Ginger Nolan - Savage Mind to Savage Machine: Racial Science and Twentieth-Century Design

Ginger Nolan

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis

London

This book is supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of CAA.

An earlier version of chapter 1 was previously published as Weltgeist/Wildegeist: The Savage inside World History, Grey Room,no. 64 (Summer 2016): 4063. Portions of chapter 4 were published in a different form in Between Survival and Citizenship: Yona Friedmans Vulgar Media, Perspecta51 (Fall 2018) and in Bricolage, or the Impossibility of Pollution, e-flux(July 26, 2018).

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To S YDELL andJ EROME

It has been said that architectures preoccupation with the primitive is so ubiquitous as to make any comprehensive historical analysis of the phenomenon a fruitless endeavor. While certainly it would be mistaken to suggest a unifying explanation for all instances of primitivism throughout the centuries, it is nonetheless possible to offer a theoretical framework to help explain the enduring prevalence of the trope into and through the twentieth century. This book takes its cue from the fact that two significant and recurrent aspects of primitivismits relationship to technological developments and its role in the production of raceremain underemphasized in design theory and historiography. This book shows how a racialized savage served in an abiding modernist project to design objects and technological processes capable of seamlessly integrating human subjects into biopolitical and capitalist programs. Language-based modes of thought could be displaced by more unconscious and affective means of integrating humans into the programs of modernitya process in which a racialized primitive served as an experimental subject and object of evidence. The savages purportedly unconscious and unmediated relationship to labor, society, and nature constituted a model for designed interfacesincluding architecturethat could be smoothly integrated with human brains and human cultures.

To understand this endeavor as racialized entails a particular understanding of race (one applicable to this history, not to all): race was a conceptual category that helped negotiate a distinction between what is often called the posthuman and the human, such that a false boundary could be maintained between, on the one hand, a sovereign predicative humanagent that consciously wielded science and technology and, on the other hand, a nonsovereign subject that was enmeshed inand enthralled bytechnological systems. If this definition of race appears overly abstract and neglectful of histories of racial politics and racial violence, it is the aim of this book to trace some important points of connection between abstract racial formulations and actual histories of racial discrimination and subjugation.

There are several probable reasons why race has been underemphasized in scholarship on art and architectural primitivism. There is, first of all, an issue of chronological framing, with much literature either focusing predominantly on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century instantiations of the primitive hut or else treating the primitive as an essentially ahistorical disciplinary trope dating back to antiquity. In the first case, such literature rightly contextualizes primitivism vis--vis colonialist discourse and practice but generally tends to presume a self-explanatory relationship among the racial, the primitivist, and the colonial, rather than analyzing what specifically was racial about, say, the primitive hut.