Two Types of Shock in Modernity

The term ‘shock’ has been central to accounts of the origins of technological and artistic modernity. Its appearance ranges from Baudelaire’s use of the term to describe urban experience in the 1860s and the phenomena of ‘railway spine’ in the same decade to the psychology of shell-shock; from the aesthetic categories of Krakauer, Benjamin and Brecht in the inter-war period to later titles like The Shock of the New. Like all respectable terms in modernity it has even acquired a prehistory, a recent cultural historian, Jeffrey T. Schapp, insisting that the origins of modern notions of shock lie in the ‘carriage revolution’, in the speeded-up world of the late eighteenth-century, rather than in Baudelaire’s Paris.