“The maelstrom of modern life has been fed from many sources: great discoveries in the physical
sciences, changing our images of the universe and our place in it; the industrialization of production,
which transforms scientific knowledge into technology, creates new human environments and destroys
old ones, speeds up the whole tempo of life, generates new forms of corporate power and class
struggle; immense demographic upheavals, severing millions of people from their ancestral habitats,
hurtling them halfway across the world into new lives; rapid and often cataclysmic urban growth;
systems of mass communication, dynamic in their development, enveloping and binding together the
most diverse people and societies; increasingly powerful national states, bureaucratically structured and
operated, constantly striving to expand their powers; mass social movements of people, and peoples,
challenging their political and economic rulers, striving to gain some control over their lives; finally,
bearing and driving all these people and institutions along, an ever-expanding, drastically fluctuating
capitalist world market. In the twentieth century, the social processes that bring this maelstrom
into being, and keep it in a state of perpetual becoming, have come to be called
"modernization." These world-historical processes have nourished an amazing variety of visions and
ideas that aim to make men and women the subjects as well as the objects of modernization, to give
them the power to change the world that is changing them, to make their way through the maelstrom
and make it their own.”
-Marshall Berman
“MORTONSIGNSTHEGREATERNEWYORKBILL
COMPLETESTHEACTMAKINGNEWYORKWORLD’S
SECONDMETROPOLIS”(22)
“In the mid-nineteenth century, the invention of the match brought
forth a number of innovations which have one thing in common: a
single abrupt movement of the hand triggers a process of many
steps[…] With regard to countless movements of switching, inserting,
pressing, and the like, the "snapping" by the photographer had the
greatest consequences. Henceforth a touch of the finger sufficed to
fix an event for an unlimited period of time. The camera gave the
moment a posthumous shock, as it were. Haptic experiences of this
kind were joined by optic ones, such as are supplied by the advertising
pages of a newspaper or the traffic of a big city. Moving through this
traffic involves the individual in a series of shocks and collisions. At
dangerous intersections, nervous impulses flow through him in rapid
succession, like the energy from a battery. Baudelaire speaks of a man
who plunges into the crowd as into a reservoir of electric energy.
Circumscribing the experience of the shock, he calls this man "a
kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness." Whereas Poe's passers-by
cast glances in all directions, seemingly without cause, today's
pedestrians are obliged to look about them so that they can be aware
of traffic signals. Thus, technology has subjected the human
sensorium to a complex kind of training. There came a day when a
new and urgent need for stimuli was met by film. In a film,
perception conditioned by shock was established as a formal
principle. What determines the rhythm of production on a
conveyor belt is the same thing that underlies the rhythm of
reception in the film.”
-Walter Benjamin “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”
“Benjamin ‘elaborates two different kinds of
‘experience’: (1) Erlebnis, immediate or shock
experience, and (2) Erfahrung, a fuller and more
reflective state of consciousness ... The context of
Erlebnis [is] the city, which offers the boundaries
and thresholds that fracture modern experience,
disrupting any sense of it as homogeneous”
-Scott McCracken “Three gulls wheel above the broken boxes, orangerinds,
spoiled cabbage heads that heave between the splintered
plank walls, the green waves spume under the round bow as
the ferry, skidding on the tide, crashes gulps the broken
water, slides, settles slowly into the slip. Handwinches whirl
with jingle of chains. Gates fold upwards, feet step out
across the crack, men and women press through the
manuresmelling wooden tunnel of the ferryhouse, crushed
and jostling like apples fed down a chute into a press” (15)
“Three gulls wheel above the broken boxes, orangerinds, spoiled
cabbage heads that heave between the splintered plank walls, the
green waves spume under the round bow as the ferry, skidding
on the tide, crashes gulps the broken water, slides, settles slowly
into the slip. Handwinches whirl with jingle of chains. Gates fold
upwards, feet step out across the crack, men and women press
through the manuresmelling wooden tunnel of the ferryhouse,
crushed and jostling like apples fed down a chute into a
press” (15)
“Three gulls wheel above the broken boxes, orangerinds, spoiled
cabbage heads that heave between the splintered plank walls, the
green waves spume under the round bow as the ferry, skidding
on the tide, crashes gulps the broken water, slides, settles slowly
into the slip. Handwinches whirl with jingle of chains. Gates fold
upwards, feet step out across the crack, men and women press
through the manuresmelling wooden tunnel of the ferryhouse,
crushed and jostling like apples fed down a chute into a
press” (15)
“Opposite him the
Elliedoll was
speaking” (272-3)
“Ellen felt herself sitting
with her ankles
Crossed, rigid as a porcelain
figure under her
clothes” (355)
“Ellie in a gold dress, Ellie made of
thin gold foil absolutely lifelike
beckoning from every window” (327)
Mannequins express
“uncanny changes wrought
upon bodies and objects in
the high capitalist epoch […
particularly the] remaking of
the body (especially the
female body) as commodity
[… They evoke] an uncanny
confusion between life and
death” (Foster 126)
“Like the work of art, woman in the age of technological
reproduction is deprived of her aura; the effects of industry
and technology thus help to demystify the myth of
femininity as a last remaining site of redemptive nature. In
this sense modernity serves to denaturalize and hence to
destabilize the notion of an essential, God-given femaleness.
Yet this figure of the woman as machine can also be read as
the reaffirmation of a patriarchal desire for technological
mastery over woman, expressed in the fantasy of a
compliant female automaton and in the dream of creation
without the mother” (Rita Felski, 20)