This article was downloaded by: [University of Sussex Library] On: 31 January 2014, At: 04:50 Publisher: Routledge

Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjsc20

Franco as cyborg: 'The body re-formed by politics: Part flesh, part machine'
Francisco Larubia-Prado Published online: 04 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Francisco Larubia-Prado (2000) Franco as cyborg: 'The body re-formed by politics: Part flesh, part machine', Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 1:2, 135-152, DOI: 10.1080/713683439 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/713683439

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the Content) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access

and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-andconditions

Downloaded by [University of Sussex Library] at 04:50 31 January 2014

Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2, 2000

Franco as cyborg: The body re-formed by politics: part flesh, part machine 1 FRANCISCO LARUBIA-PRADO
The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body. (Michel Foucault) After frequent reports in the media about the impending demise of General Franco, for several weeks after his death the American satirical television show Saturday Night Live kept interjecting the following statement during its news section: And Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead. Humour aside, Saturday Night Lives interjection forces us to reflect upon democratic Spains inheritance from Francoism. In addition, the joke reminds us, twenty-five years after the event, of General Francos prolonged agony and its most explicit representation: the pictures published by La Revista del Mundo in its 29 October 1984 issue.2 In those striking pictures (see Figure 1), Franco is represented as a cyborg, a partially organic and partially mechanistic entity.3 The political and even existential trajectory of the General could be synthesized as that of an Africanist military man with a predominantly nineteenth-century education and mentality who burst into the twentieth century by force of arms, and was forced to engage with a capitalist modernity which, by raising Spaniards living standards, rescued his regime in the 1950s and 1960s but eventually condemned it to obsolescence, finally, on his deathbed, becoming part of our postmodern times with their insistence on the artificiality of all borders. For, in this deathbed photograph of Franco-as-cyborg, the frontier between human being and machine disappears. In this essay, I take the notion of cyborg as a metaphor for ontological hybridity, where one essential component will always be related to technology. I also understand the image of Franco-as-cyborg as a powerful symbol of the political trajectory of Franco and his regime, a trajectory that has profoundly marked Spains recent history. Thus, the figure of the cyborg will become in my essay what Michel Foucault has dubbed a dispositif or analytical tool for rearticulating a cultural approach to traditional historiography. My methodological approach is indebted to Hayden Whites belief that History as a discipline is rooted in the literary imagination (1978: 99). What will become apparent in the course of my essay is that the figure of the cyborg as dispositif can give a powerful new intelligibility to the historical text, approximating the by now almost forgotten figure of Franco to contemporary sensitivity. With respect to the three instances (or cyborgologic moments) on which my analysis will focus, the critical vocabulary of the cyborg will show that the politics of Francoism that is, the political discourse and praxis of an entire era in Spains history displayed at key moments a fundamental constitutive schism. This schism duplicates the symbolic and ontological hybridity of the cyborg.
1463-6204 print/1469-9818 online/00/020135-18 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd

Downloaded by [University of Sussex Library] at 04:50 31 January 2014

136

Francisco LaRubia-Prado

Downloaded by [University of Sussex Library] at 04:50 31 January 2014

Figure 1. Front cover of La Revista del Mundo, 29 October 1984. Reproduced by kind permission of Grupo Zeta.

Franco as cyborg

137

Downloaded by [University of Sussex Library] at 04:50 31 January 2014

I shall deal first with the image of General Franco intubated in his bed at La Paz Hospital in Madrid as a trope representing the ambiguous trajectory of a regime that, while preaching ad nauseam an organic, nationalist ideology, was nevertheless desperate for technological advances that would assure its own survival. Second, I shall address the two most crucial moments in Francos political life, starting with the Spanish Civil War of 1936-9 as seen from the Francoist side. It was during the Civil War that the mythification of Franco as a hero linked to the ancestral heroes of romance began to take shape. This link with a mythical tradition deeply rooted in the European and certainly in the Spanish popular imagination through the appropriation of archaic legends and heroes had a very specific objective: the subliminal legitimization of the leader of an insurgent military movement radically opposed to democracy. I shall then discuss the most crucial moment of the Franco regime once established: namely, the fight for survival during the 1950s. This stage was marked by a deep cleavage between political discourse and political praxis. As in the Civil War, the 1950s were marked by the rhetoric of National-Catholicism and its organic nationalism, which emphasized national pride and independence and the unity and indivisibility of the fatherland above all other values. Simultaneously, however, Francoism implemented policies encouraging a bureaucratic lite to promote industrial and technological development, contrary to the regimes official discourse. Finally I shall turn, in dialogue with Mara Zambrano, to some considerations that further link General Francos death with the figure of the cyborg from a philosophical point of view. In doing so, I hope to enhance an understanding of the relationship between culture, politics and technology. I A few drops of cyborgology I wish to express the transformations of bodies in new forms. (Ovid) Nowadays, the figure of the cyborg is routinely associated with popular cultural phenomena such as Terminator, Robocop, the Borg episodes in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager, or, most recently, the film The Matrix (Wachowsky Brothers, 1999). In fact, the term cyborg (cybernetic organism) was created in 1960 by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan Kline to refer to alterations that might be induced in the human body to make it adaptable to extra-terrestrial environments. This approach to space travel was considered a rational alternative to the more difficult and expensive adaptation of space to the conditions necessary for human survival. This initial understanding of the notion of cyborg is reflected in the famous rat one of the first cyborgs weighing 220 grams (see Figure 2), equipped with an osmotic pump under its skin that injected chemicals in a controlled manner so as to alter its biochemistry. Cyborgology has become a more complex field than it was when Clynes and Kline published their now famous essay Cyborgs and Space in the journal Astronautics (reprinted in Gray 1995: 29-33). For cyborgology has gone beyond a purely scientific discourse and, through a questioning of the foundations and

138

Francisco LaRubia-Prado

Figure 2. Rat equipped with osmotic pump under its skin.

Downloaded by [University of Sussex Library] at 04:50 31 January 2014

corollaries of such a discourse, has developed its own mythical, instrumental and imaginative meanings. Indeed, there is no consensus today about the meaning of the term cyborg (Gray 1995: 4). However, roughly speaking one can consider the term to cover a whole spectrum of relations between the organic (vegetable, animal, human) and the technological (machines of every kind, technical knowledge). Indeed, Gray, Mentor and Figueroa-Sarriera state (Gray 1995: 2) that the term cyborg denotes the association of the organic and the technological, of that which has evolved and that which has been fabricated, as well as the actual integration of flesh that dies and circuits that do not die, of living cells and artificial cells. Such connections erase boundaries. The cyborg body, a hybrid entity midway between the automated and the autonomous, is its own agent but at the same time is subject to control by external agents (Gonzlez in Gray 1995: 267-8). For Donna Haraway the cyborg is both a social and an imaginative, fictive, political reality. It thus defies the clear-cut definitions consecrated by metaphysics as the foundations of Western culture (1991: 149). The transgressive figure of the cyborg short-circuits our usual intellectual habits and compels us to confront a new condition of being. This condition takes as its point of departure a life formula based on the constitutive fragmentation of being, a fragmentation already in place since we are bodies connected to machines or to other bodies through machines (Gray 1995: 5, 7). Life on planet Earth can no longer be understood without some degree of technological mediation. As Haraway remarks, after the irruption of the cyborg and its corollaries, certainty as to what can be considered nature is fatally undermined. This is so because the notion of the cyborg destroys forever any notion of unity as fusion, and any narrative of imagined original innocence and purity (Haraway 1991: 153). It is not surprising then that, in her cyborg manifesto, Haraway connects the cyborg myth with that most mechanistic of tropes, irony, and attaches it to a highly organic concept, faith: At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg (1991: 149; my emphasis). Thus, the figure of the cyborg, in its constitutive hybridity, not only interpellates the metaphysics of origins, but also questions the meaning of such notions as totality, transcendence, and, of course, human, as well as the traditions engendered through the historical development of such notions (Gonzlez

Franco as cyborg

139

Downloaded by [University of Sussex Library] at 04:50 31 January 2014

in Gray 1995: 275). The concept of the cyborg does not necessarily deny these notions, but redefines them as historically impure. Hybridity our dependence on technologies and our being conditioned by those technologies has existed since humans first used tools such as stone hammers or vehicles with wheels (Gray 1995: 6). But only with todays unprecedented technological consumerism has the latter become, as Ortega y Gasset would say, a belief in which we dwell, a kind of second human nature. In this new post-human cyborg era, we witness the transition from natural selection to technologically controlled selection of people and nations. As Hayles observes, at the end of the twentieth century we human beings are to a great extent made (Gray 1995: 321). According to Macauley and Gordo-Lpez (Gray 1995: 434), this new human condition implies a symbiotic relation and I would add a differential relation in a Heideggerian sense between flesh and technology as each reconfigures the other. The ethical significance of the cyborg is strictly neutral. If for Lovelocks Gaia the cyborg has no direct ethical character or effects, for Haraway the cyborg is an unquestionably liberating figure, a powerful sign of cultural heteroglossia, even if its spurious pedigree is spattered with militarism (1991: 151, 181). Franco as a cyborgologic figure is faithful to that pedigree: the ethical diktat used by his regime to cast itself as the moral majority never offered a gesture of reconciliation to those holding different views. However, the cyborgs significance can also be attuned to contemporary cultural anxieties. In this sense, I believe that the figure of the cyborg contains the discursive potential to become against any moral majority an affirmative expression of tolerance, reflecting what might be called a vital majority. II The post-human body: Franco as cyborg This is my body, which is given for you. (Luke 22: 19) The central notion of cyborg ontology is, as already suggested, that of hybridity, resulting from the incorporation of technology as a fundamental component of organic beings. The symbiosis between the constitutive elements of the cyborg cannot be comprehended from a purely organic or a purely mechanistic worldview. The cyborg positions itself in the space of an non-synthetic difference: a relationship of supplementarity between opposites equally necessary to its existence. The new ontological condition of Franco-as-cyborg (as represented in Figure 1) becomes apparent when one reads the startling final medical report issued by the equipo mdico habitual of twenty-four doctors who treated the General during the course of his illness. The report was intended to cast light on the causes of his demise: Enfermedad del parkinson. Cardiopata isqumica con infarto de miocardio anteroseptal y de cara diafragmtica. lceras digestivas agudas recidivantes, con hemorragias masivas reiteradas. Peritonitis bacteriana. Fracaso renal agudo. Tromboflebitis ileo-femoral izquierda.

140

Francisco LaRubia-Prado

Bronconeumona bilateral aspirativa. Choque endotxico. Paro cardaco. (Pozuelo Escudero 1980: 244-5) Quite apart from the maquinaria especial (Fusi 1985: 249) brought to the Francisco Franco Hospital during Francos stay there, following the onset of acute thrombo-phlebitis on 6 July 1974 which for the first time removed him as Head of the Spanish State, the medical and surgical instruments deployed to keep him as stable as possible during the final 476 days of his life were impressive. According to his last personal physician, Dr Pozuelo Escudero, the dictator used several prosthetic devices in his mouth (1980: 147); he was also receiving monitored cardiac telemetry, so that, when he presided over the council of ministers or received a dignitary, his medical team was constantly monitoring him in order to intervene if need be (1980: 219-20, 224, 225). After his hospitalization, the use of ), plus the different kinds of machines to perform EEGs (electro-encephalograms use of urinary bladder catheters, vascular access catheters, intubation for ventilatory support, various chest tubes and surgical drains, was permanent. Among other procedures, the doctors performed three life-and-death operations, daily dialysis, peritoneocentesis, blood transfusions, and a partial gastrectomy called Billroth 1 that left him practically without a stomach (1980: 229-36). Finally, he underwent hypothermic preservation (1980: 241) followed after death by embalming (1980: 248). All of this belongs to the field of cyborgologic technology, for these are restorative technologies whose purpose is to restore lost biological functions, as well as normalizing technologies designed to return the organism to a lost normality (Gray 1995: 3). And, of course, the equipo mdico habitual, through its technical know-how, also formed part of Francos new cyborgologic ontology (Hogle in Gray 1995: 207). To all of this sophisticated medical paraphernalia, one must of course add the organic, incorruptible arm of St Teresa and a miraculous robe of the Virgen del Pilar: clearly, it was felt that all options had to be covered. The bout of thrombo-phlebitis was the beginning of Francisco Francos clinical Calvary. Although he resumed his duties as Head of the Spanish State on 2 September 1974, he never really recovered from it. From then on, his health worsened steadily. The strain of returning to power in September clearly took its toll. Here, the international reaction to the execution of the five members of ETA and FRAP (Frente Revolucionario Antifascista y Patritico) shot on 27 September 1975 was a key factor. The dictator addressed his supporters for the last time on 1 October 1975 at the traditional Plaza de Oriente rally, at which he habitually responded to his enemies (domestic as well as foreign) when feeling under attack. At this rally, in words that have become emblematic of Francoist rhetoric, he attributed the international repudiation of his regime to una conspiracin masnico-izquierdista de la clase poltica, en contubernio con la subversin terrorista-comunista en lo social (Preston 1994: 959). That very day, Franco caught the gripe de Oriente that would lead to the cyborgologic situation depicted in Figure 1. In such a situation, Franco had to face his own fragmentation through the

Downloaded by [University of Sussex Library] at 04:50 31 January 2014

Franco as cyborg

141

insertion into his body of technological devices that would substantially affect his organic unity for as long as he lived. That is, his life began to depend on the addition of mechanical parts that inevitably and progressively configured an ontologically alternative totality to what is traditionally regarded as organic being.4 Indeed, Franco was heard by doctors to mutter: Qu duro es esto!, Djenme ya!, Dios mo, cunto cuesta morir! (Fusi 1985: 269). Francos difficulty in dying contrasts oddly with the notorious casualness and coldness with which he ordered the death of others. The suffering Franco on his deathbed represents a state of impotent consciousness [] his disrupted body (boundaries) extends the cyborgs collapse of organism and machine [.] His lack of lower body at this point only underlines the obvious metaphor of his search of self (Fuchs in Gray 1995: 299; my emphasis).5 In Figure 1 as in the rest of the report in La Revista Franco shows only his torso. This partial depiction of an intubated Franco becomes emblematic of the split identity that in so many ways he always incarnated: machine and organism; monarchical military man yet also servant of the Republic; devout Catholic yet also dictator responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths during peace time; supporter of the Axis powers yet also leader courting the allies; a public figure who did little that was not informed by political calculation yet who frequently boasted of having absolutely no interest in political affairs; autarkic fascist railing against liberalism but also the leader who ended up embracing liberal capitalism. Francos self was always a riddle to observers. Sinz Rodrguez, a minister in Francos first government, said that Franco tiene el aire de una esfinge pero no tiene secreto (The Spanish Civil War 1987). For Aristotle the secret of human personality is inseparable from the political realm; thus he regarded the human being as a political being (1959: 7). In the case of a politician like Franco, I take the lack of political consistency to be inseparable from the lack of an underlying unified personality. Francos political identity did not exist beyond the mask created by official scenography and the superficial features that made possible the continuous highly personalized assertion of his power. Among the features of the romance hero attributable to Franco there is one that fits perfectly with the lack of secrets in Francos personality. As Frye notes (1973: 304-5), in romance the writer does not attempt to create real people so much as stylized figures which expand into psychological archetypes [.] The romancer deals [] with characters in vacuo. In Forsters critical language (1970: 67-8), Franco would be closer to the flat character of romance than to the rounded character of the novel who possesses a complex personality or secret. The Franco regime was never adverse to ideological revisionism in matters pertaining to its own ideological foundation when necessary for instance, at the end of the 1950s. The only non-negotiable matter for Franco was his own continuity as Head of an authoritarian Spanish State. Thus, despite the fact that no se recuerda que desde Felipe II mandara nadie en Espaa tan amplia y terminantemente como l mand (ABC 1975: 1), Franco lacked, beyond what to many seemed an excessive hunger for power, what Ortega y Gasset called a yo

Downloaded by [University of Sussex Library] at 04:50 31 January 2014

142

Francisco LaRubia-Prado

Downloaded by [University of Sussex Library] at 04:50 31 January 2014

insobornable; that is, the kind of conviction that becomes the true foundation for the ethical dimension of human existence. Francos post-organic body becomes a sign that reveals a state of affairs in Spanish culture. Before the prosperity generated in Spain at the end of the 1950s and during the 1960s, it would have been very difficult to see in a dying Francisco Franco even if the technology had been available the image of a cyborg. In the 1960s and 1970s, though, this becomes feasible because the social dimension of the cyborg image emerges not only from the symbiotic relationship between the organic and the mechanistic, but also in moments of social change and the ensuing cultural crisis. Spain during the 1970s was an established middle-class society but without channels for political and cultural expression. Economic liberalization was never accompanied by political liberalization, producing tremendous levels of frustration. The recumbent image of the dictator, connected to assorted gadgets without which his continued organic existence would not have been possible, becomes, in the 1970s, a striking representation of what Jennifer Gonzlez has termed the subjugated cyborg. The visible human parts of the subjugated cyborg are passive and receptive, says Gonzlez, who adds that the image of such a cyborg is defined as is obvious in Figure 1 by his blind silence (Gray 1995: 273). The notion of the subjugated cyborg comes from a 1993 advertisement for fax machines: Eclipse Fax: if it were any faster, youd have to send and receive your faxes internally. As in the photographs illustrating the report in La Revista, the only part of the human body that one could see in the fax ad was the torso (in this case of a woman). Gonzlez notes: It is clear from the image that the woman is on her back [....] Her shoulders are bare, implying that she is unclothed. Mechanical devices comprised of tubes, metal plugs, cables, hoses and canisters appear to be inserted into her ears, eye sockets and mouth. Two electrodes appear to be attached to the womans forehead, with wires extending out to the sides, almost like the antennae of an insect. A futuristic Medusas head of wires, blinded with technology, strapped to the ground with cables and hoses, penetrated at every orifice with the flow of information technologies. (Gray 1995: 273) Gonzlez also sees the cyborg as the sign and witness of changed human perceptions (Gray 1995: 270). Franco as a subjugated cyborg, like the fax machine, generates information and visually emblematizes the radical transformation of a country, Spain, whose complexity the dictator could never fathom beyond the ideological parameters set by the Civil War and economic autarky.6 Like the above-mentioned fax machine, Franco also became, in his subjugated state, a very special commodity. In fact, one may ask to what extent humanness existed in the last moments of his life during his last two days he was unconscious or whether he ceased to be a cyborg and became a mere commodity for political consumption. Linda Hogle raises this question in connection with the

Franco as cyborg

143

case of a person who suffers an accident and whose brain stops functioning (Gray 1995: 203-16). Doctors wish to keep the victim alive artificially to preserve the organs for transplants. The question here is: at what point is the human component of that body so degraded that it lacks the humanity to be a cyborg, becoming simply a coveted piece of merchandise? Francos case raises similar questions from the moment when, unconscious, he underwent hypothermic preservation two days before his death. The determination to keep the dictator alive through artificial means had a powerful political motivation. In his waning days, he became a valuable political commodity for the most conservative sector within the regime led by his son-inlaw, the notorious Marqus de Villaverde. For that sector it was imperative to keep Franco conscious until 26 November 1975, so that he could reappoint Alejandro Rodrguez de Valcrcel to his post as President of the Consejo del Reino, since his appointment ended that day. Once reappointed, Rodrguez de Valcrcel would be in a position to counteract any dangerous move by the new Head of the Spanish State, King Juan Carlos de Borbn, in the selection of a new Prime Minister. Francos death on 20 November thwarted the hopes of Francoisms die-hard supporters. By contrast with the manipulation of Francos body before his death, which caused the moribund dictator intense pain and was ended only on his daughters insistence, the manipulation of his image after his accession to power had his full endorsement. The ontology of the cyborg, unlike that of organic beings, excludes natural evolution and selection. A fundamental part of any cyborgs being is made, built, constructed (Hayles in Gray 1995: 321-2). Organic beings are born, they grow, become old, and die. Cyborgs are not born from a seed or embryo, they do not experience youth or growth although they can become worn out or need tuning. They can additionally be assembled and disassembled. This was the case of Franco and of other dictators while in power. No one thinks of Franco as a child nor as a young man, except as a young military officer. In his biography of Franco, Juan Pablo Fusi swiftly dispatches Francos childhood thus: Tras una infancia anodina y cursar sus estudios primarios y elementales en colegios locales, en 1907, con el ingreso en la Academia Militar de Toledo, comenzaba la que habra de ser una de las ms rpidas y brillantes carreras militares del Ejrcito espaol del siglo XX (1985: 34). Dictators such as Franco tend to burst abruptly into the life of a country through war, revolution, a political convulsion, or an internal fight within a political organization that has already identified or will identify itself with the state or a combination of these situations. After obtaining power, the dictator officially projects an iconic and radically assertive image of himself. Ignacio de Zuloagas portrait of Franco (Figure 3) epitomizes the sparkling inner clarity that any atemporal iconic image of a dictator must possess if it is to tap into peoples mythical imaginations. Despite its Felliniesque facial features, Zuloagas representation of Franco bespeaks conviction and firmness, contrasting with a background of unruly clouds that the shapely general, wearing his blue falangista

Downloaded by [University of Sussex Library] at 04:50 31 January 2014

144

Francisco LaRubia-Prado

Downloaded by [University of Sussex Library] at 04:50 31 January 2014

shirt and a pair of reassuring high boots, keeps in check by the very force of his presence. Zuloagas representation of the Caudillo aspires to quell anxieties, inviting the spectator to trust in the portrayed figures serene composure, regardless of the explicit sectarianism illustrated by the fascist attire. Furthermore, in this painting the image of Franco is offset by a landscape representing la Espaa profunda the kind of landscape that Zuloaga knew how to depict so masterfully: a bare nature deprived of such living obfuscations as rivers, trees or birds. Here nature, in its pristine bravura, emphasizes the intrepid Caudillos firmness and distinction. A city can be made out in the distant background, for the urban milieu cannot escape the protection of the providential figure portrayed. Indeed, as a true son of the mother countrys nature, Franco provides a guarantee of salvation for the inhabitants of the city traditionally prone to disobedience whether they like it or not. The Caudillos figure clutches a phallic flagstaff with a flashy gilded tip, from which the national flag hangs, draping over his right arm and coming to rest on the ground. From his sacred vantage point, the flag, the human figure and the soil become part of the same inseparable unity. We are, then, contemplating the iconic image of a providential hero who places himself

Figure 3. Ignacio de Zuloagas portrait of Franco. Reproduced by kind permission of the Museo Zuloaga.

Franco as cyborg

145

Downloaded by [University of Sussex Library] at 04:50 31 January 2014

above constraints of space and time. Francos figure seeks to be eternally present by subliminally displaying the features of mythic heroes of the past (it recalls Hubert Lanzigers painting The Flag Bearer where Adolf Hitler is represented in Wagnerian attire). By denying temporal change, this prefabricated representation of Franco becomes the true perhaps the only guarantee of stability for the communitys future, since it concentrates in itself the essences of the mythical past, our present reality (since the figure is in power now), and our future fortunes. Organic beings come from a past, they change in the present, and renew themselves in the same temporal experience that projects them towards the future. By denying temporality, Francos anti-organic iconic image constitutes in its thematic and technical conception a profoundly cyborgologic representation. In addition to portraying himself as an eternal, triumphant symbol of permanence, Franco re-formed or re-invented himself at different moments of his career, while always maintaining his own position as captain of the Spanish vessel. I shall now go on to examine the circumstances that brought Francisco Franco to power as another example of his cyborgologic ontology. III The heroic deed: Franco and the Crusade No olvidis que los enemigos de Espaa y de la civilizacin cristiana estn alerta. (Francisco Franco Bahamonde) As is well known, Francisco Franco Bahamonde attained power in 1939 after victory in a bloody Civil War fought against the second Spanish Republic, referred to by the Francoist propaganda machine as the cruzada de liberacin. The Nationalist uprising was thus presented as a movement of national salvation pitted against destructive forces alien to the essence of Spanish, Western and Christian culture. The narrative of Francoism follows the same traditional plot that, since time immemorial, has inspired all manner of insurgent movements. It shares many features with the romance genre, linking the latter with the cyborgologic experience. As in romance, the official that is, Francoist version of the Crusade has its villain(s), its hero, its female figure, its father figure, and an apocalyptic atmosphere of confrontation between the forces of good and evil. This atmosphere is captured by the falangista poet Dionisio Ridruejo in his Oda a la guerra. There, as Juan Cano Ballesta has noted, Ridruejo llega a pintar con pinceladas casi bblicas, un mundo ensombrecido por la angustia, el feroz presentimiento y el sabor de escombros en el aire. La sociedad espaola se debate [] entre gritos y sollozos, envuelta en tinieblas, tempestades y amenazas de muerte (1994: 38). In the Francoist narrative, the destructive being sent by the forces of evil, characteristic of romance, takes the form of the red army, its soldiers and, above all, its weaponry. The red hordes an image of archetypal otherness fight in the name of a decadent system liberal democracy for popular sovereignty, agrarian reform, secularization and other values that, for the Nationalists, configured la anti-Espaa, thus being responsible for the onset of a dark age. The Republican army is represented in terms of the purest fascist

146

Francisco LaRubia-Prado

sensibility in Jos Mara Pemns Poema de la bestia y el ngel, written during the Civil War: La Bestia encarn entonces, en un carro de muerte. Sapo inmenso de hierro invulnerable. (1947: 1032) Like a cyborg a machine covered by organic matter the Republican Beast covers itself with an organic component: Para engaar al cielo los jinetes del monstruo, taparon su armadura con ramaje de olivo y de manzano. (1947: 1034) In the Spanish as opposed to German and Italian fascist imagination, the machine is associated with the destruction of beauty, spirituality and the sacred. It is also associated with evil and impiety, with liberalism, the foreign and, above all, with the Soviet Union (Cano Ballesta 1994: 45). By contrast Pemn describes the Angel which confronts the Beast thus: Es rubio como una espiga a punto de madurar... Sano es como una amapola y puro como un San Juan. (1947: 1035) Although hardly fitting Pemans idealization, Franco, like the soldier in Pemns poem, represents the forces of good in the official narrative of the Crusade. He opposes the forces of evil in the Civil War, just as, in the name of the empire, he fought the Moors in Africa. Confronting the red hordes, their tanks and their unspeakable crimes, Franco occupies the place of the human in this idealized crusading narrative; he is also the Saint George who fights and defeats the dragontoad of steel. In romance, the hero is always an exceptional male with a clear sense of his own destiny, ready to accomplish a great deed that will save a people or a community (Frye 1973: 184, 186-7, 304; Dudley 1997: 37-65). In Don Quijote, this feature of romance is present whenever the protagonist proclaims that a specific adventure has been reserved for him (Dudley 1997: 154-62). Chastity is another feature of the romance hero, as the cases of Percival, Amads or indeed Don Quijote illustrate. Immersed in the problems of the fatherland, Franco, like a romance hero, deprives himself of sexuality, as Manuel Vzquez Montalbn stresses in his Autobiografa del general Franco. And when in romance a territorial leader loses divine favour, then we encounter the wasteland (Darrah 1981: 52); in the Francoist narrative this is obviously the Republic. The clash between the hero and an enemy who, given its dehumanizing and dehumanized nature, has no name beyond terms or notions such as the Beast or the red hordes, leads to the engendering by the hero, through his phallic cannons, of the Church of Christ in Spain. The Crusade becomes his sexual act as,

Downloaded by [University of Sussex Library] at 04:50 31 January 2014

Franco as cyborg

147

Downloaded by [University of Sussex Library] at 04:50 31 January 2014

Figure 4. Aparicin de Franco ante el Sagrado Corazn (Costus 1981) Reproduced by kind permission of Galera Sen, Madrid.

through his valiant struggle against those who burnt convents and churches, Franco makes possible the being of Christ on Earth (or at least on Spanish territory, though Francos partisans also projected his mission as universal). Thus, the general becomes the symbolic father of Christ. The paternal figure of Christ in relation to mankind becomes a filial figure in relation to Franco. Francos divine fatherhood makes him the very origin of the law. Franco, as a Catholic, worships his son Christ. One cannot help but suspect that, in this Oedipal inversion/identification with his father/son Christ, Franco was in fact worshipping himself. Francos protagonism as Christs father is reflected in Costuss 1981 painting Aparicin de Franco ante el Sagrado Corazn (see Figure 4). In this painting, Christ as Son is speechless with admiration as he slightly looks towards his left, suggesting that like Semele before her lover Zeus it would be fatal for him to openly admire Francos radiant face in all its splendour. Welcomed with humility by the Son, Franco smiles as he rides his magnificent white horse enveloped in an ascending cloud. In turn, Franco pierces the ethereal atmosphere with his phallic arm erect. His fascist salute becomes an ostentatious exhibition of the rank that his unquestionable paternity grants him in relation to the Son.7 Spain, in turn, was equated in the mythifications of Francoist narrative with the female figure of romance. The nation was always conceived as a desired woman by fascist poets and politicians. For Jos Antonio Primo de Rivera, Spain

148

Francisco LaRubia-Prado

was la amada cautiva or la dama Espaa. For Eugenio Montes, Spain was a novia; and Gimnez Caballero produces the perfect tale for those truly in love with the motherland: Espaa es una mujer, y una gran mujer. Y las mujeres, como Espaa en su plenitud de gracia y de fecundidad , slo estn reservadas a los valientes que sepan conquistarlas y fecundarlas (cited by Cano Ballesta 1994: 30). Spain, the lady of romance, found in Franco the conqueror and fertilizing hero for whom providence had reserved her. The moment of the potent Generals conquest and fertilization of Spain to which Gimnez Caballero refers is the dawn of Spain: the longed-for daybreak to which Spanish fascism sings its most exalted songs (Cano Ballesta 1994: 38-45). The ultimate meaning of this dawn, once the natural order of things has been re-established after the defeat of the Beast by the Angel, is articulated mutatis mutandis as Spanish citizens would later discover by Kyle Reese, the protagonist of James Camerons 1984 film The Terminator, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a killer cyborg, when he screams at Sarah Connor, the lady of Camerons romance: Do exactly what I say. Exactly. Dont move unless I say. Dont make a sound unless I say. Do you understand? In short, Franco was designated as the true chosen one, a typically cyborgologic function (Haraway in Gray 1995: xv; Hogle in Gray 1995: 213).8 The dictator always thought that his mission was divine that is, that he had been sent by God whence the numismatic motto Francisco Franco Caudillo de Espaa por la G[racia] de Dios that Franco minted around his own effigy in legal tender. In the film Raza (Senz de Heredia, 1941), Franco, as scriptwriter, kills the paternal figure Churruca as well as his own brother, so as to be the sole substitute for the father. Franco is represented in the film in idealized form by its protagonist Jos who, shot by a firing squad, dies and miraculously resuscitates as did Christ. As Kinder suggests (1993: 152), this resurrection is an idealized enactment of the stomach wound received and survived by Franco in 1916, as he led an attack on Moroccan positions at Ain Yir hill.9 His resurrection in Raza, along with his identification with Christ and the reversal of their respective roles, provides another example of the ontological hybridity that places Francos figure beyond the organic/mechanistic dichotomy. Whether by his own design (Raza) or as an effect of his regimes propaganda needs, Franco becomes simultaneously human and divine. Hence the appellatives used by the regimes coryphaei and the media: campen de la milicia, del cielo y de la tierra, general-sacerdote, jefetaumaturgo, csar y pontfice, enviado de Dios hecho general, espada del Altsimo, broncnea voz con diamantinos armnicos, ministro de Dios, semidis inasequible, among others (Fusi 1985: 188). In this sense, Francos figure, a hybrid and ready-made figure indeed, projects itself as that of a cyborg a lo divino. If the ironic figure of the cyborg is, as we have already seen, at the very centre of Haraways metaphysical blasphemy (1991: 149), the manifold ontological hybridity of Francisco Franco transforms him, in a parodic gesture, into a blasphemy of his own sanctity.10

Downloaded by [University of Sussex Library] at 04:50 31 January 2014

Franco as cyborg

149

IV The trans-systemic system: Francoism as a cyborg political regime We believe in the possibility of an incalculable transformations. (F.T.Marinetti) number of human

Just as cyborgs were initially conceived by Clynes and Kline to adapt to different extra-terrestrial environments, so Franco possessed a talent for adapting himself to, and surviving, virtually any political environment. His chameleon-like nature, as Preston calls it, repeatedly kept him in power, as amply displayed in his simultaneous flirting between 1943 and 1944 with the Axis powers and the Allies (Preston 1993: 482-500). This cyborgologic adaptation to the external environment was evidenced even more clearly in his regimes radical change of economic and to a certain extent political orientation as it shifted from a fascist-inspired autarky to the pro-capitalist technocracy proclaimed by the Opus Dei members who held key positions in Francos cabinet from 1957 on: an adaptation precisely to technology. The contradiction between National-Catholic ideology and economic development opens up the issue of the role of technology in the attainment of modernity. Garca de la Huerta reminds us that, for Heidegger, McLuhan and Russell, technology is the main agent in the globalization of culture and history (1992: 133). Technological transferences, which entail exchanges of signs and cultural patterns at a global level, hinder the maintenance of diversity among cultures involved in the process of modernization. Thus, modernization based on the import of technologies dilutes cultural purities; individual cultures tend to become progressively assimilated by a global culture in a process of historical and cultural globalization (1992: 136). This double movement resulting from technological dependence helps to explain how the incorporation of Spain into international capitalism led to the disappearance of its cultural difference with regard to an economic and geopolitical environment (Western Europe) characterized by opposition to such a difference.11 The fundamental disappearance of Spains cultural alterity had unquestionable political repercussions. The economic success that resulted from Spains integration into a free market economy highlighted Francos anachronism as a leader without political solutions for a complex society. In addition, it underscored the inadequacy of the political class that propelled the reforms the technocrats. The latter a group of technical experts particularly knowledgeable in the administrative sciences became the most politically powerful class in Francos Spain; Garca de la Huerta notes that such technical experts tend to be the class that legitimizes power in authoritarian states (1992: 141-2). The technocratic lites take-over of the state apparatus from the Falanges ideological lite frequently reduced Franco, incapable of understanding decisions based on purely technical factors, to a figurehead whose role was to ratify their decisions. The reason why the ideal of modernity based largely on promotion of the importance of technology in a free market economy was incorporated into the regime was, of course, that the power generated by capitalism boosted an

Downloaded by [University of Sussex Library] at 04:50 31 January 2014

150

Francisco LaRubia-Prado

Downloaded by [University of Sussex Library] at 04:50 31 January 2014

established but weak Francoist state, even if it meant the radical suppression of the regimes previous history and its replacement by una temporalidad abstracta, homognea, donda la partitura poda escribirse a voluntad (Garca de la Huerta 1992: 147). Francoisms historical self-revisionism reveals the cyborgologic, hybrid composition of a political regime that gives up its own organicity and fragments itself in a historical discontinuity with respect to its own foundation, and in the undoing of its own discourse as National-Catholic rhetoric embraces the logic of the capitalist technological devil. It is not difficult to conceive the technocratic Francoist State after 1957 as a cyborg regime since it adopts an authoritarian institutional configuration where total assent was expected in exchange for the economic miracles brought about by technology. In such a State, just as doctors and technicians form part of the cyborg, so the technocrats form part of the cyborg-state. In such a state citizens become what Gray (1995) has called degraded cyborgs, assimilated to and by authoritarianism through the mind-control exercised by consumerism and the official propaganda machine. V Conclusion Qualis vita finis ita [As his life was, so was his death] (Latin aphorism) In this essay, I have used the dispositif or grid of intelligibility of the cyborg to give meaning and intelligibility to the defining moments of Francoism. My starting point was the photographic representation of General Franco on his deathbed. There is something very powerful about the notion of the death of Francisco Franco. The Spanish philosopher and writer Mara Zambrano (1904-91) insists that Francos death was: una muerte que se fue produciendo, en pedazos, sin esa unidad que tiene la muerte en cualquier ser viviente, aunque no sea un hombre [....] Y es que esa muerte careca de unidad, de identidad, se dira que no era una muerte sin que por eso estuviese en las antpodas de la vida [....] Era una muerte apcrifa. Era una pseudomuerte. O acaso algo peor. (1995: 43) Zambrano stresses the lack of unity, the progressive fragmentation that occurs in the body of General Franco: a death in pieces. Dis-integration. Being human becomes disconnected from the notion of the organic, producing ontological perplexity. As Zambrano notes, this lack of unity poses a question regarding the identity of the creature on display: what is dying? Without organic unity, the definition of death becomes problematic; the facticity of death becomes contingent, it admits discursive rebuttal. Thus Zambrano concludes that, in effect, the death of Franco is not death as such; it is a false, apocryphal death. Contrary to the running joke of Saturday Night Live, Franco would not remain dead because the unity and continuity of his organic being never died. Obsessed with unity with la unidad de las tierras y los hombres de Espaa; with a Spain that was una, grande, libre and an unidad de destino en lo universal Franco himself died, ironically, not one but a hybrid entity: a cyborg. In this, his death was indeed a reflection of his life.

Franco as cyborg

151

Notes
1

The phrase that constitutes my subtitle comes from the description by Robert Hughes, in The Shock of the New (1991 ), of one of the key obsessions of the Dada movement: the war cripple found everywhere in Berlin after World War I. 2 So far as I am aware, the source of the photographs that appeared in La Revista is officially unknown. In his book Los ltimos 476 das de Franco (1980 ), Dr Pozuelo Escudero claims that he was given a large sum of money to take photographs of Franco on his deathbed but refused to do so. However, Paul Preston (1994: 778, 961) reports that Francos son-in-law, the Marqus de Villaverde, had already made full use of his own camera (1993: 778 ). Access to these photographs is now very difficult since La Revista is available in neither the Hemeroteca Municipal de Madrid nor in the Hemeroteca Nacional. My thanks to Fuencisla Muoz for her assistance here. 3 Both Payne (1993: 254 ) and Vilars (1998: 19) refer to Francos mechanical state during his last days. 4 An organic being is defined as one in which the whole is more than, and previous to, the sum of its parts (Pepper 1970: 181-231, 280-314). 5 Fuchs s words refer to Robocop who, like Franco, shows only his torso as he hangs from wires in a laboratory. 6 According to the leading Opus Dei tecnocrat and notable Francoist, Laureano Lpez Rod, a Franco haba que amueblarle de ideas el cerebro (quoted by Preston 1994: 863). 7 Franco additionally usurps Jos Antonios ideological paternity in order to reabsorb his thinking and himself become the de facto father of the Falange. See the statements by Falange member Narciso Perales in the TV documentary The Spanish Civil War. 8 Hogle observes that the material and metaphorical realities of the cyborg occupy a social space as text that is present in the reification of the social values of altruism and the belief in a common good (1995: 213 ). Haraway notes that, in contemporary culture, the cyborg is often inserted into a discourse of salvation (Gray 1995: xv). 9 This resurrection matches the popular cultural perception of the cyborg as an entity that does not die easily. See, for instance, the film Terminator where the Terminator resurrects from the inferno when the petrol tank he was driving blows up. The conjunction of the human (human voice) and the machine (tape recorder) also played a crucial role in Francos last moments, when he recorded his own story (Pozuelo Escudero 1980). The forms of treatment recommended by Dr Pozuelo also in many cases involved technology; for example, walking up and down airplane steps borrowed from Iberia Airlines and installed in the gardens of El Pardo Palace (Francos official residence). 10 The hero as a semi-divine figure has a pagan origin, christianized by Franco just as Chrtien de Troyes christianizes Celtic romance. 11 It is not coincidence that the slogan used to promote tourism at the time was Espaa es diferente.

Downloaded by [University of Sussex Library] at 04:50 31 January 2014

Works cited
ABC (21 November 1975) (special issue on Francos death). Aristotle (1959 ) Aristotles Politics and Athenian Constitution (London: Dent). Cameron, James (1984 ) The Terminator (film). Cano Ballesta, Juan (1994 ) Las estrategias de la imaginacin (Madrid: Siglo XXI). Causa General (1946 ) (Madrid: Afrodisio Aguado). Darrah, John (1981 ) The Real Camelot: Paganism and the Arthurian Romances (London: Thames & Hudson ). Dery, Mark (1995 ) Velocidad de escape (Madrid: Siruela). Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Paul Rabinow (1983 ) Michel Foucault (Chicago: University of

152

Francisco LaRubia-Prado

Chicago Press). Dudley, Edward (1997 ) The Endless Text: Don Quijote and the Hermeneutics of Romance (Albany: State University of New York Press). Forster, E.M (1970 ) Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt). Frye, Northrop (1973 ) Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press). (1976 ) The Secular Scripture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press). Fusi, Juan Pablo (1985 ) Franco (Madrid: Taurus). Garca de la Huerta, Marcos (1992 ) La tcnica y la difusin del ideal de modernidad, in Estudios sobre sociedad y tecnologa (Barcelona: Anthropos), 131-59. Gray, Chris Hables (1995 ) The Cyborg Handbook (New York: Routledge). Green, Miranda J. (1992 ) Dictionary of Celtic Myths and Legends (London: Thames & Hudson ). Haraway Donna J. (1991 ) A cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialistfeminism in the late twentieth century, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York: Routledge), 149-81. Hughes, Robert (1991 ) The Shock of the New (New York: Knopf). Kinder, Marsha (1993 ) Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press). La voz y la obra de Francisco Franco, caudillo (1983 ) (Madrid). McDonough, Peter, Samuel H. Barnes and Antonio Lpez Pina (1998 ) The Cultural Dynamics of Democratization in Spain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Memoria de la Transicin (1996 ) (Madrid: El Pas). Morand, Pedro (1984 ) Cultura y modernizacin en Amrica Latina (Santiago: Universidad Catlica de Chile). Payne, Stanley (1993 ) Franco: el perfil de la historia (Madrid: Espasa Calpe). Pemn, Jos Mara (1947 ) Obras completas, vol. I (Madrid: Escelicer ). Pepper, Stephen C. (1970 ) World Hypotheses (Berkeley: University of California Press). Pozuelo Escudero, Vicente (1980 ) Los ltimos 476 das de Franco, 5th ed. (Barcelona: Planeta). Preston, Paul (1993 ) Franco (London: HarperCollins); Spanish translation 1994 (Barcelona: Grijalbo/Mondadori). Senz de Heredia, Jos Luis (1941 ) Raza (film). Tamames, Ramn (1977 ) La repblica. La era de Franco (Madrid: Alianza). The Spanish Civil War (1987 ), 2 parts (Granada Video). Vzquez Montalbn, Manuel (1993 ) Autobiografa del general Franco (Barcelona: Planeta). Vilars, Teresa (1998 ) El mono del desencanto: una crtica cultural de la transicin espaola (1973-1993 ) (Madrid: Siglo XXI). Wachovsky Brothers (1999 ) The Matrix (film). Weller, Peter (1990 ) Robocop II (film). White, Hayden (1978 ) Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Zambrano, Mara (1995 ) La muerte apcrifa, in Mercedez Gmez Blesa (ed.), Las palabras del regreso (Salamanca: Amar).

Downloaded by [University of Sussex Library] at 04:50 31 January 2014