Shock

In drawing upon medical discourses about “accident shock” (post-train wreck psychological problems without physical manifestation), Schivelbusch positions these traumas as somehow emblematic of modernity’s onset and its impact on the human body. He traces the etymological roots of “shock” to its military origins denoting “the encounter of an armed force with the enemy in charge or onset; also, the encounter of two mounted warriors or justlers charging one another” (qtd. in Schivelbusch 150). The rise of modern armies, the consolidation of military energies toward singular goals, and the increased mechanization of combat through technological developments posit shock as a central to modern warfare and the traumas it inspires.

Beyond these descriptions by Schivelbusch, shock continually returns as a central theoretical paradigm for describing modernity: “the shock of recognition” in Benjamin’s dialectical image, the rubble-heap of civilization (“one single catastrophe”) witnessed by Benjamin’s Angel of History; the colliding physics of Marxist dialectics (thesis + antithesis = synthesis, etc.). In describing the contradictory spatial transformations created by railroad travel (the expansion of newly accessible spaces and the annihilation of the in-between spaces that previously defined various locales as distinct from each other), Schivelbusch refers to newly adjacent spaces as “colliding”: “As the space between the points – the traditional traveling space – was destroyed, those points moved into each other’s immediate vicinity: one might say that they collided” (38).