Becoming strangers on a train

Technology and the mode of travel

HUM 201Winter 2005

Day 12

Itinerary today

• Demonstrate how an analysis of the technologies of travel help us understand some of the experiences of travel.

• Remove ourselves from arriving at a specific place and begin contemplating the journey itself.

• In what ways do trains help make us feel “strange”

Add technology to the mix

• Changes how the world “presents itself.”

• Technologies as extensions of the self.– The wheel as an extension of the foot

• Technologies as objects in themselves.– Wheels bring new qualities to bear

• Speed of a train

• Forces us to concentrate on the mode of travel.

Train as a mode of travel• First land-based industrial transportation

– No longer under body power

• Changes the relationship of bodies to landscapes– Tunnels, trestles, and trainbeds– Speed– Panoramic perception

• Symbolic meaning– Progress– Development of Empire

• Changes how we relate to each other– Reading– mixing

Alfred Hart, 1865, Trestle at Newcastle

George Innes, The Lackawanna Valley, 1855

Panoramic vision

• “All view”– Survey of sights or events– A late nineteenth century entertainment

• On the train– Grasp the whole– Lose track of the details– The inverse of “in passing”– Sense of remove from what is viewed

• “Panoramic perception, in contrast to traditional perception, no longer belonged to the same space [place] as the perceived objects: the traveler saw the objects, landscapes, etc. through the apparatus which moved him through the world. That machine and the motion it created became integrated into his visual perception.” [64]

Panorama

• Immersive entertainment• Related to the Diorama

Marquad Worcher, 1814, Thun Switzerland

• How would you paint a view from the train?

• Time-based medium

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The space of travel

• Mixing of classes• New leisure entertainments, such

as reading novels• Relationship to commodities

– Being packaged and shipped

Honore Daumier, Third-class carriage, 1860-63

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