Assignment Paper

1. Around 1905 Max Weber saw a new social psychological shape emerge; the person encased in steel. It would dominate the 20th century he wrote. Note the effects of commodity fetishization and the surrounding system of objects, bodies-fluids-memories, disciplines, and prison and arcade-like structures (arcades, fluids, memories, objects in Dreamworlds discussed). What does the “steel encased individual” resemble now? This is absolutely described in my book.

2. Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was read as a social psychological history in the first part of the 20th century and with good reason. There are few historical events recorded in its documentation of the rise of capitalism, no ethnographic description of work, or any concrete examples of what is meant by his famous conclusion “a casing hard as steel.” Instead what Weber saw as the dominant characteristic of the new individual acclimated to capitalist discipline is left as poetry. There are few clues in the text to draw out what he meant by the individual encased in steel. The concept is left like a ticking bomb at the center of American sociology. Perhaps this is what the idiosyncratic Weber meant to do all along. Along the edges of mainstream sociology the French historian Michel Foucault provides a historical infrastructure to Weber’s thesis in his documentation of the rise of panoptic theaters and new disciplinary forms in the 18th and 19th centuries (there are discussions of his work in Dreamworlds). His account like Weber’s is virtually empty of individuals. Without individual portraits how can the effects of the panoptic or the steel casing be properly evaluated? One solution is to add, then track individual portraits across Foucault’s and Weber’s historical timelines to flesh out what is meant by the steel casing and the panoptic infiltration of the individual in the critical shifts in the ecologies of the self.

3. Scattered through Weber’s work are glimpses of individuals. Find these and note how they are portrayed.

4. There are stories and images of individuals in The Wisconsin Death Trip. Part of how they look is due to the long exposure time of the camera which means that the active technologies may affect how we look.

5. Compare contemporary portraits and stories to those in Black River Falls. A whole history could be done like this looking at the work of Robert Frank in the late 1950s in a work called The Americans, Dorothea Lange during the Depression, and in Germany starting in the 1920s, August Sander. This will provide clues to how the steel casing looks today.

6. One could read Dreamworlds as what the steel casing looks like today. There is a temporal and historical dimension here. What Weber saw in 1905 changes like fashion or architecture.

7. How individuals look is often found, portrayed in the events-action-landscape around then.

8. There are a different kind description in Freud and Kafka. Note how different men and women are portrayed.

9.There are images and descriptions of individuals in Dreamworlds whereas in regular sociology individuals are normally portrayed by race, class, and gender, not the length of their noses or weight.

Weber’s poetic ending to his 1905 essay “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” is set up by looking back to capitalism’s Puritan forefathers and how the cloak lay lightly on their shoulders and could be thrown off at any time. The steel casing is a descendent of this cloak. There are no details given of the material which likely would’ve been wool or linen rather than cotton which fueled the gigantic 19th century textile mills. Its color, dark. The Puritan color spectrum was austere. He’s just as silent on the steel casing. The principal detail is the fit: it fits very tightly, as tightly as an invisible skin as if the modern individual was an Achilles dipped in the Styx. Between these two points is the coat that opens and stars in Marx’s first chapter of Capital. It’s the only moving thing in the chapter, appearing no less than 25 times across the pages. It’s a coat without a body, a shell that the reader follows through an unnamed city – is it London or Manchester – populated by other commodities. No other living thing is encountered. The only people there are the dead authors Marx cites. On the other side of Weber is Shelton’s Alabama excursions. This time there are bodies and objects in equal amounts. The Protestant ethic seems to be have mutated. Work is different. Just remembering is work. Grief is work. In this account the landscapes including the person work hard to produce a new supernatural. Weber steel casing seems fashionable here and even desirable. The Protestant ethic seems to be gone or now organized a new supernatural. Factories are not seen. In this account the landscape itself may be the factory.

1. Weber gives no indications of what the person encased in steel resembles.

2. Kafka, Freud, and the residences of Black River Falls provide clues. These are all accounts from around 1905, from 1890-1919.

3. A genealogy is suggested running from the Puritan fathers of capitalism to 1905 and then beyond.

4. Dreamworlds provide clues as to what the steel casing resembles now.

5. The steel human like Puritans or the ticking woman are historical products and change.

6. The question involves a set of sets analysis (found in Dreamworlds) as to how far into a person the casing goes and how far out from a person it might extend.

7. How a person is written on or surrounded by script may provide clues to the casing.

8. The person develops in historical phases.

9. From what Weber suggests, people at different stages could’ve been walking around the street at the same time. He described this in the opening of his book.

10. In Dreamworlds there are discussions of both the steel casing and the so-called iron cage, a deliberate mistranslation by Parsons