possess the structure of"in-order-to" (Heidegger, Being and Time 97ff). The automaton is not a means of production (or of anything else for that matter), but rather an aesthetic object, whose decidedly un-Benjaminian aura derives from its inauthenticity. For an automaton to be appreciated as an automaton, it must reveal itself as an automaton: Vaucanson's duck, which Ure so admires, is

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good preciselybecause it is not a duck. The aura of the automaton, thus, depends on its inauthenticity:if one were completely taken duck and mistook it for a real duck, it would be no by Vaucanson's
more impressive than any ordinary water fowl.6 The automaton is

the inverse of Heidegger'sconcept of equipment in Beingand Time, which functions as an invisiblemeans until it breaks down: the automaton must be completelyvisibleif it is to function at all. Indeed, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, exhibiting an automaton often included demonstrating its mechanical operation, at least to establish that it was not a hoax, operated, for example, by a human concealed inside it, as turned out to be the case with a famous chess-playingautomaton.The automaton presents itself as a machine with agency and, thus, is a reified representation of a reified world in which relationsof production appear to exist independently of sociallyrelated producers. Baudrillard'saccount of automation can perhaps point us toward a more satisfactoryaccount of the relation between the automaton and the industrial machine. According to Baudrillard, when a skill or function is automated, that function is "arrested" in the automatic machine; it is taken out of its social context and trapped, prevented from developing further. Baudrillard, thus, refers to the machine as a "poly-para-hyper-and meta-functional zone" (159). The automaton, for Baudrillard, is the limit of the machine, it is the pure machine, for it has no direct function, but is merely surrounded by an appearance of functionality.The machine becomes less and less explicable in terms of "in-order-to" as it approaches the automaton, as it becomes a simulacrum of human functions. Baudrillard,however,wrongly essentializesthe relationship between automatons and productive machinery.Their relation is rather an artifactof a traditionof mechanistviews of the capitalist mode of production, a tradition that finds an origin in the texts of Babbage and Ure. Babbage and Ure do not merely push the machine beyond its functionalitytowarda limit as automaton: they render the machine itself such that it exists on a continuum with automata. The factory,then, represents for Babbage and Ure both the product and the producer of a world that is neither natural nor political, but rather technical. The technical world appears to rest on natural laws but at the same time is produced by humans. In

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Babbage's and Ure's technical understanding of the universe, nature is un-natural, for nature construed as an automaton allows for no nature prior to technology. Just as the factory ontology means the end of nature in artifice, so too does it mean the end of history, as change itself is technically mastered. For Babbage, the technical represents the end of historical change, the end of historical time. What had, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, been the regularity of natural principles, of the clockwork universe, becomes, with Babbage, the regularity of the products of mechanical industry. Babbage devotes a lengthy chapter to describing the various ways that machinery makes identical products. "Nothing is more remarkable, yet less unexpected," writes Babbage, "than the perfect identity of things manufactured by the same tool" (Babbage, Economy 66). Within machinofacture, production does not change over time. The laws of the manufacturing economy are historically immanent and efface the possibility of laws valid outside a given historical immediacy. However, by effacing the possibility of historical change, immanent laws become simultaneously transcendent, as the world becomes technical. Historical change becomes nothing more than a change of stationary technical states by the masters of the technical, who for Babbage and Ure are capitalists and engineers, and emphatically not workers. If the world is like a calculating engine, then historical change occurs only when the master of the machine changes the series it calculates. Ure also imagines the replacement of history with a technical system. He does not regard the end of history as an ontological characteristic of machinery, as Babbage does, but rather as an inevitable outcome of technical progress: "the progression of improvement designed by Providence to emancipate his animal functions from brute toil, and to leave his intelligent principle leisure to think of its immortal interests! . . . this consummation is within the workman's reach" (Ure, Philosophy370). Ure claims that if workers cooperate with factory owners, they will soon be in the position to let their "intelligent principle" contemplate their "immortal"their transcendent, not their historical-interests, although this spiritual freedom, Ure indicates immediately after this passage, would occur while physically tending a machine. In both Babbage's and Ure's discourses, workers are pushed out of history as active subjects. Historical time becomes cyclical in the realm of the tech-

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nical, and the possibilityfor historicalaction lies only outside this technical world. However,because both writers raise the technical to an ontological principle, they leave no historical outside. This ontological conception of a priori technological world-governing laws depends on the absolute effacement of nature as a giver of laws, and the effacement of history as the field in which humans collectivelygive themselves laws. The human, however, is the recalcitrantelement in this system, the element which can resist the technologists.The human is therefore the element that must be most carefully disciplined if technological knowledge is to function (which, in a purely technical ontology, is the equivalent of being true). The human as selfinterested calculating agent disappears from political economy and reappearsas the more or less recalcitrantlaborerwho must be disciplined and integrated into an assemblage of machines. Babbage and Ure themselves realized that their visions of systems of machinofacturecould become true only to the extent that workers were trained to accept these systems. Hence, they both devoted much effort to educating workers,taking part in a general discussion in nineteenth-century Britain about the education of the working population. Programs for worker education were informed, on all sides, by the assumption that rulers and ruled should be educated differently. Educators believed society depended, in the words of Steven Shapin and Barry Barnes, on a "triple hierarchy-of authority, of mentality and of knowledge" ("Headand Hand" 235). Debateson education had to reckon with the possibilitythat a change in mentalityor knowledge might upset the status quo of authority,that too much education for the ruled might threaten their separation from the rulers. However,educators also hoped that education would make the working classes more docile as well as more resistant to anti-establishmentpropaganda. Educationalprogramsproposed at this time aimed toward keeping or making the knowledge of the ruled "passive"and the While positions on the ideal qualknowledge of the rulers "active." ity and quantityof the education of the ruled varied, every position was informed by this relation between education, knowledge, and authority. Both Babbage and Ure hoped to contribute to the education of the working population (Babbage,Economy 230; Ure, Philosophy

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426-28). Ure spent years lecturing for the Andersonian Institute in Glasgow, an institution founded to teach technical knowledge, especially political economy and mechanics, to workers. He lectured several times a week to around three hundred workers on chemistry and mechanics and viewed these lectures as a means to improve the morals of the laboring population (Farrar). Although Babbage did not teach at any of the institutions for the education of the working population, he did donate the third edition of the Economyof Machineryand Manufacturesto the Mechanics Institutes, the most famous of these institutions for worker education (Berg, Machinery 145-78; Shapin and Barnes, "Science"). The knowledge that Babbage and Ure hoped to impart to workers constituted a radical ontological reorientation in which the political subordination of labor at the point of production appeared as given by the order of Being itself. This is the point at which Foucault might enter this analysis, for one could surely view this type of technical pedagogy as a mode of power-knowledge that transforms the worker's body into "both a productive body and a subjugated body" (Foucault 26). Certainly this was one of the more or less unspoken intentions of the movements to educate workers, as well as of Babbage's and Ure's texts.7 It is tempting to stop here, to say that we have finally caught the apologists for capitalism spelling out in horrific terms the nature of their own mechanized dystopia. Thus, Marx used the text of Ure, whom he dubbed "the Pindar of the automatic factory" (Marx, Capital 394), as a description of the use of machinery in capitalist production. Although Marx criticized Ure's tendency to view conditions specific to capitalist machinofacture as general conditions of machinofacture, he nonetheless accepted Ure's description as an accurate, though partial, account. Ure's influence on Marx is evident, for example, in the following passage in which Marx describes the relation between industrial machinery and human labor: The implements of labour,in the form of machinery,necessitate the substitutionof naturalforces for human force, and the conscious applicationof science, instead of rule of thumb.... [I]n its machinerysystem, Modern Industry has a productive organism that is purely objective, in which the labourer be-

of the Machine andthe Spiritof the Factory 21 The Ideology comes a mere appendage to an already existing materialcondition of production. (Marx,Capital 364) Especially reminiscent of Ure here is Marx's emphasis on the machine simultaneously replacing and controlling human labor. Marx, of course, did not applaud these conditions of production and observed that Ure's was a vision of industrial production specific to capitalism, that only within capitalist relations of production need a worker relate to machinery as "a mere appendage." Marx read Ure as he read other political economists: as theorists who understood capitalism only immediately, rather than as a specific stage in a larger historical process. However, for Marx, Ure differed from most bourgeois political economists because he expressed more than a merely ideological account of industrial production. Marx writes that Ure anticipated "the spirit of the factory," even though he could not have directly observed fully developed machinofacture: Although Ure's work appeared ... at a time when the factory system was comparativelybut little developed, it still perfectly not only by its expresses the spirit of the factory [Fabrikgeist], undisguised cynicism, but also because of the naivete with which it blurts out the stupid contradictionsof the capitalist brain. (Marx,Capital 411) Marx does not assert here, as he often did when considering other bourgeois economists, that Ure observed a real situation and mystified it. Marx rightly asserts that Ure could not have based his work on observations of a fully developed system of industrial capitalism. This passage on the one hand claims that Ure's work is untrue, the product of "stupid contradictions," yet on the other hand that it expresses a truth, the truth of a "spirit."What is this ghostly truth that Ure's and Babbage's accounts of machinofacture express? Marx was perhaps the greatest theorist of ghosts-from his critique of the idealist conception of spirits (Geister)(at its best in The GermanIdeologyand his "Theses on Feuerbach") to his explication of the specter haunting Europe in his "Communist Manifesto." Marx's theory of ghosts, perhaps more than his critique of political economy, provides a key to understanding the truth of

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Babbage's and Ure's imaginary factories. These factories are not so much mere ideologies, whose rational kernel can be extracted and used as a witness to historical reality, as they are specters haunting Europe. They are ghosts who are also amenable to dialectical materialist understanding, though not necessarily ideology criticism of the type Marx brings to bear on political economic texts in Capital. In his earlier work, Marx does not present spirits as distorted reflections of society, which need merely to be unmasked to reveal their truth, but rather as integral aspects of a historical totality, which can only be understood as they relate to, and form a part of, this totality. In his fourth thesis on Feuerbach, Marx writes that it is not enough to discover the origins of the "holy family" in the "earthly family": the earthly family "must then itself be criticised in theory and revolutionised in practice" ("Theses" 144). That is, it is not enough to unmask an ideology (in this case, religion) as an apologetic reflection of reality. Rather, ideology and social reality must be interpreted simultaneously, contextualized, so that they mutually illuminate each other. While ideology and the social reality in which it finds its origin are radically bound together in a single historical totality, these two aspects are also distinct elements, whose difference should not be ignored. Althusser's understanding of ideology, especially in the essays collected in ForMarx, develops the ghostly strand of Marx's understanding of ideology. Althusser suggests that the truth of ideology exists not because of any relation an ideology has to a truth or to facts external to it, but rather because of its relation to the society that "sustains" it (62-71). Ideology is not merely a representation of a real historical base, sending the historian distorted transmissions about the structural reality down there, but rather a part of society itself. This may seem rather obvious, but it is enormously consequential for my own critique of political economy and for the critique of ideology generally. Like Marx's more famous specter, the "spirit of the factory" cannot be understood merely by reading between the lines: "The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future" (Marx, The EighteenthBrumaire 18). If we try to clear away the fog in Babbage's and Ure's texts to get to the real machines behind the ghostly ones, we shall miss the truth of these texts, which is not

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secreted somewhere within them, like a rational kernel in the core of a dialectic. The truth of Babbage's and Ure's texts does not lie in any hypothetical future system of machinofacture that they dreamed up, or, more charitably put, that they anticipated. Although Babbage and Ure could not have empirically known the highly developed automatic machinofacture that their texts seem to describe, they did know capitalist relations of production immediately. It is precisely, I argue, these real relations of production which sustain the instrumentsof production they imagine. Both authors were of course quite familiar with existing instruments of industrial production. However, their political economic texts not only represent, for example, steam-powered spinning machines, but also present a mechanical ontology illustrated by fantastic images of mechanized humans and anthropomorphized machines. The truth of this mechanical ontology lies less in the "spinning jenny" or the "self-acting mule"-although these names themselves indicate a kind of acknowledgment of the mechanical ontology I seek to describe-than in a capitalist system whose essence and "hieroglyphic" (Marx, Capital 79) is not the machine, but the commodity. Babbage and Ure render the alienation inherent in capitalist subjectivity as images of automatic machinery. As Marx explains in his Economicand PhilosophicManuscripts,because workers produce objects which they do not own, their own work appears to them as an alien objective force. The worker comes not only "to face the product of his activity as a stranger" but to face his activity itself as a stranger (274). The worker's very activity appears as an objective system standing over and against him. The products of labor are alienated as commodities in the process of production (rather than, as in previous modes of production, only in the process of exchange), so that alienation becomes a characteristic not merely of the marketplace, but of all productive activity. The owners of the means of production are similarly alienated, for, as workers produce what they do not own, owners own what they do not produce. The alienation of workers is practical, it is a process; the attitude" (Economicand Philoalienation of owners is a "theoretical sophic 282). While Marx does not specifically relate alienation to machinery, the ambiguities of his understanding of machinery

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present a suggestive opening: "It [labour] replaces labour by machines-but some of the workers it throws back to a barbarous type of labour, and the other workers it turns into machines" (Economic and Philosophic 273). Marx here, like Babbage and Ure, demonstrates the very theoretical alienation he ascribes to the consciousness of the owners of the means of production, the "theoretical attitude" that work is separate from workers. Marx, like Babbage and Ure, imagines alienated labor as mechanized labor. The machine is a reified theoretical understanding of alienation, and images of machines are projections of the "stupid contradictions of the capitalist brain," beliefs that alienation itself, apart from alienated humans, must exist out there somewhere in factories. The machine is alienation alienated, reification reified. Although such generalizations about the actual consciousness of broad sectors of society based on deductions from economic theory have been rightly regarded with suspicion at least since E. P. Class, this account of Thompson's The Making of the English Working alienation does indeed apply to Babbage and Ure. Babbage, for example, ontologically grounds both his understanding of the economy and his calculating engines by representing historical conditions of production as transcendent laws of the universe. For both Babbage and Ure, the machine itself appears as a nonhuman cause of the reification of relations of production, so that conditions particular to capitalism can be rendered not just as necessary conditions of all production, but also as the fundamental order of Being, prior to both nature and history. Far from representing machines as instruments of production, Babbage and Ure represent machinery as production itself. Reification, which originates in a historical system of social relations among producers, comes to appear as the result of instruments of production. The historical cause of reification is, thus, itself reified. Machinelike workers and the machines which control them by simulating (automating) them-the two great specters that haunt much capitalist mythology, apologetic and otherwise-are the product of no machine, but are rather an ideological mystification of a system of social relations. Interpreting the works of Babbage and Ure becomes more historically fruitful when the economic base is understood not as the machinofacture the texts themselves posit, but rather as the

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capitalist relations of production as they in fact developed in England in the first half of the nineteenth century. The attempt of the bourgeoisie to rule the production process appears in Babbage's and Ure's texts as the theoretical primacy of the means of production over production itself. The political victory of the bourgeoisie in Britain after the parliamentary reforms of 1832 may have provided the social basis sustaining this second-order reification. The conceptof the machine is no instrument of production. It is rather one of the many ways that the bourgeoisie transformed its own culture from an attack on precapitalist modes of production and power into a defense of existing capitalist modes of production and power (Corrigen and Sayer 114-65; Richards). The fate of Chartism in the following decade illustrates the British bourgeoisie's tendency to conceive of its interests more against the working classes than against the remnants of the feudal political order. One of the forms the British bourgeoisie's defense of its class interests took was the attempt to train and discipline workers in the Mechanics Institutes and in the Andersonian Institute, in which Babbage and Ure each actively participated. What we today take to be a machine stems from a mechanist ontology sustained by the contradictions of a capitalism whose victories against earlier modes of production necessitated an immediate struggle against possible future modes of production. The sociohistorical contradictions which sustained Babbage's and Ure's texts have continued to sustain a series of technological fantasies, from Taylorism to cybernetics to, most recently, dreams of a computerized postindustrial society. Such understandings of mechanized production are sustained of production (in any not so much by anticipated future instruments case a bizarre reversal of the temporal relation of cause and effect) as by contradictions in contemporary relationsof production. Ideology is not like a fun-house mirror that reproduces a distorted version of social reality: its connection to history happens in a much more fundamental and obscure way than merely by representing (or misrepresenting) the things in the world to which it claims to refer. More deceptive than any of its specific deceptions, ideology's greatest ruse is its connection to historical reality as representation. Like Babbage's and Ure's claim that the machine represents human workers, the understanding of ideology as a representation of social reality obscures more than it reveals. The first

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step in the present analysis involved bracketing out this relation, separating economic reality from economic ideology, base from superstructure, so that I might ultimately connect the two in a more productive way than as villain and disguise. Immediately, this disassociation helped me show what I take to be the real philosophical interest of the political economic texts of Charles Babbage and Andrew Ure: they are not merely cunning descriptions of machines but rather metaphysical artifices, which raise drawing-room novelties such as Vaucanson's mechanical duck to economic and ontological principles. This separation of economic reality and economic ideology has also, I hope, helped to foreground both the limitations and the specific truth of an image of the machine and of industrial production that still haunts us today. However, while I began by calling for an analytic separation of economic base from ideological superstructure, I have concluded by suggesting how the two might be reconnected, so that they illuminate rather than eclipse each other.

Notes
I am grateful to Johanna K. Bockman, Andrew Feenberg, and Simon Schaffer for their detailed comments and helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this article. I am of course responsible for this final version and all of its shortcomings. 1. For this revised role of machinery in capitalism in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Britain, see Berg, The Age of Manufactures.As early as 1944, Polanyi argued that the first industrial revolution (of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) was primarily a revolution in the social relations of production, and that only during the second industrial revolution (of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) did a revolution in the instruments of production take place. Braudel suggests that the importance of commercial capitalism far outweighed the importance of capitalism in productive sectors even into the nineteenth century. Braudel, Gutmann, and Kriedte, Medick, and Schlumbohm argue that industrial development before the early nineteenth century took place only gradually, in the form of rural household production organized in the putting out system rather than as wage labor within factories. Landes gives an opposing view of early industry and generally gives a good account of the industrial production that did exist in the period under consideration, although he underemphasizes the role of other sectors of the economy. 2. Although I would not want to argue for the complete separation of economic discourse and the economy, as Tribe does in his structuralist account, I do want to foreground the gap between the two entities, and their mutual irreducibility. Also, unlike Tribe, I ultimately want to reground the connection between economic discourse and economic reality.

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3. This article owes much to Berg's The MachineryQuestion. Berg argues that although machinofacture represented only a small portion of actual economic activity in early-nineteenth-century Britain, "[t]he machinery question became in fact the hinge which connected the new economic relations of production with the wider culture and consciousness of the new bourgeoisie and working classes" (2). Unlike Berg, I view Babbage and Ure not within the context of the machinery question in nineteenth-century political economy (see especially Berg 179-202) but rather as a radical break from prior political economy, and as the origin of a mechanical, factory-centered tradition in understandings of capitalism. More importantly, in this article I want to explore what this reconceptualization of these two figures means for our understanding of capitalist ideology. Borkenau makes the related argument that the mechanistic philosophies of the seventeenth century were ideological justifications for capitalist relations of production rather than merely reflections of mechanical instruments of production. And Noble provides a useful analysis of what he refers to as "the technological mystification of power in our society" in "Present Tense Technology." See also Feenberg's discussion of "technical codes" (Critical Theory, "From Information," and "Subversive Rationalization"), as well as Marglin; Reddy; and Noble, "Social Choice"; for readings of particular, actually existing productive machines as political arguments. 4. Whether Ure actually saw the duck or only read Vaucanson's description of it, which had been translated into English in the eighteenth century, is unknown. Jacques de Vaucanson's description of the duck, given in an appendix to his Le Mecanisme du Fluteur Automate, corresponds to Ure's description. However, whether such a mechanical duck ever existed cannot be determined. 5. For an excellent discussion of Babbage's attribution of mechanical qualities to God and his corresponding natural theological understanding of the world as machinelike, as well as the relation of this natural theology to Babbage's justification of, and involvement in, the industrial revolution, see Schaffer 224-27. 6. Hugh Kenner presents a fascinating account of the relation between humans, automata, and artificiality, and discusses both Babbage and Vaucanson's automata (17-42, 100-142). On automata and political argument, see Mayr; Price; Sutter. On automata and the culture of automata, see Bedini; Strauss. 7. Schaffer persuasively argues that "systematic vision in the Industrial Revolution," exemplified especially by Babbage's understanding of his calculating engines, his natural theology, and his account of the factory system, "was designed to produce the rational order it purported to discover" (226). As Schaffer demonstrates, London exhibitions of portions of Babbage's calculating engines, as well as of other machines and automata, were part of a campaign to implement the disciplinary industrial factory system. My project differs from Schaffer's in that I seek to present the foundation on which the mechanized factory could be understood as a disciplinary apparatus in the first place.

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