Effects of the Industrial Revolution:
Review of Wolfgang Schivelbusch. The Railway Journey. (California, 1987)
The railway revolutionized England, America and all Europe. Established opinion stresses the efficiency and progress that such travel engendered, but the more or less non-quantifiable things that were lost or damaged is something else entirely. Efficiency is easy to quantify, the way of life destroyed by such monoliths is not measurable and hence, given modernity’s obsession with measurement, easier to ignore.
Railroads were a symbol: they were a symbol of the industrial revolution, but, most important of all, it was a symbol of man’s conquest of nature. More specifically, it was a conquest of something more than nature, but the forms under which nature appears, that os time and space. It was one thing to want to conquer the world of matter, quite another to conquer the conditions under which matter appears. The conquest of matter is a long standing aim of the natural sciences, but the conquest of time and space is the domination of the inner man, the very nature of perception. This is what makes the railway unique, it is what gives rail travel a philosophical and epistemological value not lost on such writers as Leo Tolstoy.
Hence, the conquest of time and space is a qualitative distinction from science’s conquest of matter, a conquest still taking place. The nature of this shift is the thesis of this book. Railroads conquered perception, something far more intimate than man’s relationship to matter. Man should be qualified, for it is a label that hide more than it reveals. Railroads were demanded by elites, and hence, built by elites. So the old slogan “man against nature” really amounts to economic elites against nature.
The weakest link in capitalist production in the early19th century was overland travel. While nearly every other element in the productive process was quickly moving “forward,” transportation was not. Overland coach transport was considered inefficient because it depended on the upkeep of animals, namely horses, that were expensive to feed and care for. Coach travel was to become a vestigial organ in production and distribution once the railway was developed, as well as the steam engine, based on coal, that preceded it. The fact is that the author skillfully hints that the development of evolutionary biology has nothing to do with biology. It fits the development of industry far better than the purported development of natural organisms. The evolution of the machine in modern times fits the Darwinian model perfectly. It begins with fits and starts, the economic “organism” struggling to free itself from dependency on its environment. It develops piece by piece, as the development of the whole demands changes among specific parts. Parts are discarded and appear as a result of this constant dialectal pressure. The better inventions of technology edge out others, which then fall into the abyss of memory. Industrial capitalism enshrined the doctrine of the survival fo the fittest right around the time Hegel and later Darwin (both Erasmus and Charles) struggled with these concepts as a developmental reality, rather than as a static one. Movement and progress, rather than the more stationary ideas of virtue and stability dominated: it would have been a miracle if someone had not applied the movement of the industrial capitalist to the world of biology.
In England, the move from a wood based to an iron/coal based economy made this shift a possibility. The shift from wood to coal was brought about by a long process of deforestation that had taken place steadily since the high Middle Ages. When wood became scarcer and more expensive, substitutes needed to be found. The industrial revolution, in a sense, can be said to rest upon the shift from a wood-based economy to one of coal. The fact is that England’s coal supplies were plentiful, and, more importantly, centralized in a few districts, making exploitation and transportation much easier. France, on the other hand, while possessing coal, did not possess it in sufficiently centralized area (7). French coal deposits were found scattered throughout the country, hampering its exploitation. Hence, the use of coal in an iron based mechanical environment meant that England was to be the first out of the industrial starting gate and, for a long time to come, dominate the industrial production of the globe.
While it is clear that the economic elites of England demanded the development of the steam engine and the subsequent railroads, the losses engendered by this new mode of transportation are much more difficult to discern. It is easy to pinpoint the specific advantages in international trade and colonization afforded to the British empire by the development of this revolutionary technology, the losses are far less crisp. What it significant is that the alterations in perception that the railway afforded, for better or for worse, mirror nearly exactly the radical changes the “steamrolling” juggernaut of capitalism was to inflict upon the countryside, and on human life itself. That is the aim of this book.
The victory of the railroads is termed a “conquest of space” (10). This means that the very perception of man was altered, by definition. The idea of local space changed, and the old idea of local sovereignty was radically altered as well. As the conquest of matter moved society from a natural to an increasingly synthetic environment, so too, perception moved form one of immediate experience with nature to a “panoramic” view of the natural world more akin to moving pictures than actual experience. Such a shift is very easy to understate. The “panoramic” mode of seeing things is as synthetic as the rest of the economy: it is seen in fast motion, from behind a wall of glass, one sees as a spectator, one passive and relaxed, rather than engaged. The natural world becomes merely an object, rather, in an interactive environment, a subject in its own right. The very fact of traveling by rail itself caused the linear, measured route to take over from the winding paths created by the topography itself, the natural mode of travel as opposed to the symmetrical mode created by railroads (13). At the same time, inactivity was dominating, since the human person no longer had any means of controlling the nature of the travel itself. So in all respects, both in the nature of the travel itself, as well as the alteration of perception of a landscape, the human person lost all control, but this loss of control was engendered by an artificiality of landscape and travel route.
Travel no longer followed the topography of the land. This meant that it was not generation prior that had created the routes that best fit the place, but routes and forms of travel were now centralized and bureaucratized. The author writes: “Technological constructs affect natural forces in the same way social rules affect individuals” (169). What is being said here is that there is a parallel between the canalization of natural forces, the very nature of technology, and the canalization of both human beings as objects as well as subjects. Objectively, because such constructs force greater and greater regimentation, and as subjects in that humans are now herded onto a single path, a single, mapped out route based on bureaucratic and financial considerations. It is another form of alienation, where everything about transportation is controlled by distant and largely anonymous functionaries in an increasingly centralized bureaucratic apparatus. The individual is merely an object–constantly the spectator, never a subject.
The human herd is now created: a bovine mass is herded from one metropolis to another, on the basis and scale dictated to by a separate class of men: the wealthy, connected and bureaucratically minded. There is no connection with nature, man is now insulated from it. But even more, given the scale of the new railways, individuals confronting one another in the train cars were complete strangers. Nature was blocked out, as was real community (11).
The real loss was freedom. The slogan mentioned in the book is a powerful one, and one that lies as the backbone of modern capitalism: the more primitive the technology, the less coordinated the parts need be (170 ff). The more developed the machinery, the more regimentation among the parts is necessary. Darwinian biologists make similar claims for organisms. Put differently, modern technology requires the coordination of its parts, that is, labor, as well as machine parts, at a level of intensity never before seen since the building of the pyramids. Increasing self-discipline, factory discipline and both economic and political centralization are necessary parallels to the development of the steam engine, the railroads and all the technology and massive coordination such industries imply. It is not liberation from nature, but enslavement to the web, not of people, but abstract and impersonal social relations one might abbreviate as “managerial bureaucracy.” A web of centralization and regimentation is necessary to maintain the countless parts of a national, advanced, modern economy, today at a global scale. As the web gets more and more complicated, books such as the Railway Journey become more and more important.
Just to give one example: the development of the railway necessitated the reorganization of its target cities. This is because the narrow streets fo the Middle Ages could not handle the large movement of goods through the town to get to the (usually) outlying stations. Hence, cities were rebuilt, heritage was destroyed, and the narrow and curving streets of the old days were rebuilt into a symmetric pattern. Hence, the very living arrangements of the people were affected in an intimate way. To cash out the endless changes that take place at the most minute levels to make room for this technology would tax hundreds of lifetimes of archival labor. But, at a general level, even out modern intellects can pick this up. Hence, when one says that technology is “revolutionary” this is no mere slogan, but refers to the complete reorganization of life toward that of coordination, discipline and centralization necessary to make such technology work at its maximum efficiency. One of its results: the department store. The journey from the factory to the train was just replicated on a smaller scale, and dominated by middle men, that execrable sect of the retailers, who then add a “tax” of sorts on their services by acting as gatekeepers to the merchandise one cannot live without.
Hence, the final message here (at its most abstract) is that the quantifiable methods of social science, typified in industrial capitalism, while garnering huge profits, are inimical to freedom. Freedom is non-quantifiable, it is a way of life and thought that resists the obsession with measurement and symmetry that industrial capitalism demands.
