The Post-Industrial Dreamscape:
A Collective Consciousness of the Urban World

          It is 1:15 p.m., and my grade twelve Writer’s Craft class has just begun. Mr. Morgan, the eccentric Plath-reading punk socialist who is our teacher, sets a timer for two minutes and instructs us to write. I open a small red journal into which I have been instructed to enter something every day. Among other melodramatic and precocious ramblings, I scribble the following passage:

"And then my eyelids fell shut and I was awake again. I was alone on an empty streetcar in the dead of winter, a place I didn’t think I’d find myself so peacefully smiling. The train ran through slush and mud and ice until it reached the end of the world and the mechanical roll of 12 lurching wheels rocked to a rest. Climbing out of the lonesome machine, I noticed I was barefoot in a field of sunbeams. The tall creatures that passed me by were pressed with the marks of angels who were made of light and hands and tongues. Then outside my head I felt the sunrise. And a terrible alarm like drilling. The calls of 432 birds woke me from my daydream. I reached for grass beneath me and my fingers were met once again by steel."

My writing teacher hands me a book. It’s called The Portable Beat Reader, and it becomes my first introduction to the writers of the Beat Generation. Famous avant-garde literature of this era such as Allen Ginsburg’s Howl, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch changed the conventions of acceptable writing and even altogether challenged notions of what defines literature. I read Diane DiPrima’s Dinners and Nightmares, in which she writes about getting through January in a new New York City apartment by eating Oreos all day. That day on the twenty-two subway stop commute home, I think about Diane DiPrima and her Oreos. What about it feels so familiar? The subway stalls and I must walk a few blocks to the next station, and it gives me more time to consider this question. Around this time, I begin to steep myself in Radiohead. I study German Expressionism. I feel a disturbing familiarity when I watch Black Swan in film class. When I move out of Toronto to go to university, shoegaze reminds me of home. I’m a really big fan of Pieces of April. The National makes me cry. I take up an interest in the old-school folk music that my parents like, but often it feels disingenuous.

Fast forward a few years to this past summer. I’m in my friend’s basement watching Requiem for a Dream for the first time. It is the most horrifying film I have ever sat through. By the end of it I’m in tears. It’s a story about four drug addicts in New York City, one of them being a middle-aged widow whose obsession with TV game shows leads her to an addiction to diet pills. We also watch down-and-out 20-somethings Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, and Marlon Wayans attempt to make it big selling heroin, and slowly become estranged, leading Leto to an arm amputation, Connelly to sex trafficking, and Wayans to prison. It is a masterpiece evoking our desire to be loved and the things which stand in the way of that dream.

One evening a few weeks after that I’m in the fourteenth story of a cinderblock apartment building in Chicago, looking out over lake Michigan. It is so wide, and if I want to reach for it I’ll have to jump through the glass and kill myself. Why in this moment do I think of that movie I saw? I have never been destitue, nor addicted, nor trafficked, nor imprisoned. I have never truly suffered, but what is it at the core of that film that resonates with me? What resonated with the public enough to make $7.4 million?

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As I have come of age as a writer, I have begun to personally identify with this genre of art which for the purpose of this essay I will refer to as “Post-Industrial Dreamscape”. This style of literature, music, and visual media, captures the alienation that is unique to living amongst an industrial metropolis. “Dreamscape” describes the ungroundedness of urban life, a half- lucid experience of humanity. It is art that evokes the feeling of being holed up in high-rise, looking out at artificially illuminated nighttime, the sound of sirens dampened by the window glass, your view of the horizon obscured. Or perhaps it is early morning and you are riding a

city bus to work, your eyes half open, watching the sky brighten although you cannot see the sunrise itself.

The Beat Generation is largely responsible for the revolution of literary freedom which enabled Post-Industrial Dreamscape work to be accepted. The same could be said of many genres; the Beatniks were critical in turning the spotlight of popular media from white-picket- fence America to the fringes of the American machine. Similarly, the No Wave filmmaking movement born of Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1980s was revolutionary in the world of independent filmmaking, leading to a greater acceptance of transgressive cinema. I cannot continue without acknowledging works such Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, the entire catalogue of David Lynch, Věra Chytilová’s Daisies, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. These are the creative origins from which I believe that the style of Post-Industrial Dreamscape is largely drawn.

For the purpose of clarity as I go further into this topic, here I have compiled a short and certainly non-comprehensive list of media that I consider part of the Post-Industrial Dreamscape genre:

1. OK Computer, Radiohead, studio album (1997)

2. Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk, novel (1996)

3. Fight Club, David Fincher, feature film (1999)

4. Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky, feature film (2000)

5. Kid A, Radiohead, studio album (2000)

6. Origin of Symmetry, Muse, studio album (2001)

7. Amnesiac, Radiohead, studio album (2001)

8. I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, Bright Eyes, studio album (2005)

9. Up In Our Bedroom After the War, Stars, studio album (2007)

10. My Blueberry Nights, Wong Kar-Wai, feature film (2008)

11. Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky, feature film (2010)

12. A Moon Shaped Pool, Radiohead, studio album (2016)

13. Better Oblivion Community Centre, Conor Oberst, Phoebe Bridgers, studio album (2019)

14. Joker, Todd Phillips, feature film (2019)

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Defining the boundaries

All of these works are not necessarily critical of the urban world. I would not consider Black Swan to be raging against the machine as is “Electioneering” on OK Computer. Similarly to Origin of Symmetry or Up in our Bedroom After the War, Black Swan merely evokes the atmosphere of alienation that I consider integral to Post-Industrial Dreamscape. It exists within the consciousness of those who live among the masses in a capitalist world disconnected from nature. However, works within the genre are often infused with politics that one could align with the Punk subculture, anti-capitalism, anti-consumerism, and other leftist viewpoints. Perhaps what most importantly distinguishes Post-Industrial Dreamscape from Punk is that the latter attempts to actively push back against the system, while the former is merely exhausted or driven to neurosis by it. It is better characterized by repression, resignation, and numbness than by direct anger.

The atmosphere which defines the genre is that of the spiritual marginalization that exists in the everyday of a Post-Fordist society dependent largely on intellectual labour. Stylistically, it is the place where Urban Gothic meets Post-Punk. The creator is aware of his position in regards to the technology that has created his reality, and often yearns to find relief.

Post-Fordism is an important point to raise as it distinguishes Post-Industrial Dreamscape from earlier works such as Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, two anti-industrialist films which criticized the growing mechanization of capitalist Western society. The genre I hope to identify is not that which warns us against the modern

world but that which lives, revels, and dies in it. Its nature is the digitized. It is the disturbed consciousness of the generation baptized by the God of automation.

The most important thematic aspect of Post-Industrial Dreamscape is isolation. The loneliness of urban life is not an objective reality; my commute to high school brought me hundreds of new faces to see every day, but being among people is markedly different from being in the company of people. In the city there is a sense of stifling precision, of engineered humanity. In “Fitter Happier”, the thematic hammer of Radiohead’s OK Computer, this idea is well-put. The whole two-minute track is a computerized satirical narration of the coldness of the post-industrial world.

“Fitter happier / More productive / Comfortable / Not drinking too much / Regular exercise at the gym (3 days a week) / Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries / At ease / Eating well (no more microwave dinners and saturated fats) / A patient, better driver / A safer car (baby smiling in back seat) / Sleeping well (no bad dreams) / No paranoia / Careful to all animals (never washing spiders down the plughole) / Keep in contact with old friends (enjoy a drink now and then) / Will frequently check credit at (moral) bank (hole in the wall) / Favours for favours / Fond but not in love / Charity standing orders / On Sundays ring road supermarket / (No killing moths or putting boiling water on the ants) / Car wash (also on Sundays) / No longer afraid of the dark or midday shadows / Nothing so ridiculously teenage and desperate / Nothing so childish / At a better pace / Slower and more calculated / No chance of escape / Now self-employed / Concerned (but powerless) / An empowered and informed member of society (pragmatism not idealism) / Will not cry in public
/ Less chance of illness / Tyres that grip in the wet (shot of baby strapped in back seat) / A good memory / Still cries at a good film / Still kisses with saliva / No longer empty and frantic / Like a cat / Tied to a stick / That’s driven into / Frozen winter shit (the ability to laugh at weakness) / Calm / Fitter, healthier and more productive / A pig / In a cage / On antibiotics” (Yorke)

“Fitter Happier” presents the Western ideal of a well-adjusted person. It evokes the isolating dehumanization one experiences as the target of mass marketing that is crafted to fuel an efficient workforce. One can feel a sense of aggravation rising under the surface of the text, as though the person being described is a character in a simulation trying to break out. The next question is: under what conditions of thought does this phenomenon of experience arise?

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Social and philosophical origins of the urban consciousness

As I have used the word “technology” quite a few times already in this essay, I will point out that it has become something of a nebulous term. In Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, originally La Technique, ou l'enjeu du siècle, the concept of “technique” is distinguished from “technology” or “machine”. Technology is one manifestation of a certain technique, but it is larger than the machine itself. He argues that “as long as technique was represented exclusively by the machine, it was possible to speak of man and the machine. The machine remained and external object, and man, though significantly influenced by it in his professional, private, and the psychic life, remained nonetheless independent.” At a certain point in the 19th century, technique became a self-moving thing, evolving to a point where it was no longer a mediator between humanity and nature, but that which is able to replace nature as a whole. Ellul points out that the city is a good example of this, as it is a case wherein we see that the only fate for rural areas of the “technicist society” is to be urbanized or desertified. La Technique seeks to change our perception of Technique, reframing it as a tool rather than the standard against which we perceive ourselves as human beings.

La Technique raises a similar point as another prominent philosophical work of the 20th century: Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. This fictionalized autobiography follows Pirsig’s 17-day motorcycle trip across the American Northwest with his young son. The book explores the Pirsig’s philosophical concept of Quality, presenting a way to live better by fully integrating oneself into the everyday practice of life.
Towards the beginning of the novel, the protagonist encounters a disagreement with his friends, who insist on relying on mechanics to fix their motorcycles and are easily frustrated with the prospect of doing their own maintenance. They would rather technology stay “over there”, out of sight and out of mind, as they perceive it to be the ugly root of society’s problems. Pirsig argues that it is this dualistic perspective on technology - thinking of it as something other than oneself, is an Aristotelian system of thinking which does not serve us. Rationality and emotionality, practicality and creativity, science and philosophy, form and function, all have been separated by a dualistic Western system of belief which has given rise to a collective feeling of spiritual oppression and thus a resentment for the technology which represents this suffocating dualism. It is only logical that this would give rise to an artistic genre which criticizes what is perceived in Western thought to be the other half of human existence - a cold, robotic, sociopathic system.

For Pirsig, Ellul’s idea of the oneness of man and machine is presented with the metaphor of motorcycle maintenance. He treats the machine as an extension of himself, fully identifying with the task at hand as opposed to perceiving the cycle as an other. When the motorcycle is treated as separate from the mechanic, frustration and boredom arise. Our use of technology reflects our intentions as a society. It is not the chimney that pollutes the air, it is the man who burns the coal. If we turn our pitchforks at cars we will fail to see the problem of our dependence on speed. What has been lost is the importance of Quality in our use of technique. In a system in which we our self-reliance is on the decline, also being lost is our ability to care about the practical things we do every day. As convenience increases, intention gives itself over to efficiency. Quality is replaced by function. These two are seemingly irreconcilable in today’s world.

Gilles Deleuze also offers comment on the inseparability of man and machine in his essay “Postscript for the Societies of Control”. As capitalism has shifted since the 1980s from a Fordist model of production to Post-Fordist, the neoliberal notion of ‘flexibility’ of the labour force translates to a society that revolves around profit 24/7. Deleuze makes reference to Foucault’s work on the “disciplinary societies” of old, saying “In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything--the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation” (Deleuze 4).

The concept of oneness of man and machine, the inexhaustible demand for efficiency, the round-the-clock world whose every facet serves the same purpose, the grounds on which Ellul, Pirsig, and Deleuze agree, encourages us to look at the industrial world as a mechanized form of human thought. What underlies the alienation felt by living in an apartment building? One must consider both the romantic and the classic elements of this experience: visually and spatially, it is constraining, blocking one’s access to nature or even a view of it. Rigid architecture stirs an unwelcome sense of confinement in the human mind. Beneath this, there is a pervading theme of isolation which each of these visual-spatial elements represents. The building represents dualistic separation of man from each other, and of man as separate from anything at all. From the apartment building there arises a spiritual dissonance, the experience of which is captured by the genre of Post-Industrial Dreamscape. This is a world which evokes the impossibility of the human experience of Quality within a technicist society.

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In the wake of the dream

It is now worth exploring the ways in which it seems we go about dealing with the experience of this oppressive dualism previously outlined. Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes declares his coping strategy in “Road to Joy”, the final track of I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning:

“I have my drugs, I have my woman / They keep away my loneliness”...

Obviously, this does not solve the problem. Many works in the Post-Industrial Dreamscape canon include themes of drug use. It is well-known that loneliness is a major

contributing factor of (and, paradoxically, a symptom of) addiction. The COVID-19 pandemic provided us with a concrete example of the way we respond to isolation. The scope of addiction, when looking around these days, can broaden beyond substance use to encompass many of the obsessive ways in which we all attempt to cope with our disconnection from each other. In Requiem for a Dream, Ellen Burstyn’s character Sara, a widow, becomes enthralled with contest TV, allowing the delusion of her destiny for the screen to consume her to the point of an addiction to diet pills. I personally cannot get through a day without looking at my iPhone at least twenty-five times a day. Each time I hope and believe that there will be something new waiting for me. A friend of mine was addicted to Hot Cheetos. Some people fall in love with robots on the internet. Some people set shit on fire. We all have our delusions of refuge.

There is a certain through-line of escapism found in many works in the genre — specifically a desire to relieve oneself of the suffocating isolation of the “system”. In Requiem for a Dream, Jared Leto’s character is repeatedly haunted by an imagined scene where Jennifer Connelly stands at the end of a pier and he runs toward her. In the film, this dream represents their yearning for love, and an escape from the isolated lives they are bound to lead. In Radiohead’s “No Surprises” of the OK Computer album, Thom Yorke writes,

“I’ll take a quiet life / a handshake of carbon monoxide / no alarms and no surprises / ... silence” (Yorke)

The song describes a suicidal narrator’s exhaustion with chasing the ideal payoff of a life in the system:

“Such a pretty house / such a pretty garden” (Yorke).

As though he too is seeing Jennifer Connelly at the end of a pier, the narrator laments his desire for relief from the monotonous “job that slowly kills you”.

Conor Oberst, the songwriter of Bright Eyes, is more overt with this metaphor of escape, in many songs off I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning like this one line from “Land-Locked Blues”:

“You'll be free child once you have died / From the shackles of language and measurable time” (Oberst).

For Oberst, death is an escape from the confines of objectivity in a world which upholds logic as supreme.

These examples, however extreme, are what best illustrate one of the most important thematic aspects of Post-Industrial Dreamscape: the desire for the warmth of humanity, as a means to escape the coldness of a technological world. The idea of “warmth” can refer even to pain, suffering, and death, because, as the character of Tyler Durden says in Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club, "God's hate is better than His indifference” (Palahniuk 141). To be fully alive is to experience Quality, which cannot be rationally measured nor objectively contrived.

 

At the heart of the matter

It seems that the Post-Industrial Dreamscape understands the idea of underlying form; the crisis we face in the technological age is not the fault of technology itself but behavioral systems of Technique which control it. If these works are calling for any change at all, it is a cultural one; to employ a new Technique which helps us turn toward each other. The root cause of the havoc wreaked by human technology — climate change, nuclear war, polluted land and sea, a sick population — is the result of humanity’s striving for absolute efficiency. In the collective lonely lament that is this genre, a unity can be found. It is the folk consciousness of the city. Its nature is fluorescent moonlight, subway wind, tar on grass, smog clouds, averted eyes, desperate touches, conversations with strangers, spoken word on streetcars, shoulder to shoulder with the world, a dream that never ends.

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