Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 90

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The Popular Culture Review

They used powerful images of machines commanding nature to
describe the construction of a new industrial civilization. They found
the physical environment to be a submissive medium that could be
molded and sculpted to incorporate utopian political designs. Their
technological visions included an accommodation to and conquest of
the natural world, and eventually the creation of a man-made world
as an addition or partial replacement of it.
In his memoirs of the Tennesse Valley Authority, David
Lilienthal, invoking (1966, pp. 2-3) a recurring image in the older
radical tradition, described how an unsettled organic society could be
replaced by a markedly efficient and planned society:
The Tennesse River had always been an idle giant
and a destructive one. Today its boundless energy
works for the people . . . Today it is builders and
technicians that we turn to; men armed not with the
ax, rifle, and Bowie knife, but with the diesel engine,
the bulldozer, the giant electric shovel,. . . [T]hey can
move mountains;. . . they can create new jobs, relieve
human drudgery,. . . put yokes upon the streams, and
transmute the minerals of the earth and the plants of
the field into machines of wizardry to spin out the
stuff of a way of life new to this world.
Here the environment becomes substance for functional design;
nature is described as a protoplasmic substance to be shaped by a
technological nucleus. Technology is an instrument of the
transformation and redemp tion of nature. Powerful images of
machines commanding nature are used to describe the construction of a
new industrial civilization. The physical environment is seen to be a
submissive medium that could be molded and sculpted to accomodate
utopian political designs.
The sixties represents a disjuncture from such an optimistic
belief in the possibility of pastoralism in an industrial age. This
inquiry will examine one of the dominant antimodemist themes of the
dissident voices of the sixties—the loss of pastoralism as a viable
alternative to industrialism. In an era of increasing power and
complexity, the possibility of recovering a simple, more natural way
life lost not only its attraction, but its viability.