I. STAGES OF INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONS:
A. Western
Europe and the United States, from 1760 to 1900
B. Russia
and Japan, from 1880s onward
C. Pacific
Rim, Turkey, India, Brazil and other parts of Latin America, from 1960s
onward.
II. FOUR GLOBAL EXAMPLES OF INDUSTRIALISM:
A. Transforming Sugar Plantations in
Cuba
B. Liebigs Beef in Uruguay
“Gelatine, when taken in the dissolved state, is again
converted, in the body, into cellular tissue, membrane and cartilage; that it
may serve for the reproduction of such parts of these tissues as have been
wasted, and for their growth.” (Liebig)
C. Silk Industry in Japan
D. French “mission civilisatrice” in Indochina:
III. The Positive Side of Industrialization:
A. Inventions:
Kindergarten…Friedrich
Froebel, 1837
Medical
Advances…xrays, vaccines,
Printing…Friedrich
Gottlob Koenig and
Andreas Friedrich Bauer, 1812, created a steam powered
printer made it possible to print thousands of copies of a page in a day.
B. Art:
Town Anthem of Yawata, Japan:
Billows of smoke filling the sky
Our steel plant, grandeur unmatched
Yawata, O Yawata, our city!
Wordsworth:
“Steamboats, Viaducts, and
Railways” (1833)
MOTIONS
and Means, on land and sea at war
With
old poetic feeling, not for this,
Shall
ye, by Poets even, be judged amiss!
Nor
shall your presence, howsoe'er it mar
The
loveliness of Nature, prove a bar
To
the Mind's gaining that prophetic sense
Of
future change, that point of vision, whence
May
be discovered what in soul ye are.
In
spite of all that beauty may disown
In
your harsh features, Nature doth embrace
Her
lawful offspring in Man's art; and Time,
Pleased
with your triumphs o'er his brother Space,
Accepts
from your bold hands the proffered crown
Of
hope, and smiles on you with cheer sublime.
The Erie Canal:
Charles Dickens: “exquisite beauty of the opening day, when
light came glancing off from everything; the gliding on at night so
noiselessly, past frowning hills sullen with dark trees and sometimes angry in
one red, burning spot high up, where unseen men lay crouching round a fire; the
shining out of the bright stars undisturbed by any noise of wheels or steam or
any other sound than the limpid rippling of the water as the boat went on; all
these were pure delights.”
IV. THE SAD TRUTH OF GLOBALIZED INDUSTRIALIZATION:
A. Art
“Let us compare
the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting
invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon
himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner
has his eye grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be
arrested….The spectator’s process of association in the view of these images is
indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change. This constitutes the shock
effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened
presence of mind.” (Benjamin, 238).
Marx noted the fetish of the machinery of industrialism:
“Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening
and fructifying human labor, we behold starving and overworking it. The
newfangled sources of wealth, by some weird spell, are turned into sources of
want. The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character. At the same
pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to have become enslaved to other
men or to his own infamy.”
B. New Forms of Discipline:
How
is your life ordered?
In Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the
Prison, Foucault wrote,
“In the correct use of the body, which makes possible a
correct use of time, nothing must remain idle or useless: everything must be
called upon to form the support of the act required.”
You are an
industrial creation….
