The Whole Machinery

A familiar story holds that modernization radiates outward from metropolitan origins. Expanding on Walter Benjamin’s notion of die Moderne , The Whole Machinery explores representations of people and places, objects and occasions, that reverse that trajectory, demonstrating how modernizing agents move in a contrary direction as well—from the country to the city. In a crucial reconsideration, these figures aren’t pulled by or into urban modernity so much as they bring alternate—and transformative