Idle Threats by Andrew Lyndon Knighton

Author:Andrew Lyndon Knighton [Knighton, Andrew Lyndon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Labor, General, Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9780814789391
Google: 7CcVCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2012-10-22T04:24:31+00:00

Lines of Productiveness

Wrapping western spaces in an increasingly dense meshwork, the railroad—of “great value as a sort of yard-stick and surveyor’s line”—was crucial both in effectuating the demographic saturation of the West and in accomplishing the symbolic and real calibration of activity to the standards of productivity. Its power to translate “idle” space into a theater of production made it a persistent icon in nineteenth-century discourse regarding idleness and industry, in which it serves as both the harbinger of a budding, industrious modernity and as the ruination of those benefits associated with free activity and appropriation. Charles Lummis captured much of this in his A Tramp Across the Continent, in which he documents a walking tour of 3,507 miles from Ohio to California; there, he justifies his exploit in terms that echo typical period concerns about hurry, gain, and activity: “railroads and Pullmans were invented to help us hurry through life and miss most of the pleasure of it—and most of the profit, too, except of that jingling, only half-satisfying sort which can be footed up in the ledger.”140

In contrast to Lummis’s complaint about the subjection of movement to hurry and profit, Emerson’s more positive evaluation of the railroad turns precisely on its ability to make idle spaces pictorially productive by improving upon their inherent character. “In an uneven country the railroad is a fine object in the making,” he argues. “It has introduced a multitude of picturesque traits into our pastoral scenery. The tunneling of mountains, the bridging of streams, the bold mole carried out into a broad silent meadow, silent and unvisited by any but its own neighbors since the planting of the region.”141 But this is far more than an aesthetic matter, as Emerson’s imagery of industrious exertion—all this tunneling, bridging, and burrowing like a mole—is subsequently amplified. He goes on to invoke the moil of “gangs of laborers” and “the energy with which they strain at their tasks; the cries of the overseer or boss.” Under that urging is transformed “the character of the work itself, which so violates and revolutionizes the primal and immemorial forms of nature.”142 Like Irving’s bees, bringing with them the prospect of ruthless commercial enterprise, the arrival of the iron horse is thus accompanied by an industrious model of work and exertion. For Emerson, the work of railroad expansion is fitted not only with the halter of alienated submission to “the overseer or boss,” but also according to the revolutionary “violation” of nature’s order. As the railroad translates idle western space into an abstractly rationalized terrain, it proceeds hand in hand with the translation of free activity into alienated “work.” It thereby both metaphorically and literally represents the triumph of capitalized labor over idleness, of the wage regime over free activity.

The scene described by Emerson fuses the industrial and the corporeal, the mechanical and the human; it coincides with the threading together of physical and social energies under the rubric of “work,” as diagnosed by Deleuze and Guattari: “The wage regime had as its correlate a mechanics of force.

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