The 1889 World’s Fair in Paris

The most salient features today of the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris in the popular imaginary are the rising iron Eiffel Tour or the spectacle of Wild Bill’s Wild West Show, staring Annie Oakley.  However, the Fair was also home to the most prodigious expression of capital to date, the Gallery of Machines.  A massive structure more than 1,450 feet long and over 360 feet wide and 150 feet high at its center and designed by Ferdinand Dutert, it produced the largest interior space of any building at the time of its construction, encompassing more than 900,000 square feet under its iron and glass enclosure.

The Gallery’s purpose was to exhibit to tradesmen and merchants from around the world the singular accomplishments of the industrial sciences.  Prominent among the exhibits were electric motors and the telephone.  Both devices were at the very center of a burgeoning social revolution that would cut vast swaths of distances from around the globe and exponentially increase the amount of work produced.

However, the exhibit itself marked a fundamental turning point in the forces of production, a moment when production and its efficiency had become an end in itself, something that under the aegis of the machine’s mechanical labor and the electronic technology then available made universally expressible, giving rise to (an always already re-presented) pure immanence.  It was a moment when axioms of capital (“a profit must be made”) and decoded flows (“surplus value is pure profit as such”) coincided with the forces of production in the articulation of a world culture under which we still live today.  In short, this singular conjuncture was marked by the overarching aspiration of the Fair to be very literally a world event, a taking place of a globalized perennial present here and now.  It is the epicenter of Lefebvre’s notion of urbanism (The Urban Revolution).

The analogues of this event are still with us today, more recognizable under their more public montages as Google, Intel or Microsoft, but the organizational structure of their operation owes to its nineteenth century origins more than we can perhaps know at present.  The fact that their production is now principally virtual merely alludes to their dynamic origins.

In the end it would appear that we have never in fact left the nineteenth century, and perhaps it is even more likely that we never will.  Whatever the end result, or the results of ending, the age of the machine is still upon us…