Memorial Hunt (Cody): The B-Line Rail-Trail

For this blogging assignment, I have decided to be slightly less literal in my understanding of what constitutes a “memorial.”  That is, rather than analyzing an obviously commemorative statue or placard, I’ve decided to consider the monumental performance of an artifact that doesn’t explicitly or immediately distinguish itself as a memorial or a site of compulsory requiem or nostalgia.

While jogging along Bloomington’s B-Line rail-trail, I saw several images that really struck me. One was this now-defunct railroad crossing light.  Of course, we could argue that the entire rail-trail is a memorial: as the various “welcome” signs that line the path mention, “You are standing in the heart of Bloomington’s early industrial era” (emphasis added).  But such a statement is disingenuous.  While I’m following this path, I’m not really transported back to Bloomington’s industrial apotheosis during the 1820s.  Rather, this sign and its constative language, if anything, reemphasize the great temporal and cultural distance between my present and Bloomington’s past.  I don’t see local industry; rather, as my other photos attest, I see abandoned or demolished buildings where industry used to take place.  Surely, these signs and this monumental rail-trail inform me of a past but they don’t perform that past. 

Nevertheless, this nonfunctional railroad crossing light does seem to possess some performative powers.  While I have no idea how old this crossing light is or whether its present location is the same as its original location, I can feel a sense of historical authenticity—the crossing light certainly doesn’t seem as historically or locationally alien as the welcome signs or the intervallic “workout stations” along the path.  The present feels less distant from this otherwise seemingly moribund, industrial past.  In other words, the crossing light is able to more efficaciously perform the past—or, at least, some idea of a past—in the present.

Furthermore, we equally notice that the crossing light’s functionality has changed.  Whereas before the light would have served as an indicator of an oncoming train, now the light functions as a means of “pointing” pedestrians either north toward Downtown or south toward the “switchyard,” that is, toward the park that has now replaced the no-longer-extant, “real” switchyard.  This change in functionality designates the crossing light as a palimpsest--an artifact that has been reused or altered over time and, as such, bears a metaphorical or visualizable timeline across its surface--especially as we consider the juxtaposition of the iron pole’s rusty patina with the arrows’ acrylic, plastic “newness.” And still, this palimpsestic performance of the crossing light is clearly contrived; its imagery of loss and moribundity are unable to fully retreat within its rhetoric of memorialization and coalescence of past with present.  When read from Debord’s Marxist and materialist understanding of the spectacle, we comprehend the crossing light’s presence, within the context of the revamped rail-trail, as an image of loss and as an image of capitalism's power to disunite and destroy, to abstract and alienate.  As Debord writes,

The origin of the spectacle lies in the world’s loss of unity, and its massive expansion in the modern period demonstrates how total this loss has been: the abstract nature of all individual work, as of production in general, finds perfect expression in the spectacle, whose very manner of being concrete is, precisely, abstraction. . . . The spectacle’s function in society is the concrete manufacture of alienation. (22)

 Ultimately, the spectacle is inevitably an image of loss as capitalism and the accumulation of capital produce a never-ending sequence of new objects, forcing those older artifacts into obsolescence, further alienating our present from our past.