"".
The "modern,"" as the experience of recent times, involves the memory of the past and anticipates a future. Thus, the experience of the "modern- is change. In the flux, the familiar may be lost or altered. If change is a characteristic of the modern, then heimlich and unheimlich - the familiar and the unfamiliar - with the resulting dread and anxiety produced by change are important features. One of the implications of this understanding of "modern- is that as capitalism emerges as the economic ethos of Western countries, the changing technologies of industry that buttress capitalism become key to understanding the "modern."" Industrial technologies are not simply tools within the workplace; because they change the terms of work, they inevitably have an impact on the relation of workers to their labour and, hence, on the identities of workers, particularly in terms of redefining class and gender. As industrial technologies evolve, they effect radical change, which generates anxiety, particularly for the middle class, which, located between the upper and working classes, is in a site of negotiation and inherent instability.
Industry and its technologies opened a set of social relations that gave rise to the middle class. It is relatively easy to define the upper class as those who enjoy social privilege by virtue of aristocratic birth and those with established fortunes - either made or inherited - that allow access to social institutions of power. In contrast, as Ed Cohen notes in Talk on the Wilde Side, "agricultural labourers and the industrial working classes [ ] were largely determined by the material constraints circumscribing their lives- (19), which is to say that the work in which they engaged was mainly physical, intellectually disengaged, and under-waged, so that there was little possibility of accruing excess capital. Members of the working class did not have the luxury of imagining that their financial circumstances would improve significantly.
