Schivelbusch Reading Notes
Mobility’s Association with an Industrial Machine: Trains
Chapter Four (Panoramic Travel):
The central thesis—the destination?—of Schivelbusch’s book is in chapter four, in which he develops the idea of panoramic vision. Imprisoned in their train compartments, European rail travelers found their vision deadened by the overstimulation the foreground supplied (close up, everything blurs at high enough speeds), and the spectator loses the ability to make sharp distinctions between disparate objects, resulting in what Schivelbusch dubbed panoramic vision. He asserts that panoramic perception, in contrast to traditional perception, no longer belonged to the same space as the perceived objects: the traveler saw the objects, landscapes, etc. through the apparatus which moved him through the world. He claims other roughly contemporary technologies, various optical devices and the like, set themselves up as affordable substitutes for the still-expensive panoramic experience of rail travel, yet he never seriously addresses, or indeed more than tangentially mentions, the other major technology that mediated perception through an apparatus: photography and ultimately film. He is concerned only with the effects of the railroad on perception, and thus misses, or refuses to see, the other train (i.e., filmic/ photographic perception) running on tracks parallel to his own story, which is especially unfortunate because it is moving in the same direction (modernity), and at more or less the same speed, so it should have been in clear focus. Nevertheless, Schivelbusch offers a number of insights on the experience of train travel, suggesting that the linkage in Europe between rail journeys and reading (perhaps as strong, in its own way, as that between the American movie theater and popcorn) was a direct result of the disorienting and ultimately deadening effects of panoramic perception on travelers, as well as a result of the unique space of European trains.
Chapter Four (Panoramic Travel):
The central thesis—the destination?—of Schivelbusch’s book is in chapter four, in which he develops the idea of panoramic vision. Imprisoned in their train compartments, European rail travelers found their vision deadened by the overstimulation the foreground supplied (close up, everything blurs at high enough speeds), and the spectator loses the ability to make sharp distinctions between disparate objects, resulting in what Schivelbusch dubbed panoramic vision. He asserts that panoramic perception, in contrast to traditional perception, no longer belonged to the same space as the perceived objects: the traveler saw the objects, landscapes, etc. through the apparatus which moved him through the world. He claims other roughly contemporary technologies, various optical devices and the like, set themselves up as affordable substitutes for the still-expensive panoramic experience of rail travel, yet he never seriously addresses, or indeed more than tangentially mentions, the other major technology that mediated perception through an apparatus: photography and ultimately film. He is concerned only with the effects of the railroad on perception, and thus misses, or refuses to see, the other train (i.e., filmic/ photographic perception) running on tracks parallel to his own story, which is especially unfortunate because it is moving in the same direction (modernity), and at more or less the same speed, so it should have been in clear focus. Nevertheless, Schivelbusch offers a number of insights on the experience of train travel, suggesting that the linkage in Europe between rail journeys and reading (perhaps as strong, in its own way, as that between the American movie theater and popcorn) was a direct result of the disorienting and ultimately deadening effects of panoramic perception on travelers, as well as a result of the unique space of European trains.