Crash (Speed as Engine of Individuation)

Today we live affirmatively in our automotive moments, moments in which the driver looms as king, as sovereign, as tyrant.¹

At the wheel, many an American tends to transform himself into a god.²

Every culture has its founding myths, and a culture like our own, built upon the worship of technics and science, is no exception to the rule.³ If many of its inaugural texts and artifacts proudly proclaim their resistance to the blandishments of mythology in the name of a brave new post-mythological world, others (perhaps with greater honesty and lucidity) identify this very stance as modernity’s founding myth. For them, the dream of overcoming all prior mythologies constitutes a revolutionary myth. It promises access to a technicist Olympus through not only an overcoming of history, but also the advent of a heroic new humankind emancipated from the shackles of temporality. Such a text is the 1909 “Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism”: a document which, for all its bombast and bathos, rightly deserves the key place that it was long ago assigned in accounts of the birth of cultural modernism. The manifesto opens with a clash between objects that is also an intergenerational clash. It pits copper mosque lamps perforated with stars against their own “electric hearts”: light bulbs whose brilliance they constrain; light bulbs fighting to break out. The copper mosque lamps stand in for a larger inventory of objects—plates, cabinets, oriental carpets—inherited by the manifesto’s author, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, from his father. Objects that bear witness to the poet’s upbringing in Alexandria, Egypt, but that, in so doing, crystallize everything that the manifesto subsequently identifies with the term passéism: ancestral indolence; the celebration of dead or moribund things; world-weariness; a taste for the precious, the arcane, and the exotic; repugnance for the present. This past-centered, contemplative paternal world, responsible for the decor of the poet’s apartment on Milan’s Via Senato, is about to be left behind by the manifesto’s second paragraph. The catalyst for its abandonment is the flow of traffic. A passing trolley and a roaring automobile drive Marinetti and his young friends out into the streets, where, bathing in the stark, artificial glare of the new public sphere, they can proclaim the overcoming of “mythology” thanks to the appearance of two new modes of transportation: automobiles (“we are on the verge of experiencing the birth of the Centaur”) and airplanes (“soon we will see the first Angels fly!”).⁴

Mythology is overcome inasmuch as, in Marinetti’s view and in that of his era, technology actualizes what was once only a poetic dream or a theological fiction. It gives rise to “living” machines that are also machines for living: machines that, because endowed with powers of agency, intuition, and moral autonomy, are capable of serving as prosthetic enhancements of human bodies and psyches. Two body/machine complexes are mentioned in the passages just cited: the driver/automobile complex figured by the Centaur and the pilot/airplane complex figured by the Angel. The first structures the central episode of the 1909 manifesto: the automotive flight into the outskirts of the city culminating with a crash cast as the actual scene of Futurism’s birth.⁵ It is this drive and accident, and the transformative impact ascribed to it that constitute my springboard for the following reflections. Before the accident, Marinetti appears bound to a shadowy fin-de-siècle world of mosque lamps and oriental carpets; after his rebirth in the “good factory muck [with its] impasto of metallic shavings, useless sweats, and celestial shards,” he emerges as the new metallic man with a pulsing light-bulb heart: the prophet of a gospel addressed to all the living men on the earth whose points include “singing the love of danger,” “exalting aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the sprint, the mortal leap, the slap and the punch,” the glorification of war as the “hygiene of the world,” and the demolition of institutions of memory such as museums, libraries, and academies.⁶ The new humanity forged through this initiation rite is literally and figuratively in the global driver’s seat: “the ideal lance-like projection of the steering wheel that he grasps in his hands,” states point five, “crosses the Earth, in the course of its own speeding orbit.”⁷

Two questions stand at the core of the present inquiry: first, why the choice of a speeding automobile as the vehicle for this metamorphosis which I take as the emblem of the transformation of premodern into modern man; and second, why the emphasis upon traumatic birth (or why must a crash resolve the initial clash)? The answers that I provide are necessarily speculative but place Futurism’s founding myth at the culminating point of an anthropology of speed and thrill that evolved over the course of two prior centuries: an “anthropology” inasmuch as it envisages accelerated motion not as a neutral physical event that leaves the traveler and the context traveled through unchanged. On the contrary, the transportation revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries precipitated fundamental perceptual and psychic changes in human subjects and in the fantasies that governed their modes of interconnection with landscapes traversed and viewed: changes that suggest a tight linkage between the history of transportation technologies and that of optical devices, from phantasmagoria to moving pictures, such that the story of moving vehicles is, from the start, the story of moving cameras; changes that so blur the distinction between the categories of realism and the hallucinatory or the fantastic that they demand a rethinking of the commonplace notion that modernism marks a revolt against naturalism.⁸

The following essay⁹ represents little more than a test drive of a book-length argument that, in its full unfolding, will include full treatments of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s accident in the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire; of John Mytton, sporting gentleman and wanton seeker of accidents whether riding horses or driving gigs and phaetons, and of the film magicians Georges Méliès, R. W. Paul, and Mack Sennett, codifiers of crashes as a generative comic device. Here the itinerary has been reduced to a series of shortcuts running from Delisle de Sales’s 1771 Lettre de Brutus sur les chars anciens et modernes; to Thomas De Quincey, whose hallucinatory experience of landscape atop a mail-coach prefigured his later opium-induced imaginings; to caricaturists such as George Cruikshank;¹⁰ to the Andy Warhol of the early 1960s whose silk-screened Car Crashes coincide with his first icons of Elizabeth Taylor; and to, finally, Vaughan, the hero of J. G. Ballard’s novel Crash! (1973) whose life of auto crashes culminates in “his only true accident”: the automotive masterpiece for which he has been rehearsing his entire life—a crash landing atop the same movie actress (whose failure qualifies it all the more as his only true accident).¹¹ Five complementary hypotheses inform this drive: first, that a fundamental bifurcation occurs by the beginning of the nineteenth century between passenger-centered and driver-centered modes of transportation or, to state the matter otherwise, between modes of mass transit and individual transportation, whether in the experiences and fantasies to which they give rise or in the sorts of discourses that are elaborated in order to regulate and represent them; second, that once technology devised a sufficient buffer between the surface traveled, the force of propulsion, and the individual traveler, it became possible to envisage speed as a kind of drug, an intensifier, an excitant moderne; third, that the human subject of speed—typically the driver—whom I will refer to later as the kinematic subject, once reshaped by repeated experiences of this stimulant, finds himself caught in an addiction loop, threatened, on the one hand, by monotony, and, on the other, by the need for ever new stimuli in order to maintain the same level of intensity; fourth, that the crash becomes a necessary feature of this loop structure, at once vouching for its legitimacy (by crystallizing the very intensity for which it stands), serving as a regenerative device (by initiating a new cycle of hyperstimulation), and marking an absolute limit (death); and fifth, that every accident requires a viewer, or better, a voyeur to relay its stimulus out into the world. The accident, in short, will emerge as the locus of a form of trauma that, contrary to prevailing traumatocentric accounts of modernity, engenders neither psychic blockage nor new sure-fire forms of regimentation or alienation. Rather, in the works I am here examining, trauma thrills. The thrills in question may be cheap or expensive, private or public, humble or exalted, but, whatever their nature, they represent, I will argue, a distinctively modern redaction of the sublime. In the eighteenth century the sublime transported spirits enclosed in motionless bodies; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it spirits away bodies that are themselves transported. In both cases it plays a key role in engendering modern forms of individualism and in secularizing the supernatural and relocating it in the everyday. If the driver was a god or angel in pre-modern times, the gods or angels of the modern era will be found holding the reins or sitting behind the wheel, so identifying individuality with the possession of and mastery over wheels. […]

Speed’s rise as a cultural thematic, its move into an everyday realm of perceptibility, its adoption as sacrament of modern individualism, became possible only with the development of mechanical buffers between rider, horse, and roadway: buffers that enable new fantasies of attachment, first, between rider and engine, and, then, according to a more complex logic, between rider, engine, vehicle, and/or landscape. […]

Whatever the answer, one thing is certain: a single dose of speed is never enough. Whether in the logic of amusement parks, modern transportation cultures, revolutionary movements, news media, or the cultural-political avant-gardes, thrill must follow thrill. Which means that accident must follow accident. De Quincey moves from mail-coaches to opiates; Marinetti from cars to airplanes to war; the thrill rider from attraction to attraction; the revolutionary dreams of permanent revolution. […]

Speed is the medium that ensures that the conjunction between human and mechanical individuals will engender not relaxation and tedium, but bigger living: quickened senses, aroused faculties, expanded powers of vision; acts of heroism, improvisation, and innovation; spectacular crashes and catastrophes; eruptions of laughter and glee. For this effect to be achieved, however, velocity must avoid becoming routinized. Only a constant increase in the stimulus it provides can avert the danger that danger itself will be driven out of the perceptual field. There is no escaping the resulting addiction loop or its aporias. Constant stimulus increases end up engendering resistance and/or the very tedium they were meant to ward off. This leaves the crash alone as a way out of the loop. But just as speed can become routine, so too the crash can become normalized. Even Vaughan, Ballard’s prophet of a coming Autogeddon, is forced to admit that “one car crash looks just like another.”¹² The threat can held at bay by varying every crash’s details, like Mack Sennett’s Lizzies of the Field (1924) with its protean pile ups or Méliès’s The Impossible Voyage (1904) whose seriatim accidents couple cars to pedestrians to trains to zeppelins to spaceships to buildings within the framework of a joyous rampage wherein everything is destroyed yet no one is hurt. But fated eventually to become just another “normal accident,” the crash’s stimulatory effect must necessarily attenuate unless it leads, in turn, to a “true” and definitive accident: one that brings the cycle to a close through the driver’s death. The only way to save the normal accident, that is, is to transform every accident into a dress rehearsal for a death collision, a premiere that is also a final performance.

“I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.”¹³ The circuitous prose is that of Andy Warhol from the 1963 interview in which he explained the simultaneous genesis of his Death in America series and of his silk-screen paintings of Liz Taylor and Marilyn Monroe.¹⁴ These images arose midstream amidst a crush of Pop icons extending from Jim Dine’s 1959 Car Crash pastels to John Chamberlain’s car compressions from the 1960s and 1970s.¹⁵ But whereas Dine probes a realm of dark psychosexual wounds and Chamberlain endows twisted hoods and bumpers with a lyrical swagger, it is Warhol alone who brings the story of Crash to a provisional close. For his serial patterns of stars and cars replay my inquiry’s central problematic of thrill and repetition in a more comprehensive and original manner. In the Death in America series, the ideal of doing like a machine translates into a non-recursive but repetitive system that sets off lurid images of intertwined cars and drivers against flat fields of orange, yellow, green, red, and white in such a way that they echo one another both internally and externally, but never without visual irregularities or accidents. The individual frames, exploring as they do a kind of no-man’s land between photojournalistic sensationalism and the icy look of police crash-site photos, traffic freely in voyeuristic thrills. But the latter reach the viewer by means of a detour. The appeal of the subject matter is distanced by enhancing the silk-screened photo’s black and white graininess, only to be reintroduced in the form of colored planes whose jarring ornamentalism creates a sense that the thrills have been flattened out and rendered cool.

Pop art’s romance with the car crash came about within a postwar context in which the speeding motorcar had been naturalized much like the speeding train at the time of Futurism’s birth. This naturalization was effected by similar means: through an array of technologies designed to isolate driver and passenger from the roadway, and the roadway, in turn, from the world, including softened suspensions; passenger compartments transformed into sealed cocoons equipped with autonomous sound and climate systems; rationalized superhighway networks. Cornerstone of the utopic, peril-free suburban universe regularly evoked in Warhol’s photographs, the automobile retains a sublime and dangerous flip side that affiliates it with De Quincey’s mail coach and Marinetti’s killer shark. Still a prosthetic enhancement for modern “dreamers, artists, and men belonging to no social class” and an accelerator of auto-erotic tremors, the car is for Warhol a mechanical individual akin to the theme park ride. Itself a star, it is also a star-vehicle and star-maker. But never more so than when it collides with or for an audience. In each and every accident car and riders are cast, in Ballard’s words, as “the principal actors at the climax of some grim drama in an unrehearsed theater of technology, involving crushed machines, the dead men destroyed in their collision, and hundreds of drivers waiting beside the stage with their headlamps blazing.”¹⁶ Is it any surprise, then, that Warhol could also produce celebratory icons of everything from carriages to cars?¹⁷ Hardly (figs. 22, 23). But even when implementing the Futurist slogan that “a racing car… is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace” one senses that the unrehearsed theater of technology is now being viewed, as it were, from the far side of the culture of thrill. The primary location of the artist’s ego and eye has shifted from the fiery thrillings of the impériale to the icy fire of a more distant site, a site occupied by an omnipresent mechanical voyeur. The machine in question and the machine that Warhol most wishes to become is not the car, but rather the camera. The latter’s automatism, its speed of image capture, the potentially unlimited reproducibility and manipulability of its output, render the camera the orchestrator of sequences of real and/or imaginary pile ups so vast and repetitious that they could easily fill any and every “museum of excitement and possibility.”¹⁸ Which is to say that, for Warhol, the camera as engine of thrill leads inexorably to the camera as engine of monotony. Machines, he avers, are about “liking things” and liking things means being machine-like “because you do the same thing every time. You do it over and over again.”¹⁹ So the story of Crash! ends neither with a bang nor with a whimper, but with an outcome that the founding manifesto of futurism could never have envisaged, not to mention embraced: the emergence of tedium itself as the greatest thrill of all.