Technology Subjectivity and Space of Concentration - Essay Example

With the invention of the telegraph in 1844, world geography has been rapidly evolving in response to significant changes in the way in which humans interact with each other. Increased communication, served to shorten distance and decrease time. Other developments in transit and other machinery further helped to reduce those distances and factories sprung up bringing large numbers of people together in relatively small areas, shifting the worldview toward a more objective culture that constrained individuality and celebrated the automatic. The response to this led to one of the most violent expressions of individuality recorded in human history as Nazi Germany exalted the Aryan and vilified the Jew. The response to this violence, assisted through the use of yet further technology such as cinema and the exhibition to educate and influence the cultural mind, led the way to the current trend of increasing subjectivity within the Metropolis. Thus, there are numerous complex relationships apparent between the advances in technology to the degree of subjectivity inherent in a particular society as shown through the space of the factory, the concentration camps, the Manhattan Project, the exhibition and the cinema. One of the most important features of capitalism in industries was the capacity to impose a work discipline with uniform and regular patterns while eliminating the possibility of self-organizing (Thompson, 1967). Within the factories, many artisans were brought under the same roof and, more importantly, expected to work within the mills, a radically different production technique from that used previously within the cottage industries. “The nineteenth century demanded the functional specialization of man and his work; this specialization makes one individual incomparable to another …, this specialization makes each man the more directly dependent upon the supplementary activities of all others” (Simmel, 1903). The factory eliminates the need for the individual even while it works to separate the individual into appropriate work classifications for greatest effect, making each worker depend upon the work of another to function. Yet, this “colossal centralization, this agglomeration of three and a half million people on a single spot has multiplied the strength of these three and a half million inhabitants a hundredfold” (Engels, 1987) creating a need to institute some sort of control. Therefore, bringing all these people together also made surveillance possible at the least as a means of negotiation or to pay the wages. In response to this technological wave that threatened to eliminate the individual in favor of the industrial ‘we’, a celebration of the Aryan and German rites and myths grew among the ‘Bourgeois’ culture that was later incorporated into the Nazi cult. The first Facist groups to emerge did so at the outbreak of war in 1914 as individuals gathered together in mutual hatred of the workers’ independent organizations and “foreign” or “Jewish” ideas like Communism, Marxism and Liberalism. The Nazis isolated and oppressed the Jewish population by targeting and confiscating Jewish property and issuing special identity cards that separated the Jews from the rest of the population. Often forced into inescapable ghettos, Jewish people were shot at directly or shipped away to concentration camps wherein they were sorted into the fit and unfit. Those considered fit were used like machinery for medical experiments or work gangs of various types. Those classified as unfit were exterminated immediately. The terror inflicted on the people contained within these camps served to keep them obedient and submissive. Within this severe environment, individuality was not only shunned, but actively feared as it served to call attention to the one and created a prime target for the next display of violence. To counter the Nazi threat, American history yields the Manhattan Project, a huge effort to develop and manufacture the most destructive and dangerous weapons in the history of humankind, the results being the Atomic bombs “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” which were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively, placing a gruesome exclamation point on the end of World War II. This project was so large it developed a culture all its own, at one time employing more than 125,000 people and secretly executed in vast sites that were hidden in mountain or desert locations. To maintain the secrecy required, a number of techniques were employed to facilitate communication, including the invention, manipulation and transformation of spoken, written and visual languages (Atomic Spaces, 1997). The consequent physical landscapes manufactured through this project reflected a complex and evolving ideology, blending corporate capitalism, government social management and military codes of coercion and obedience into a new sort of alternative culture (Atomic Spaces, 1997). Throughout this history, though, exhibitions have served as doorways of knowledge about history and technology through disciplines as varied as geology, natural history, archaeology, anthropology and the latest branches of geography. In the words of Prince Albert at the 1851 World Fair, exhibitions provide “a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived in this great task, and a new starting point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions.” By providing such public demonstrations, individuals are encouraged to expand their own ideas, introducing an aspect of the subjective back into the culture. “As members of a great metropolis, to think of the world at large, we may lay the foundation for a pattern of life which would have an enormous impact in times to come” (Mumford, 1970). Thus, the exhibition both serves to introduce subjectivity back into the culture as well as to help define collective cultural identity. Also thanks to advances in technology, cinema emerged as an art and literary form beginning in the 1910s that has since proven to provide powerful reflections of society that lay threadbare the identity, societal institutions and political power struggles that remain as constructed entities in the Metropolis. The feeling of eeriness inherent in the darkened theatre demands the cinemagoer to fill silences and darkness with their own imagination, bringing their own take on anxiety into the mix of experience and playing on the medium’s subjective nature. While “the presence of the original [was] the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity,” in the cinema “the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility” (Benjamin, 1969). The cinema also provided one of a few acceptable spaces for women in the public sphere, contributing to an increase in their political and social activity. From the spread of the cottage industries and the slow-moving systems that were dependent upon horse and cart or sailing ship to deliver people, goods and messages through the objectifying age of the industrial revolution to the present day introduction of the subjective into the Metropolis, technology has driven change and change has driven technology. These are made possible through the creation of the factory, exhibition and cinema as gathering places within which ideas can be shared, experienced and expanded as opposed to other institutions such as the concentration camp within which complete objectivity ruled and no progress was possible. References Benjamin, Walter. (1969). Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books. Engels, Friedrich. (1987). The Condition of the Working Class in England. New York: Penguin Books. Hales, Peter Bacon. (1997). Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project. University of Illinois Press. Mumford, Lewis. (1970). The Culture of Cities. New York: Harvest Books. Simmel, George. (1903). The Metropolis and Mental Life. New York: Free Press. Thompson, E.P. (1967). Time Work-discipline and industrial capitalism Past and Present. Read More