Sunday, June 28, 2009

Dickens' Reply...

Dickens new just as much as Marx that the only real change in their times, to only change that mattered was the industrial one.
In Dombey and son therefore Dickens suggests four principle of industrialization.

1) firstly it is random, choatic and patchwork. The revolution errupted across london, forcing change and challenge. It made then a world where things were necessarily different and yet that difference was unexpected. Old ways gave to new utterly distinct and yet juxtapose with them, with no order or pattern. Life's unity was the a t once shattered, and yet the parts still lived in their fractured bits. The new does not utterly destroy the old or replace it, it merely explodes it.

2) Each process is then akin to a mini-death. To listen to a train, to flow its beat in verse is to here the echo of time and the changes of time. It is that which destroys what was. that which explodes. That which takes one on journies where if one returns at all everything is different. The rhytmm of this change, is then the tread of death. What is touched is forever altered. what remains remains only suspended. It might carry on as if nothing had changed. In a sense given change is death for it it cannot to other than this. And yet it is likely enough in the end death will come for it (as only politics and banking look set to escape).

3) The change empowers odd people. Those then who live through it, and becoming its working class have new rights and abilities. They can reachacrss old divides and arrange things differenelty. Industrial change challenges the social order and must do so.

4) Finally industrialization is the strangest of punts on the future. we are like an inventor who has a number of bets on what will be. The shrimpy boat will not doubt one day come it. and yet when and were we do not know. It will happen...sometime and somewhere. To live in the industrial world is therefore to live knowing that somewhere there is an inventor, making something to change everything - and yet that person is hidden and will be hidden until their invention breaks onto a world, jangling it otherwise..

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