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| “Machine Room” by Kristen Bolton |
Christine Rosen, writing at In Character, notes Henry Adams’ awe at witnessing early power generators called dynamos at the Paris Exposition of 1900. Adams later related: “The planet itself seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm’s-length at some vertiginous speed, and barely murmuring.” For Rosen, that earlier age of industrialization when machines “inspired awe by proving capable of doing what man could never do alone” has given way to their quotidian existence. “Our machines not only ease the mundane burdens of daily life (cooking, cleaning, working), but also serve, increasingly, as both our primary source of entertainment and the means for maintaining intimate relationships with others. Henry Adams’s dynamo has been replaced by Everyman’s iPod, and awe has given way to complacence and dependence. Your computer’s e-mail program doesn’t inspire awe; it is more like a dishwasher than a dynamo. Nineteenth-century rhapsodies to the machines that tamed nature, such as the steam engine, have given way to impatience with the machines that don’t immediately indulge our whims.”
In The London Review of Books Rebecca Solit travels in the aftermath of the Gulf oil disaster and reminds us that our machines can be powerfully corrosive, suffocating us in our fantasies of the future. Solit, whose written much about the region in her book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, reflects on the destruction she witnesses: “Mary Douglas said that dirt is matter out of place, and petroleum is out of place everywhere above ground. We design our lives around not seeing it even when we pump it into our cars and burn it, and when we do encounter it, it’s repulsive stuff with a noxious smell, a capacity to cause conflagrations, and a deadly impact. Nature kindly put a huge amount of the earth’s carbon underground, and we have for the past 200 years been putting it back into the atmosphere faster and faster, even though we now know that this is a project for which words like ‘destructive’ are utterly inadequate.”
At the same moment when Adams was inspired by the power of dynamos, machines were producing books with faster and faster efficiency, selling more and more volumes to more and more readers. Without machines there would be no book culture as we know it today. Now, we are at a moment when our books are becoming machines.
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| “Abandoned Factory” by Sabrina Campagna |
Marco Roth reflects on the future of the book by looking out at the bleak post-industrial landscape at N+1 Magazine: “American as you are, deracinated, modern: you have cause to regret so much waste, so many ruins created in the name of “fresh starts” and blank slates. The British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott suggested that the fear of having a breakdown is our way of remembering an earlier breakdown. And so it is with industrialism and the book. American culture has killed so much that once gave pleasure to so many that it seems only logical to expect that books will be next.”
Yet Roth holds out hope that the demise of the published book is not a force beyond our control, but something that takes a certain will to preserve. The story of the book is not already written by the history of our love of machines–awe and reverence turned into quotidian blindness. So as we pick up an iPad or Kindle (or the laptop I’m using right now), as we imagine new book machines of the future, we can’t forget how they are linked in this complex way to the dynamos and oil rigs and the rusted machines of our past. The digital book fulfills some odd and old story where progress and destruction are coupled in an inevitable and unchanging dance.
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