The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism (Post-Contemporary Interventions) - Softcover

Duffy, Enda

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822344424 ISBN 13: 9780822344421

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Speed, the sensation one gets when driving fast, was described by Aldous Huxley as the single new pleasure invented by modernity. The Speed Handbook is a virtuoso exploration of Huxley's claim. Enda Duffy shows how the experience of speed has always been political and how it has affected nearly all aspects of modern culture. Primarily a result of the mass-produced automobile, the experience of speed became the quintessential way for individuals to experience modernity, to feel modernity in their bones. Duffy plunges full-throttle into speed's "adrenaline aesthetics," offering deft readings of works ranging from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, through J. G. Ballard's Crash, to the cautionary consumerism of Ralph Nader. He describes how speed changed understandings of space, distance, chance, and violence; how the experience of speed was commodified in the dawning era of mass consumption; and how society was incited to abhor slowness and desire speed. He examines how people were trained by new media such as the cinema to see, hear, and sense speed, and how speed, demanded of the efficient assembly-line worker, was given back to that worker as the chief thrill of leisure. Assessing speed's political implications, Duffy considers how speed pleasure was offered to citizens based on criteria including their ability to pay and their gender, and how speed quickly became something to be patrolled by governments. Drawing on novels, news reports, photography, advertising, and much more, Duffy provides a breakneck tour through the cultural dynamics of speed.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Enda Duffy is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of The Subaltern Ulysses.

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""The Speed Handbook" is not just a dazzling book but a necessary one. There is nothing else like it. Enda Duffy insists on the political stakes of speed, persuasively connecting the emergence of speed as the 'only new pleasure invented by modernity' with commodity fetishism, the sensorium, gender, 'endocolonization, ' 'adrenaline aesthetics, ' and social control. This superlative work will become required reading for scholars of modernism, historians of technology, materialist critics, and even egg-headed car lovers."--Paul K. Saint-Amour, author of "The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination"

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THE SPEED HANDBOOK

Velocity, Pleasure, ModernismBy Enda Duffy

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2009 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4442-1

Contents

Introduction: The Adrenaline Aesthetic: Speed as Culture....................................11. Speed Theory............................................................................172. Thriller: The Incitement to Speed.......................................................593. Gaining Speed: Car Culture, Adrenaline, and the Experience of Speed.....................1114. Blur: Rapid Eye Movement and the Visuality of Speed.....................................1575. Crash Culture...........................................................................199Epilogue: Overdrive.........................................................................263Notes.......................................................................................275Bibliography................................................................................287Index.......................................................................................295

Chapter One

Speed Theory

All revolution is movement, but all movement is not revolution. -Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics

Consider speed. Specifically, imagine again the intense new thrill felt by those who at the dawn of the twentieth century drove a car fast for the first time. This is how Aldous Huxley describes it in his essay "Wanted, a New Pleasure" (1931):

Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure. True, men have always enjoyed speed; but their enjoyment has been limited, until very recent times, by the capacities of the horse, whose maximum velocity is not much more than thirty miles per hour. Now thirty miles an hour on a horse feels very much faster than sixty miles an hour in a train or a hundred in an airplane. The train is too large and steady, the airplane too remote from stationary surroundings, to give their passengers a very intense sensation of speed. The automobile is sufficiently small and sufficiently near the ground to be able to compete, as an intoxicating speed-purveyor, with the galloping horse. The inebriating effects of speed are noticeable on horseback at about twenty miles an hour, in a car at about sixty. When the car has passed seventy-two, or thereabouts, one begins to feel an unprecedented sensation, a sensation which no man in the days of horses ever felt. It grows intenser with every increase in velocity. I myself have never traveled at much more than eighty miles an hour in a car; but those who drunk a stronger beverage of this strange intoxicant tell me that new marvels await anyone who has the opportunity of passing the hundred mark.... Two hundred miles an hour must be absolute torture.

You can sense Huxley's quaking with doubt about his proposition even as he wrote it, but you sense too that he knew his idea was too brilliant and audacious to let drop. As he sees it, despite vast changes through the centuries, people's experience of pleasure has remained remarkably the same. To claim that, with the car, the technological advances that had been a hallmark of the industrial revolution had finally brought to individual human subjects a new pleasure that they could tangibly experience-that it would give each of them a thrill which had never before been felt-is to posit a fundamental and truly wondrous kind of revolution. It also begs a host of questions. Why did it happen now? Was it a pleasure that was rationed, and who had access to it? How is it connected to the effects of other technological advances that were such a feature of that historical moment: the bicycle, the phonograph, the telephone, the airplane, the movie camera, even mass electrification and electric light? How does it jibe with the shocking changes in art, literature, and, soon, film that burst on the scene at the same time, the diverse experiments we now call modernism? If people's pleasure was radically revised, how did this impact the old, familiar pleasures? Finally, was the pleasure policed, and how did it matter to communities and even nations as well as individuals? Which is to say, what exactly are the politics of this new pleasure? Speed, as pleasure and as politics, would shake things up; here we begin the exploration of how and why.

To think of speed as a pleasure is to think of it strategically. It forces us to think of speed sensationally, that is, how it feeds our sensations, our senses, working on our bodies to produce physical as well as psychic and psychological effects. Centrally, it makes us attend to the way speeding changes how we experience space. Speed in modernity has, most frequently, been thought of as a matter of conquering time: the regime of clock time, timetables, clocking in, schedules, being on time, meeting deadlines, going faster. This is the modern urban regimen described by Georg Simmel in "The Metropolis and Mental Life." It is the aspect of speed that modernity forces on us; it is the part of speed that is onerous. It is the speed of modern stress that the Austrian novelist Elfriede Jelinek had in mind when she said of New York, "I'm just afraid that the speed and noise would make me mad as soon as I set foot on land." When we think of the thrill of speed as pleasure, however, as, for example, in driving a car at a hundred miles per hour, then we think of traversing space more quickly. If speed's nastiness is about beating time, speed's pleasure seduces by recasting our relation to space. To understand the politics of speed, why it came to be granted first to the rich and then to masses of people in the early twentieth century, how it was rationed and policed, how it was represented as a thrill to be desired, then we must theorize it as part of a revolutionary change in the ways in which space was reorganized in modernity, and in the ways in which people willingly embraced such changes. In terms of the history of the organization of the world's space, the salient fact in or around 1900 was that this was the moment of greatest expansion of the Western empires: the age of empire, in which a small group of Western nations ruled over vast swaths of territory and controlled the sea routes of the globe. At the same historical moment, the first cars were mass-produced: technological speed would first be offered as individual pleasure to masses of people in the West. The age of empire and the age of speed coincide; how to trace their relation?

Speed is not only a pleasure that has a politics; speed, it turns out, is politics: the expression of a new order of the organization of global space. My key proposition in this chapter is this: that masses of Westerners were granted access for the first time to the experience of speeds made possible by technology at the moment when empire was at its height, but more importantly, at that paradigm-shattering moment when it became clear that the whole world had at last been mapped and conquered, and that global space was finite. Until this time, in the age of empire as exploration, it had suited Western ideologies to encourage dreams of exotic "other" spaces, spaces to be enjoyed, mapped, and conquered. This had been the basis for a long-standing Western conception of space as a dualist entity, with the known home close at hand, and the exotic and potentially infinite space of exotic and threatening otherness faraway. When the sources of such...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822344424
• ISBN 13: 9780822344421
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 316
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland