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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.