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The Second Industrial Revolution

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The Second Industrial Revolution CHAPTER THREE THE SECOND INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION Andreas Killen You can reproduce the identity of a woman? She will be a thousand times more identical to herself . than she is in her own person! (Villiers de l’Isle-Adam 1886) riting in 1913, on the eve of the Great War, the Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin Wcelebrated the civilizing and hygienic value of sports. In the eyes of Coubertin, the prime mover behind the revival of the Olympic Games in 1896, sports represented an antidote to what he called “the universal neurosis of modern life,” a remedy for the degeneration and loss of vitality that affl icted contemporary mankind. Caught up in the mechanical routines of the modern world, modern individuals suffered from a depletion of energy. Against this, he argued, sports served as the best possible means of restoring “virility.” Moreover its virtues went far beyond the purely physical, for sports also represented an exemplary “psychic instrument” and means of will-training (Nye 1982). In his other writings, Coubertin wove numerous variations on this theme, stress- ing the benefi ts of a kind of identifi cation with the machine. He extolled, for instance, the possibilities of self-knowledge to be gained through studying fi lm footage of the body performing athletic feats. Close study of the “mechanical fi gure,” he argued, yielded important insights into the capacities and limits of the “physiological ensemble.” Knowledge of the factors of the “bodily economy” or its “positive” or “negative coeffi cient” conferred on the individual signifi cant advantages not just in the arena of sports but – given the “fertile instability of modern society” – in the struggle for success in all arenas (de Coubertin 1930). Coubertin’s search for a “social therapeutic” to offset a perceived process of decline, as well as his mobilization of technical resources and metaphors, were widely echoed at the turn of the century. In the memoir she published in 1910, New York doctor Margaret Cleaves addressed the condition of universal neurosis that Coubertin diagnosed from a medical standpoint. She described the class of invalids that made up the majority of her clientele as suffering from a peculiar condition of 45 — Andreas Killen — nervous exhaustion. Cleaves’ Autobiography of a Neurasthene identifi ed its author as one of these invalids and provided a meticulous record of the symptoms associ- ated with this condition. Along with the periodic “electrical storms” such invalids experienced in their nerves, she singled out as the major hallmark of this condition the fact that it brought them “constantly face to face with life’s most interesting problem, the conservation of energy.” In her recourse to such language, Cleaves placed this disease picture within a larger set of scientifi c, medical, and social themes that had emerged over the second half of the nineteenth century. Among these were the intense demands made on the human organism by new technologies and new types of physical and mental labor, as well as by the sheer volume and multiplicity of stimuli unleashed by the modern world. But Cleaves’ account made clear that hovering over all these considerations was the problem of energy, its conservation and loss – nothing less than the great thermodynamic principle that had, since its fi rst enunciation in the 1840s, moved to the center of scientifi c, social scientifi c, and political thinking. In the body and mind of the neurasthenic the laws of this abstract principle were made vividly manifest. Tellingly, the most common treatment Cleaves prescribed for this condition was electricity. From around 1870 onward, accounts such as Cleaves’ multiplied across the industrial world, documenting the anxieties produced by accelerated social change. If it was true that thermodynamics, as Cleaves implied, represented a form of destiny, then this fact had ramifi cations not just for individuals but for contemporary civilization as a whole. The trials of the nerve invalid represented an extreme form of the extreme fatigue that plagued the modern industrial laborer and that had accordingly become the object of investigation by teams of scientists who strove to unravel the enigmas of the relation between work and effi ciency. Central to these investigations was a novel image of the human body as a motor or thermodynamic system, traversed by fl ows of energy and marked by new possibilities of heightened output but also of its inverse, pathological exhaustion or nervous breakdown. It became one of the major enterprises of late nineteenth-century society to unlock these possibilities, while at the same time establishing a new scientifi c understanding of the limits of the body and corresponding norms of productivity. The metaphor of body as machine thus linked the problems experienced by the solitary nerve invalid with those associated with the fatigued industrial worker. Both were comprehended within this new model, a model that, although it bore the distinct imprint of processes of social and industrial transformation fi rst experienced in the Western world, made its impact felt everywhere these changes were occurring. The modernization process embarked upon in post-Meiji Japan brought with it a new awareness of the “civilizational disorder” neurasthenia, with accounts of this disorder multiplying especially after the 1904–5 war with Russia (Hill 2009). As elsewhere, Japanese writers seized upon the diagnosis neurasthenia as a heuristic by means of which to assess the human costs of accelerated social change. At the same time, in its search for a “social therapeutic” Japanese society turned to new discourses of bodily performance and effi ciency, notably those imported from the United States under the rubric of “scientifi c management.” (Takehiko 2002) What Bayly (2004) calls the “great acceleration” that marked the fi n de siècle included a process of increasing standardization of body practices and forms of bodily comportment across the globe. As fewer parts of the earth remained untouched 46 — The second industrial revolution — by Western expansion, new value orientations and norms of health and performance became part of the habitus of increasing numbers of people around the world. This period served as incubator of many aspects of the “modernity” that would encom- pass the earth, and this was true not least in the realm of body practice. New scien- tifi c forms of medicine emerged to combat age-old maladies as well as more recent “diseases of civilization”; at the same time, a range of techniques of human improve- ment and engineering – time-and-motion studies, scientifi c management, gymnastics – emerged as features of a concerted strategy designed to break the hold of traditional attitudes toward work, performance, and health. Through the medium of popular hygiene manuals, scientifi c exhibits, social insurance plans, and sports events, these discourses were transmitted to ever-broader sectors of the public, who under their infl uence learned to scrutinize themselves in new ways. Encompassing a wide range of practices with regards to the body, modernity as such became both a descriptive and a normative term laden with a host of assump- tions concerning effi ciency, productivity, and health. This normative dimension underlying Western attitudes toward the body and efforts to make it commensurate with the demands of the modern age has been treated skeptically in recent historio- graphy. There are good reasons for doing so: as Joseph Conrad ironically noted, the civilizing mission that accompanied the late nineteenth-century conquest of Africa smashed one set of idols only to set up another, no less magical belief system based on “the devotion to effi ciency.” (Conrad 1990: 4) The notions of traditionalism or backwardness against which the apostles of effi ciency sought to do battle – laziness, idleness, pre-modern time consciousness – were in many respects discursive con- structs, whose ritual invocation served to fl atter industrializing societies about the degree to which they had broken with the pre-modern past and with obsolete atti- tudes toward work and time. Such invocations became themselves part of a set of conventions according to which modern individuals and societies measured their distance from geographic and racial others, as well as from their own recent past (Adas 1989: 241; Bayly, 2004: 80). Implicit in the views of Coubertin was the belief that close knowledge of the “physiological ensemble” conferred a kind of moral superiority on more advanced societies. Such judgments became part of a larger system of cultural exchanges: as Indians once considered incorrigibly lazy by their British masters learned to adapt to the disciplines of work, they internalized the view of the African as archetypal “lazy native.” (Adas 1989: 270) Yet tendentious as they undoubtedly were, these emerging bodily and perceptual norms were also highly productive: they opened a new discursive horizon against which it became possible to imagine the self differently, and thus to modify it in accordance with infl uential new ideals of behavior and performance. This was, to be sure, always a fragile achievement, as accounts like that of Cleaves attested. In the illness narratives associated with neurasthenia, modern society was confronted by an ambivalent specter, a protest against the ideology of effi ciency. On the one hand, such maladies served as a stimulus to personal transformation, to new ideals of health and “care of the self.” In this respect the fi n-de-siècle anxiety about illness and loss of vitality belongs to the longue durée of modern self-formation that extended back to the Enlightenment, and was now recast in the language of energy, effi ciency, and hygiene (Sarasin 2001). On the other hand, such narratives revealed the limits of that project. In moments of extreme personal or social crisis, the process 47 — Andreas Killen — of self-formation could suddenly and disturbingly break down: the outer layers of the new self stripped away to reveal a human organism permeated both by remnants of its atavistic, pre-modern past or, conversely, by apparatus-like elements.
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