Popular Culture Review Vol. 19, No. 1, Winter 2008 | Page 122

118 Popular Culture Review can see what we might call the work of play in the age of mechanical reproduction as operating precisely on these terms. An investigation into the buffet of amusements offered up at Coney Island reveals the degree to which the amusement park approaches a kind of cultural orientation through disorientation and stages the dangers of an increasingly technologized environment in a contained space in order to mollify its nervous patrons and assure them that will get home safely. As Robert Snow and David Wright point out, Coney Island represented “America’s first and. .. most symbolic commitment to mechanized leisure,”3 and a crucial component of the cultural work of the amusement park was to mediate the increasingly anxious relationship between the human and the mechanical. If the daily transactions with the machine mandated by industrial labor threatened to “mechanicalize the workman,” as Henry Potter contended in The North American Review in 1897,4 the turn to mechanized leisure could potentially further erode the boundaries between work and play as well as between man and machine. Indeed, for some later cultural theorists, leisure time and leisure space become mere extensions of work time and work space; work essentially devours play. According to Benjamin, “what the Fun Fair achieves with its Dodgem cars and other similar amusements is nothing but a taste of the drill to which the unskilled laborer is subjected in the factory.”5 For Horkheimer and Adorno as well, “amusement... is the prolongation of work. .. what happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s leisure time.”6 In service of rescuing the worker from the gloomier implications of these theoretical trajectories, we might attempt to salvage the more liberatory effects of play in order to locate an “amused” agent whose engagement with park technology renders the industrial world more readily navigable. After all, the fundamental mode of the amusement park is a sort of comic relief via disorientation, as contraptions that appear functional prove dysfunctional and technologies ostensibly speeding out of control are very much in it. In the words of one fin de siecle journalist, “Coney Island is only another name for TopsyTurvydom,”7 its anarchic veneer offers the fantasy of inverted relations and “fluid new possibilities.” The amusement park was littered with trick chairs and trick benches that in John Kasson’s words “mocked the world of productive devices by being intentionally counterproductive, systematically frustrating those who would expect them to fulfill their apparent functions.”8 A certain degree of counterproductivity is embedded in the very logic of the “ride” as well; having arrived at precisely the same spot from which she departed, the rider gains nothing beyond the raw sensory experience of the ride. If amusement is doomed to repeat the rhythms of mechanized labor, perhaps it is repetition with a difference, or even, as Kasson suggests, a transformative “parody of urban experience.” The injection of mechanization into recreation is homeopathic rather than toxic, a dose of industrial grade hair of the dog.