Event, Series, Trauma: The Probabilistic Revolution of the Mind in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Consciousness industrialized: Reflections on Ben Shephard's ‘A war of nerves’

“…Although modern industrial combat was partly recognizable as far back as the American Civil War, most notably in its use of soldier-citizens, mass movement of troops and supplies, and long-dispersed fronts, the new warfare came into its element in 1914-18 (Dean Jr., 1997). Moreover, the mental maladies which are characteristic of the new warfare bear a striking resemblance to the mentalities of peacetime states described by Simmel and Benjamin in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: mechanized travel and its psychosomatic consequences (railway spine, neurasthenia, traumatic neurosis); bureaucratization and the sharpening calculative facility (welfare insurance and compensation); the continual, conditioned repetition of non-productive and non-skilled actions (gambling, de-skilled labouring) (Cooter & Sturdy, 1999;Schäffner, 2001). While war thus makes for extraordinary times and experiences, and while it carries the profound risk of death and mutilation, its characteristic features, sociological and psychological, do not depart from, but rather derive from the social procedures and psychological responses of peacetime society.…”

“…Welfare insurance provides a final instance of the intimate connections between wartime and peacetime modernity as it links changed patterns of technological development and industrial labouring to the workings of state bureaucracy. As Wolfgang Schäffner (2001) has noted 'the accident which appears as psychic trauma, is a discursive bundle in which issues of medicine, jurisprudence, and insurance are intertwined, and which is provoked by the peculiar character of the event' (p. 82). In this view, accident insurance as an aspect of state welfare provision is also an expansion of state authority through its bureaucratic procedures of regulation and measurement amounting to a 'political technology of the self' (Foucault, 1988).…”

Neuroscience and Critique

“…The idea that some psychoneuroses arise as a consequence of traumatic episodes has its origins, at least in part, in the convergence of neurology and discussions around industrial, typically railway, disasters beginning in the 1860s. It was in his 1866 On Railway and Other Injuries of the Nervous System that English surgeon John Eric Erichsen explicitly emphasized the direct injurious effect of railway travel and accidents on the neurological constitutions of passengers (Caplan, 1995(Caplan, , 2001Schäffner, 2001;Schivelbusch, 1986). In the book's 1875 second edition, retitled On Concussion of the Spine, Erichsen described the extent to which railroad accidents produce varying degrees of what he called "nervous shock" at the psychological level alone, inducing an emotional state that he identified as hysteria (1875, pp.…”