BAGDContext CSM

Karen and me have quite a big collection of vintage silk squares…

We started collecting these in the early 1990s when they were deeply unfashionable. We buy and sell them from the store in Folkestone. Karen recently found this terrific Hermes scarf with steam engines on it – perfect for a blog post.

Hermes are world famous for their handbags and silk squares.

The company was established in 19C Paris and were harness makers for most of their history. In 1937, they began to print silk squares. The timing of this wasn’t accidental.

The business opportunity of producing silk squares was founded on the intersection of several cultural trends. I’ll describe these briefly…

Women

The first thing to say is that it might be tempting to think of  the printed headscarf as a form of repressive head-covering. This would be a mistake. In its 20C form, the printed silk square is specifically associated with the social and sexual emancipation of women.

In cultural terms, the modern scarf devolves from the traditions of wearing military favours and of the commemorative handkerchief. We are all familiar with the idea, in chivalry for example, of knights wearing coloured tokens of favour. More recently, there were commemorative printed cotton handkerchiefs from the Napoleonic military period.

A short detour…

One of the groups of material we have in our collection are propaganda scarves made during WW2. These were made for exchange between sweethearts and cover all the major communities and services in London. These include for the Army, the Royal Navy and the Royal Air-Force, the Free-French, and the Americans. We also have various Home-Front themed scarves that commemorate the general contribution of civilians to Total War.

Now, back to the main story…

I’ve already posted about various social anxieties that emerged, at the end of the 19C, as a consequence of the development of industrial capitalism. Not least of these was the discovery of female sexuality! Of course, I don’t mean that female sexuality didn’t exist before the end of the 19C; but the normative conventions that defined female sexuality for most of the 19C were much more constrained. In addition and as I’ve mentioned before, the clinic and the prison were used to coerce those women who refused to conform to the prevailing conventions of family, hearth and home.

Anyway, at the end of the 19C women began to re- define their sexuality in a multitude of different ways. Cigarette smoking and bicycle riding were eagerly adopted as cultural signifiers of female liberation.

In this context, the scarf was both a practical and exotic accessory.

Hair

This was especially the case after the development, by Karl Nessler (Nestle), of the “permanent wave” as a widely available hair styling technique. From the beginning of the 20C onwards, women were able to style their hair in a semi-permanent way. Correctly looked after, the hair could remain styled for about a week. The only problem was that, if the hair got wet or windswept, the style would be lost.

In the circumstances, it was entirely appropriate that the printed silk square should emerge as a convenient and practical adjunct to maintaining the permanent wave. The square was quickly integrated into the fashion system after WW1.

Movement and Modernity

WW1 marked a sharp acceleration in the machine-ensemble of modern life. Motor cars, ocean liners, and aircraft became more visible . Each of these machines quickly became identified as an exemplar of modernity through a combination of technology and speed.

It wasn’t surprising that women should join this adventure.

Glamour and Luxury

It turned out that hardly anything was as glamorous as a dynamic woman. It wasn’t surprising that hermes should be at the forefront of producing hand-luggage and scarves to serve this emerging market.

The Scarf

So, the headscarf became associated with a category of celebrity female adventurer. The fashion semiotics of the scarf combined glamour, emancipation and modernity to positive effect.

The steam scarf by Hermes is a design by Philippe Ledoux, probably in the 1960s. The theme of the steam engine fits with the rediscovery, during the 1960s, of 19C culture and technology.

As usual, the design includes a number of related pictorial and typographic elements. The integration of these elements into a coherent and stylish whole is the mark of a great design.

La Bete Humaine is a story by the French writer, Emile Zola, published in 1890. The book has been turned into a film on several occasions. Notably, by Jean Renoir in 1938. A number of themes int he book and film are interesting – not least the overbearing presence, both mechanical and systemic, of the railway…

The main characters of the story are Roubaud, the deputy station master at Le Havre, his wife Séverine, and Jacques Lantier. Lantier is an engine driver on the line and the “human beast” of the title. He has a hereditary madness and has, several times in his life, wanted to murder women. The story is part of the Rougon-Macquart series of novels.

Animal Instincts

The explicit reference to animal instincts in the title would have been especially upsetting to the refined sensibilities of the 19C. Polite society considered its behaviour to be governed by moral sentiments defined by the moral absolutes of religious belief. In this context, it was upsetting for polite society to have the animal instincts of its conventional behaviour progressively laid bare by the discoveries of science and psychology.

The major figures in this story are Darwin, Charcot and Freud.

Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” and “Theory of Evolution” debunked the idea that human beings are a special and separate part of the natural world. This insight has always been a problem for religious creationists. Accordingly, human behaviour could be described entirely in the terms usually applied to the physical appetites of the animal kingdom. These appetites have nearly always chosen so as to describe nature as “red in tooth-and-claw.” No room for empathy there then.

Moral sentiments, understood as the defining characteristic of an elevated human sensibility, were subsequently exposed as a convenient veil that obscured the more obviously cynical and venal parts of human interaction.

Charcot (the “inventor” of psychology) applied systematic medical investigation, diagnosis, and therapy, to patients who displayed “abnormal” behavior. Charcot was determined to link psychology and neurological disorder to an anatomically specific and identifiable (and therefore curable) pathology.

Interestingly, Charcot was house doctor at the Salpetriere Hospital, Paris. This hospital had originally been a gun-poweder factory and prison. It became the women’s prison in Paris. In practical terms this meant that most of its inmates were women whose social behaviour and sexuality were misaligned with prevailing norms.

The medical, psychological and traumatic therapeutic treatments pioneered at the hospital were entirely consistent with medicine’s normative functions as described by Michel Foucault.

Freud

By the end of the 19C, Freud had begun to understand that the link between psychological neurosis and anatomical pathology (as desired by Charcot) could not be substantiated. Even today, it is incredibly difficult to link particular behavioural issues with specific forms of brain trauma. Psychology has a long and terrible history of attempting to map the brain. Inevitably, this leads to surgical intervention as a means to modify problematic behaviour. Labotomy, anyone?

In the circumstances, Freud conceptualised the possibility of a hidden subconscious pathology that underpinned neuroses. This had to be revealed, or drawn out, through therapeutic interrogation and over a long period. This was called psychoanalysis.

The association between animal instinct and subconscious desire, within the context of late 19C polite society, is what Zola is investigating. Of course, what Zola is describing is also a widespread political and social anxiety about inconsistent forms of behaviour.

Man and Machine (the engine driver)

The building-blocks of industrial capitalism are money, people and machinery. These resources are deployed according to efficient and economical principles of the division, specialisation, and integration of labour. The increasing mechanisation of industrial process raised efficiency by increasing speed. In the circumstances, the cadence of the human operative was increasingly defined by the machine.

The engine driver became an exemplar of a new kind of human-mechanical interface. The particular responsibilities attaching to the “correct” workings of the railway locomotive were mythologised in the tragedy of Casey Jones.

Weirdly, when a steam engine is being driven “hard” the whistle can be mistaken for a woman screaming…

Industry Economy and Society

The productive potential of the industrial worker became leveraged up through the association of money and engineering. This was a cause of some anxiety to political and social elites at the end of the 19C. The aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war provided, for  France, a period of introspection and soul-searching. The received wisdom was that French military defeat had been a consequence of moral delinquency and physical enfeeblement of French society. Nothing to do with poor military leadership then

Ideas from political-economy and Darwinism were therefore combined into a sociology based on the Nietzschean doctrine of relentless struggle (if it doesn’t kill you; it makes you stronger). The evident truth of this perception was increasingly identified in the widespread debauchery and criminality of the underclass.

Sex-Crime and Murder

It was entirely appropriate that, against this background of generalised anxiety, the widespread interest in criminality  should express itself  in the media reporting of “faits divers.”

The most extreme (and fascinating) of these crimes has always been the brutal and violent murder of young women. Often, underscored by a sexual motive. Sadly, there has always seemed to be a lot of that about. In Britain we have long been obsessed with the unsolved “Jack the Ripper” mysteries. Co-incidentally, these murders occurred almost at the same time as Zola was writing his novel…

A bit later, the post-impressionist artist, Walter Sickert, began painting a series of “kitchen-sink” pictures of squalid bed-sits in Camden. These pictures purport to show the victim of a brutal murder…

For better or worse, these kinds of story, and the visual culture (paintings, engravings and photographs) of their presentation became a fully integrated element of the developing spectacular of late 19C society.

Jean Renoir

It was entirely appropriate that the French film director should revisit Zola’s themes during the 1930s. The aftermath of WW1 saw the emergence, across Europe, of popular-front politics. In many cases, the policy choices of these mass-mouvements were defined in relation to the social-darwinist anxieties mentioned above.

The poster for Renoir’s film recasts the protagonists in melodrama where the woman is hysterical (mad) with desire (Charcot and Freud again) and the man’s physical supremacy multiplied by mechanical power and exacerbated  by the railway engine. You can see all this in the poster image, above.

The speeding train is unstoppable, like the tragic narrative of these protagonists.

Mechanical and Model Societies

In conclusion, its worth noting that the moral  benefits of industrialisation, mechanisation, and automation, are often called into question. Along with the usual problems of alienation, the structures of industrial specialisations are thought to atomise indiduals and to reduce empathetic feeling.

Feelings of moral separation, and superiority, are the first signs of bureaucratic despotism. In the end, the path to utopia will not be automated. Nor will it run on rails…

The implicit message of Zola and Renoir is that the machine, by its scale and power, is both beautiful and brutal…

“Train d’enfer” is a French expression that is a little difficult to translate into English. You might think it has something to do with railways; but actually and nowadays, it is more often used to describe a kind of relentless momentum and dynamic movement.

For example, you could describe a midfield diamond formation in football as imposing this kind of rhythm on a game. In cycling a breakaway effort, leading from the front, might also be described in these terms.

But the expression is obviously linked to railways and steam locomotives. I don’t think the expression has anything to do with runaway trains. It’s more to do with the huge efforts of steam powered speed records.

Don’t forget that, in the big steam express locomotives of the mid 20C, the engine was powered by coal. The coal had to be endlessly shovelled from tender to fire-box. This was exhausting work.

I think the expression comes from the combination of mechanical speed and human effort. The association with hell fires comes from the glow of the furnace reflected in the frantic movements of the fireman.

The poster, above, by the Irish artist, William Orpen, gives a very good impression of this dramatic scene.

The expression is so dramatic and meaningful that it has been used several times a film title.

I recently posted about Marcel Proust (the insomniac hypercondriac author) and his appreciation of railway timetables. Of course, Proust would never have boarded an actual train for fear of railway trauma…

This wasn’t quite as ridiculous as it sounds; railway collisions were a frequent occurrence in the early 19th century. The fatal association between the railway and danger was established from the first. This was exemplified through the fatal injury to the MP, William Huskisson, at the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester railway in 1830.

Exacerbating the problem, in the first instance, was the fact that railway cars were flimsy, wooden structures with no protection for the occupants. So, the railway journey was always linked to excited feelings of anxiety. Nowadays, the railways are amongst the safest forms of mass transportation. Nevertheless, these feelings of excitement and anxiety persist.

The first full length medical study of railway trauma was John Eric Erichsen’s classic book, “On Railway and Other Injuries of the Nervous System.”

Erichsen observed that those most likely to be injured in a railway crash were those sitting with their backs to the acceleration. This is the same injury mechanism found in whiplash.

Railway accidents are now known to cause “post-traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD) and other psychosomatic symptoms in addition to physical trauma.

The nature of symptoms caused by “railway spine” was hotly debated in the late 19th century, notably at the meetings of the (Austrian) Imperial Society of Physicians in Vienna, 1886.

Germany’s leading neurologist, Hermann Oppenheim, claimed that all railway spine symptoms were due to physical damage to the spine or brain, whereas his French and British colleagues, notably Jean-Martin Charcot and Herbert Page, insisted that some symptoms could be caused by hysteria (now known as conversion disorder).

The great doctor, Sigmund Freud, identified several kinds of neuroses that devolved from the railway. These were generally neurological manifestations that followed the physical trauma described above.

The main types of 19C trauma were “railway spine” (whiplash injury to the nervous system and paralysis) and “railway brain” (neurological agitation and psychosis).  Both of these were results of an association between the physical agitations of movement and the psychological anxieties attaching to that movement. Freud later described these mechanical agitations in terms of a “model of shock” and, famously, used a similar model to describe male sexual development.

The anxieties attaching to the railway were heightened, experientially and sensationally, by the evident mechanical power of the engine and the manifest speed of travel. The feelings associated to carried forward were exciting, pleasurable and discomfiting for both men and women.

It’s not difficult to understand how, for Freudians, the railway became a powerful metaphor for the traumas attaching to sexual desire….and the feelings of shock and guilt that attach to this activity.

The problem of human agency, implicit in the diagnosis of this “normal” behaviour, is a characteristic of the systems and structures of modern life. These may be economic, social and political. For Freud, especially, the practical terms of human agency were always derived from sexual desire.

The link between medicine, therapy, doctors and trains is not as far-fetched as it may seem. Alain Corbin has described the origins of the aquatic therapy of sea-bathing in explicitly sexualised terms. The historical development of the seaside  “pleasure garden” and fun fair were attempts to conjure an architecture and social space devoted to a therapeutic engagement with pleasure.

The early fair ground rides (roller coasters especially) provided for a more exhilarating version of the railway journey. Freud’s phobia of railways was entirely due to his anxieties in relation to giving up control, and to feelings of pleasure, generally.

Needless to say, these anxieties were those of “the reasonable man” confronted with the power of uncontrollable emotional feeling.

Lewis Carroll used the figure of the White Rabbit to get Alice’s dream started. The anxieties attaching to lateness and to missed connections must have run deep; even in the 19C.

We’re back at the railway timetable…(or to Neo in The Matrix).

Time to “go off the rails…”

Supplemental 200712

The psychic strain of railway travel proceeds, not from the noise, speed and vibrations of the railway carriage; but from the excitement, anxiety and nervous shock consequent on the effort to catch the last express; to be in time for the fearfully punctual train.

The French writer, Marcel Proust, was a notorious hypercondriac and insomniac. In order to help himself to sleep, he would read railway timetables; the more detailed and provincial the better. Not for him, les grandes lignes.

For Proust, every place name was freighted with the potential of people and history. Of course, this was both beautiful and disasterous. This tendency, combined with his other psychological characteristics, to distinguish a form of spectacular inertia.

It’s all very well planning a journey; but in the end, you have to leave the house!

I guess it was entirely appropriate that Proust should be fascinated by train timetables – he spent his whole life writing a work called In Search of Lost Time.

I am intrigued by how many writers, scientists and philosophers were exploring the theme of time in the early part of the 20C. One can certainly link the writing of HG Wells (The Time Machine), Proust (Time Past) and Joyce,  to the ideas of Einstein, and to those of Henri Bergson and Henri Lefebvre, and to those of Sigmund Freud.

This railway poster by Abram Games, from 1951, visually captures the connection between railways, dreams and time…

I’ve already posted about railway time,and about the Freudian connection between trains and dreams…

In Russia, where train travel may extend to days and weeks; one travels across Siberia on a bed!

I’ve been meaning to post about one of my favourite Hitchcock films since I began posting on here. You will recall that I began this blog with a post about trains, Alfred Hitchcock and psychoanalysis. You can remind yourself, here

The Trains of Alfred Hitchcock

Obviously, The Lady Vanishes (1938) scores. It is by Alfred Hitchcock and is set on a train. So, that is two out of three for starters. You can watch the film, here

http://www.soku.com/detail/show/XOTYyNDA=

NB – the Chinese video streaming websites are terrific for these old films. But their files are not listed on Google!

The LV comes from the end of Hichcock’s “English” period. These black and white films were made in the 1930s and explore some of the psychological themes that Hitchcock had discovered in Berlin during the 1920s. The English films describe these psychological themes within the context of a more structured, not to say repressed, society.

Anyway, the plot and main themes of LV are described, here

http://atthelighthouse.wordpress.com/2010/05/22/in-which-i-explain-why-the-lady-vanishes-1938-is-the-movie-that-has-it-all/

and, of course, there is a wikipage about the film, here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_Vanishes_(1938_film)

The story is a modern (20C) reworking of the classic “vanishing hotel room” trick. The original version is a late 19C story about what happens when the usual reference points of civilised society are turned on their heads. Circumstances, paranoia (anxiety) and feeling combine to uncover the social construction of reality and the dark consensus of social conformity.

The point is that, by placing the action of the film on the train, the story is given an extra dimension of suspense. We know that speed and time are conspiring to bring the story to a climax… it’s literally inevitable. Also, the train (especially the luxury trans-Eurpean express) is a place where social conventions are observed in their most minute detail. The transfer of the original story, from hotel to train, is entirely consistent.

There’s also a lovely gag about the two “little Englanders” travelling through Europe whose main interest is the test match score. The whole world is about to go up in flames and they are worrying about cricket!

Well worth watching.

So, the degree shows are over and the results have been handed out… The next adventure begins.

I wish all our young people every success. Bon Voyage!

This is a post about cutaway drawings. These will be familiar to boys of all ages. They are compelling images for their technical detail and the abundance of information. They show how things work. There’s nothing better for explaining big machines.

Obviously, these kinds of drawings are not so good the solid-state gadgets of modern life.

Here are a couple of information posters that show how power is generated…

You can find out about the masters of this kind of illustration, here

Masters of the Cutaway

I’ve posted recently about the Droz railway layout that has just been sold in Germany. Not all railway toys are as complex and sophisticated as that. Here is another kind of railway toy, designed by Ladislav Sutnar.

Sutnar is a key figure in the mythology of modernism. This presents modernism as a cultural phenomenon that links Moscow, Berlin, Paris and New York. During the heroic period of Modernism (after 1918 and before 1939), the only way to connect these great cities was by train and ship.

Sutnar made this journey himself; moving between Prague and New York.

In the 1930s Sutnar designed these simple painted wooden toys. These painted wooden toys were a staple of Bauhaus designers. In the 1960s, in London, Galt Toys worked the same theme.

Even nowadays, wooden toys are understood as from a different ontological entity to plastic toys. Not just playing; but learning!

Yesterday, we went to Paris for lunch with the French family. We travelled by Eurostar and took the RER and Paris Metro. So, a lovely day.

I noticed that the French are busy transforming their Metro. The new platforms have security gates all along the platform. That means that the train slows and stops in an exact alignment with the sliding doors of the gates. This means that people will find it much harder to throw themselves under the train.

Also, people position themselves in readyness for the train with much more precision. I’m not saying that the French are queueing; but it is a big improvement.

If you look carefully, the trains don’t have drivers either! The machine is in control and we are behaving better (more consistently).

Inside the trains, there is much more space too. The carriages are open-ended and you can walk right though the whole length of the train.