Are we continuing the ‘project’ of the industrial revolution?

I’m reading an excellent novel (name withheld for now, cause there will be a post on it when I’m done), where one section takes place during the industrial revolution and centres around a factory worker in the new production sector of the time.

It’s been well observed that while this was responsible for lifting the average person above the large bracket of being a peasant, it caused many shifts in the human experience and lifestyle. One of the most notable has to do with time. Before the advent of factory work (i.e. shifts) it could be three o’ clock in one village and one-thirty ten miles down the road. Time was approximate, and based on interaction with your immediate neighbours, who all kept the same time. At first factories had no clocks to keep track of time. The end of the day was indicated by a whistle blown by a foreman or supervisor, who was the sole possessor of a pocket watch. What ended up happening is people would show up at different times for work, and in an effort to standardize this, clocks began to appear on factory walls. Eventually, they began appearing in the more populated ‘blue collar’ areas generally, and expanding their presence in our daily lives. This heavily contributed to the focus now placed on knowing the time.

As point of comparison though, have things changed that much? In many ways the factory has become the office. And while the work isn’t as hard, and many people are better off financially (what does this even mean? – a whole other question), the principles are very similar. It is where the vast majority of people (in the west at least) work. It is monotonous, requires interaction with a machine and often involves no personal investment. The similarity lies in how they can both to be said to be numbing. There is a lot written about the alienation of industrialism, and even more discussion of it in the present day. Are they very different kinds of alienation? If anything it may even be worse.

A friend of mine who worked in an office told me he used to put pieces of a sticky paper over things that displayed the time (i.e. the phone, the corner of the computer screen). I asked why, and the answer is obvious, it was to try and avoid seeing it, and hence, hope the day would pass faster. Did not having clocks in the factory assist help the day pass faster? Did it make is seem less endless or moreso? Despite having covered the clocks at work, my friend noted it was still next to impossible to not know the time, as everyone else did. The illusion was short lived, but it did stop him from looking at the clock every five minutes.

Have we really moved beyond factories and production, or is the new ‘machine age’ the same as the old one? The office is in many ways the new factory, and our disconnect maybe hasn’t changed that much. The themes of industrialization have continued in a different form.

Is this also reflected in Postmodernism continuing the ‘project’ of Modernism?

Wed, Apr 2, 2008  Permanent link