There are two kinds of dread associated with the factory, and they are opposites. The first belongs to the age that built the factories. The second belongs to the age that closed them. Most writing about alienation still describes the first, which is one reason it so often fails to describe how people in emptied towns actually feel.
From the cog to the remainder
Industrial angst was a fear of incorporation. Its images are the assembly line, the time clock, the worker reduced to a single repeated motion. The complaint was that the machine used people: that it took whole human beings, with judgment and craft and moods, and required of them only a wrist. To be a cog was to be necessary in the most insulting way possible.
Post-industrial angst is a fear of exclusion. Its images are the padlocked gate, the parking lot with grass coming through it, the unemployment office. The complaint is no longer that the machine uses people but that it has stopped. The cog at least had a place in the mechanism. What replaces the cog is the remainder: the part left over when the calculation is finished.
The cog at least had a place in the mechanism. What replaces it is the remainder: the part left over when the calculation is finished.
It is worth being precise about why the second is worse. The alienated worker could strike. Withholding labor is a weapon only for those whose labor is wanted. The surplus worker has nothing to withhold, and a philosophy built on the dignity of the indispensable producer has very little to say to someone who has been dispensed with.
The landscape as argument
A post-industrial town makes this argument in brick. The mill becomes apartments for people who work elsewhere. The foundry becomes a heritage center in which a volunteer, often a man who worked there, explains to school parties what the building was for. One chimney is kept, cleaned and floodlit, as a monument to the fact that there used to be thirty.
None of this is cynical, exactly. It is what a place does when it has lost its reason and kept its buildings. But the effect is of a town curating itself: living among its own remains and charging admission. The ruin with a gift shop is the characteristic architecture of the period.
The anonymous night-shift workers who produced The Furnace Hymnal in the last years of their plant understood what was coming with a clarity that planners rarely matched. "They will keep the gates," one issue predicts. "The gates are the part that photographs well."
Time after work
The deepest change is to time. Industrial labor imposed a brutal order on the day, the week and the life. There was the shift, the weekend, the two weeks each summer when the whole works shut, the apprenticeship, the pension. People resented this order and were formed by it. It told them what time it was.
When the work goes, the order goes with it, and time does not become free. It pools. Days lose their edges. A Tuesday is like a Sunday, and the year is marked by nothing in particular. Boredom, in this setting, is not a trivial complaint. It is the experience of time with no claim on you, and it turns out that a claim, even an unjust one, was something people leaned their weight against.
This is why the standard remedies so often miss. Retraining schemes, enterprise zones and leisure facilities all address the loss of income or occupation. They do not address the loss of a clock.
Haunting without ghosts
Such places are regularly described as haunted, and the description is right, but it is usually pointed the wrong way. What haunts a former steel town is not mainly the past. The past, after all, happened; it can be remembered, commemorated and argued about.
What haunts is the future that was promised and withdrawn. The extension to the works that was announced and never built. The streets laid out for families who never came. The assumption, held by everyone and written into every plan, that the children would do what the parents did, only with shorter hours. A future that failed to arrive has no grave and cannot be mourned, which is the condition the theorists call hauntology: being occupied by what did not happen.
R. Tamsin Voigt's essay on the abandoned mall makes the same point about a later generation of buildings. The dead shopping center is not sad because people once shopped there. It is sad because it was built for a prosperity that was supposed to be permanent.
What the angst knows
It is tempting to treat all this as a condition to be cured, and for individuals it often needs care rather than commentary. But as a collective mood, post-industrial angst is not a malfunction. It is a form of knowledge.
What it knows is that an economy can finish with a place and with the people in it, and that no law of history prevents this. Those who learned the lesson early, in towns built around a single industry, were told for a generation that their problem was local: the wrong skills, the wrong attitude, the wrong zip code. It has become steadily clearer that their experience was an advance copy. The fear of being surplus has since arrived in offices, studios and professions that once considered themselves immune.
To say so is not to romanticize the furnace. The work was dangerous, the towns were often narrow, and plenty of people were glad to see their children escape. The point is narrower. The emptied town is a place where a society's idea of human usefulness was tested to destruction, and the results are in. They deserve to be read as findings, not as symptoms.