IVIV (12): 195-197

[alice wellintown]

How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackening Church appalls
And the hapless Soldiers sigh,
Runs in blood down Palace walls.
                            William Blake

That William Blakes makes his appearence in AtD should not surprize
us. There will be blood.

GR opens with images of the second industrial revolution--England.
Coal, iron, and, steam and all that
accompanied the machine.

Paleotechnic industry arose out of the breakdown of European society
and carried the process of disruption to a finish. There was a sharp
shift in interest from life values to pecuniary values: work was no
longer a necessary part of living:
it became an all-important end… This second revolution multiplied,
vulgarized, and spread the methods and goods produced by the first:
above all, it was directed towards the quantification of life, and its
success could be gauged only in terms of the multiplication table
(Mumford).

A landless traditionless proletariat was put to work in these new industries—a
steady unremitting toil.


The phase one here defined as paleotechnic reached its highest point,
in terms of its own concepts and ends, in England in the middle of the
nineteenth century: its cock-crow of triumph was the great industrial
exhibition in the new Crystal Palace at Hyde Park in 1851: the first
World Exposition.

We (whenever I use this pronoun one may assume that the antecedent
noun is Queen Elizabeth I) are dealing with a technical complex that
cannot be strictly placed within a time belt: but if one takes 1700 as
a beginning, 1870 as the high point
of the upward curve, and 1900 as the start of an accelerating downward
movement, one will have a sufficiently close approximation to fact.

1900? Oh Henry! Henry Adams, 1900, acceleration history.

Carboniferous Capitalism
The great shift in population and industry that took place in the
eighteenth century was due to the introduction of coal as a source of
mechanical power, to the use of new means of making that power
effective—the steam engine—and to new methods of smelting and working
up iron. Out of this coal and iron complex, a new civilization
developed. Now, the sudden accession of capital in the form of these
vast coal fields put mankind in a fever of exploitation: coal and iron
were the pivots upon which the other functions of society revolved. …A
series of rushes (get rich quick), gold, copper, diamond, petroleum.
The nineteenth century town became in effect—and
indeed in appearance—an extension of the coal mine.

Dixon on a coal skiff haunted by ghosts whose bodies are murdered
Against the Day. The texts, they believe in ghosts who cross out of
profane time or history.


After Watt perfected the steam engine, the technical history of the
next hundred years was directly or indirectly the history of steam.
…The steam engine tended towards monopoly and concentration. Wind and
waterpower were free; but coal was expensive and the steam engine
itself was a costly investment; so too, were the machines that it
turned. Twenty-four hour work, which characterized the mine and the
blast furnace, now came into other industries. The steam engine became
the pacemaker. If machines can work all day, why not a man or a woman
or a child?

Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times THEY are a Changing.

Since the steam engine requires constant care on the part of the
stoker and engineer, steam power was more efficient in large units.
…The steam engine fostered a tendency towards large industrial plants
already present in the subdivision of the manufacturing process. Great
size, forced by the nature of the steam engine, became in turn a
symbol of efficiency. Bigger was another way of
saying better…. With the big steam engine, the big factory, the big
bonanza farm,  the big blast furnace, efficiency was supposed to exist
in direct ratio to size.

Speed kills and size matter ializes man. Marx? I prefer the dumb one.
He look so pretty on my BIG screen.

With the integration of the railroad system and the growth of
international markets, populations tended to heap up in the great
terminal cities. The main line express services tended to further this
concentration and the feeder lines and cross country services ran
down, died out, or were deliberately extirpated: to travel across the
country it was often necessary to go twice the distance
through the central town and back again, hairpinwise.

The Visible Hand--Managerial Capitalism & the Railroads, Chandler

Blood and Iron
Iron and coal dominated the paleotechnic period. Their color spread
everywhere from grey to black: the black boots, the black hats, the
black coach or carriage, the black iron frame of the hearth, the black
cooking pots, and pans and stoves. Mourning ? Protective coloration?
Was it mere depression of the senses? Some Puritan fascination with
morbid Doom? No matter what the origianl color of the paleotechnic
milieu might be, it was soon reduced, by reason of the soot and
cynders that accompanied its activities, to its characteristic tones,
grey, dirty brown, black.
The center of the new industrialism in England was appropriately
called the Black Country.

Iron became the universal material. One went to sleep in an iron bed
and washed one’s face in an iron washbowl: and sat on an iron
locomotive and drove to the city on iron rails, passing over an iron
bridge and arriving at an iron-covered rail station…. In the most
typical of Victorian utopias, that of J.S. Buckingham, the ideal city
is built almost entirely of iron. In the very midst of celebrating the
triumphs of peace and internationalism in 1851, the paleotechnic
regime was preparing for a series of more lethal wars in
which, as a result of modern methods of production and transport
entire nations would finally become involved: the American Civil War,
the Franco-Prussian War, most deadly and vicious of all, the world
war…. Bloodshed kept pace with iron production: in essence, the entire
paleotechnic period was ruled, from the beginning to end, by the
policy of blood and iron. Its brutal contempt for life was rivaled by
the almost priestly ritual it developed in preparation for inflicting
death. Its “peace” was indeed the peace that passeth understanding:
what was it but latent war?

Destruction of the Environment
 The first mark of paleotechnic industry was pollution of the air. For
all its boasts of improvement, the steam engine was only ten percent
efficient: ninety percent of the heat created escaped in radiation,
and the good part of the fuel went up the flue. Smoke increased the
thickness of London’s natural fog. In this paleotechnic world the
realities were money, prices, capital, share: the
environment itself, like most of human existence, was treated as an
abstraction. Air and sunlight, because of their deplorable lack of
value in exchange, had no reality at all. Manufacturers proudly
displayed factories with no windows as examples of the excellent
gas-lighting systems which served as a substitute for then sun!
Disease of dirt and disease of darkness flourished: small-pox, typhus,
typhoid, rickets, tuberculosis. Above all, the psychological and
social stimulus derived from cultivating numerous different
occupations and different modes of thought and living disappeared.
Result:  an insecure industry, a lop-sided social life, an
impoverishment of intellectual resources, and a physically depleted
environment.

The Degradation of the Worker
Kant’s doctrine, that every human being should be treated as an end,
not as a means, was formulated precisely at the moment when mechanical
industry had begun to treat the worker solely as a means---a means to
cheaper mechanical production. Human beings were dealt with in the
same spirit of brutality as the landscape: labor was a resource to be
exploited, to be mined, to be exhausted, and finally discarded. The
poor propagated like flies, reached industrial maturity—ten to twelve
years of age---promptly, served their term in the mills and mines, and
died inexpensively.  Reduced to cog, the new worker could not survive
but as an extension of the machine.

The Starvation of Life
Add to the lack of light a lack of color, except for the
advertisements on hoarding, the prevailing tones were dingy ones: in a
murky atmosphere even the shadows lose their rich ultramarine or
violet colors. The rhythm of movement disappeared: within the factory
the quick staccato of the machine displaced the organic rhythms,
measured to song, that characterized the old workshop, as Bucher
has pointed out: while the dejected and outcast shuffled along the
streets in Cities of Dreadful Night, and the sharp athletic movements
of the sword dances and the morris dances disappeared in the surviving
dances of the working classes. Sex, above all, was starved and
degraded in this environment. Sex had no industrial value. Starvation
of the senses and starvation of the mind was
universal.

The Hammerby Carl Sandburg

I have seen
The old gods go
And the new gods come.

Day by day
And year by year
The idols fall
And the idols rise.

Today
I worship the hammer.