MDDM Chapter 44 Notes & Musings

[Dave Monroe]

>From Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The
Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth
Century (Berkeley: U of California P, 1986) ...

"'Annihilation of time and space' was the topos which
the early nineteenth century used to describe the new
situation into which the railroad placed natural space
after depriving it of its hitherto absolute powers. 
Motion was no longer dependent on the conditions of
natural space, but on mechanical power that created
its own new spatiality." (p.10)

"The empirical reality that made the landscape seen
from the train window appear to be 'another world' was
the railroad itself. [...] It was, in other words,
that machine ensemble that interjected itself between
the traveller and the landscape. The traveler
perceived the landscape as it was filtered through the
machine ensemble." (p.24)

"Transport technology is the material base of
potentiality, and equally the material base of the
traveler's space-time perception. [...] If an
essential element of a given socio-cultural space-time
continuum undergoes change, this will affect the
entire structure; our perception of space-time will
also lose its accustomed orientation." (p.36)

http://www.daaq.net/bibliography/b_schivelbusch.html

http://home.uchicago.edu/~jrbeebe/cinema2.html

--- John Bailey <johnbonbailey at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 440: ‘Ley-lines’: s/z noted in the first read-
> through that this term wasn’t coined until the
> 1920s.
>
http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9801&msg=22892&sort=date
> 
> The Rev’s description calls to mind (my mind at
> least) the later railroad expansion to the West,
> and the powerful changes in society, as well as 
> individual psychology, which it effected; as well
> as, perhaps, the internet, the Jesuit Telegraph,
> and other ‘imaginary’ elisions of space. The 
> implication seems to be that the Line, in fact any
> line of this sort, is powerful precisely because it
> allows the mind to reduce physical space to a 
> function of consciousness. Something is always lost
> in this translation, which is why the Line is often
> painted as a negative force.

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - online filing with TurboTax
http://taxes.yahoo.com/