In reference to the railroad travels it is generally thought that the time we gain by getting faster from a place to another will give us some more extra time to occupy differently. This notion of “buying time” or “buying minutes” is what really has turned time into a commodity and it is precisely why it is so strange that in a positivistic age, like that during which these texts were written, they can say that a quantitative notion of time will devitalize it.
The sense that the rapidly connecting points along a railway could lose a sense of “local identity” oversees the fact that through these new connections, identity starts to be redefined as a patchwork or a quilt rather than as a mono-textural, mono-aural, mono-tonal fabric.
The collage/montage patchwork/quilt is a permeable membrane that allows for the observation of both sides of it through different light, or even to observe it merely as a souvenir designed for a tourist rather than a true traveler. You just have to observe the movement of a passenger’s eyes when riding a train and trying to catch to something in the landscape, to realize that these movements are nothing else than the Rapid Eye Movements one is submitted to when in deep sleep and dreaming. To go further, this type of movement is also present in the passenger to-be standing on a platform and observing their incoming train. Both sides of the window begin to dream with eyes open!
Thus, the origin of “stress” as a pathological concept rather than just a fatigue of materials. But then again our references are mostly western-centered(I will appeal to our Indian peer to confirm the fact that all these descriptions do not apply to their railway system, and traveling in India as I did in every type of coach –even “upper” class- is very far away from boring). We must listen to other voices describing travel to understand others’ point of view (for example see the rendering of traveling camera movements in early Japanese animation to realize how the reality gets divided into three carefully choreographed planes rather than the European loss of depth).
Political deliriums of “equality” or “democracy” in a train system, or considerations of why the lower classes don’t read during the voyage frankly deserve no attention. Once again the “embarrassment” felt by the European has to do mostly with their way of life than with the railway system. You can only be embarrassed in a time like the first industrial revolution if you are conscious that you are becoming an individual and as such are pursuing your own individuality. This can only happen if you no longer live in a community (communitas) but in a society that is in expansion. In turn this definition of the individual is in direct relationship with the individual’s “private property” and “private life”. But then again “private life” and “personal space” have different interpretations in different parts of the world and in a time such as the one described the merit an artist has is to be able to communicate something really private and make it public.
Probably that is why one observes a mania for listing or cataloguing and is why, in spite of the different media and materials available most art can still be seen in terms of collage and montage. As long as there is interpenetration of meanings and materials, as long as there is dislocation of meanings, shrinking, splicing and scrambling of techniques; as long as this leads to a transformation, the communicative intent of art will be met. Because the “material dictates the form” and when the material is the time or epoch in which we live, this is the only form possible: a visual and spatial solution to communication.
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