26

Futurism begins with a four-month delay.

Its clock starts ticking on October 15, 1908, with the publication of the
following item in the Milanese daily Corriere della Sera:
This morning, a bit before noon, F. T. Marinetti was heading
down Via Domodossola in his car. The vehicles owner
was at the wheel accompanied by a 23-year-old mechanic,
Ettore Angelini. Although the details of the incident
remain sketchy, it appears that an evasive maneuver was
required by the sudden appearance of a bicyclist, and
resulted in the vehicle being ipped into a ditch. Marinetti
and mechanic were immediately rescued by two race-car
drivers from the Isotta and Fraschini factory, Trucco and
Giovanzani, each in his car. Marinetti was transported to
his apartment by the former and seems to have suffered
little more than a scare.
Within a handful of weeks the event has been reworked as
the founding myth of the centurys rst cultural political avant-garde
movement, initially literary but soon encompassing the full sweep of
the arts, whose eleven-point platform weds the exaltation of danger,
the habit of energy and fearlessness, aggressive movement, feverish
insomnia, the race pace, the mortal leap, the slap and the punch to
the unveiling of a new beauty:
We afrm that the magnicence of the world has been
enriched by the advent of a new beauty: the beauty of
speed. A race-car, its hood adorned with large pipes, like
serpents with an explosive breatha roaring car that
seems to ride on grapeshotis more beautiful than the
Victory of Samothrace.
1
(gs. 1, 2)
The prose is telegraphic, the message time-sensitive. The
manifesto is news from the future. But the news pipeline was full
of reports on the simmering Bosnian crisis (soon to be followed by
the Messina earthquake): so full that months pass before behind-the-
scenes lobbying by a family friend and Figaro stockholder nally
Fast (slow) modern
Jeffrey T. Schnapp
1. F. T. Marinetti,
Le Futurisme,
Le Figaro, February
20, 1909. Translated
by the author.
27
lead to the texts appearance on the front page of the Parisian daily
Le Figaro. The rest, as they say, is history (g. 3).
I begin with this little parable because it crystallizes the
double logic around which the present volume pivots: namely, a
modernity infused with such a sense of urgency that pace becomes the
basis for establishing priority, defending property and patent claims,
measuring productivity, progress, prot, intelligence, accomplish-
ment, value, and pleasure. But a modernity also whose very tempo
and complexity give rise to distinctive forms of slowness: distractions,
bureaucratic delays, trafc jams, cues, system crashes, physical
collapses, eruptions of boredom, obsolescence. The book probes both
sides of the speed/slowness divide, not as polar opposites, but as dual
emanations of a single system within which speed is king. Normal
breakdowns, modern forms of slowness represent the outermost
layer of a repertory of limits aimed at sustaining a higher overall
pace, from safety devices that make the assumption of ever greater
physical risks a rational behavior to investment vehicles that act as
insurance policies against speculative risks while creating, in turn,
new opportunities for speculative risk-taking. In so doing, however,
they also mark a boundary line: a liminal clearing from which
critiques of modernity can wave the banner of slowness in the name
of causes such as a re-enchantment of the world, social rootedness,
enhancing the quality of life, the return to nature, and responsible
resource management. These forms of dissent fall within the compass
of Speed Limits no less than do race-cars adorned with serpentine
pipes or motion capture and replay devices.
Left (g. 1): The
Winged Victory of
Samothrace, c. 300
BCE. Marble. Louvre
Museum, Paris.
Photo: Scala / Art
Resource, NY. On
view at the Louvre
since 1884.
Right (g. 2): Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti
seated in his four-
cylinder Fiat, 1908.
28
29
The book surveys this territory on the hundred-year anniver-
sary of the publication of The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism.
Whereas the centenary is being marked by several important exhi-
bitions and publications that commemorate the movements impact
on the arts, Speed Limits is critical in character, exploring a single
futurist theme from the standpoint of its contemporary legacies. The
legacies in question are multiple because speed means multiple
things with respect to modern life: time-space compression; changes
in cityscapes and landscapes brought about by the transportation
revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; accelerations
in the pace of everyday life; new approaches to construction and
economic production; new modes of organizing, communicating,
and sharing information; the rise of transient lifestyles, global travel,
and mass tourism; new attitudes regarding duration versus
obsolescence, xity versus portability, safety versus risk. As already
noted, speed also signies the rise of distinctively modern regimes
of slowness that encompass everything from techniques for the
capture of otherwise unseen phenomena to dreams of escape from
the rat race of everyday life to forms of outright protest in the
name of quality (slow food), sustainability (green development), and
renewed community (new urbanism).
Rather than provide an overview of these themes, the present
volume traces a selective pathway through them. The book is
divided up into three main sections. The rst is entitled Speed
Writings and contains ten commissioned essays written by dis-
tinguished scholars on such topics as vehicular trafc, economic
production, cognition in/and motor sports, the built environment,
capital ows, modern materials, communications systems, media
capture, the culture of accident, and the nature of aesthetic experi-
ence. The second is congured as a series of fteen interspersed
windows that, together, form a visual essay entitled Rush City in
which individual thematic clusters are explored and probed. The
third, entitled Speed Readings, assumes the form of an anthology
extending from the early nineteenth century (Grard de Nerval)
to the present (Oiwa Keibo) made up of major or symptomatic
statements regarding the powers and limits of the modern eras cult of
velocity: the challenges to which it gives rise and the consequences it
entails, actual or potential, short- or long-term. By weaving together
these three components, the book aims to be more than a companion
volume to an exhibition. Rather, it sets out to provide a historically
informed, transdisciplinary framework for reection upon some of
the critical issues of our day, from questions of resource management
Opposite (g. 3):
Front page,
Le Figaro, February
20, 1909.
Le Futurisme
(better known as
The Founding
and Manifesto of
Futurism) is featured
on the left side of the
page.
30
and urban planning to cognitive questions such as how contempo-
rary cultural forms promote modes of attention or inattention to the
relationship between pleasure, place, and pace.
A few assumptions shape the present volume and the
essays that form its backbone. First among them is the conviction
that the implicit or explicit technological determinism that informs
some of the most inuential historiography on modern revolutions in
transport needs to be balanced by a more bidirectional understand-
ing of the relationship between technological and cultural change.
Among other consequences, this means applying pressure to
modernitys self-description as a radical rupture event as well as
rejection of the present-centered teleologies of theorists like Paul
Virilio who rely upon military determinism as a universal explanatory
key. The past two centuries represent only one momentwhether the
decisive moment or not cannot be taken for grantedwithin a long
history of revolutions in modes of transportation, communication,
and construction practices, not to mention dromological imaginings
of the sort that have long shaped religious belief systems, both
ancient and modern.
Evidence to this effect may be found in Anthony Vidlers
(The speeds of) History, where a range of historical conditions of
movement or reposefrom the slow but progressive to the abrupt
and fast-paced to the stopped to the backward movingis matched
with a set of architectural implications, vehicles of reference, limits,
and penalties. The arguments structure lays out a template that
is eshed out in the other essays in domains ranging from art to
economics to communications. Here the tone is playful but the intent
serious: to map the reciprocally structuring logic of modes of trans-
port and understandings of historical time, particularly as it spills over
into the domain of the built environment. Architecture, an art that
might be misunderstood as essentially wedded to notions of stability,
solidity, and duration, is shown instead in a multiplicity of guises, all
informed by an ideal pace.
Nino Mastruzzos ne-grained account of the shifting
cadences in western practices of writing, entitled Writing/Reading,
is no less macrohistorical in its approach. It is built around a story
line whose key rupture points take place not during the industrial
revolution, but instead in the late Middle Ages and the information
age. For over ve centuries, fast writing remained a stable construct
based upon the cursive, running hands (or script) developed by
medieval merchants and clerks, and dependent upon the morpho-
logical renewal of writing that occurred thanks to learned efforts
31
to recover antiqua hands. The practice was barely affected by
inventions like the pencil, fountain pen, ball-point, and felt-tip pen;
and proved resistant even to the initial incursions of mechanical type-
writing. Only with the increasing ubiquity of what Mastruzzo refers
to as video writing has the keyboard triumphed over the pen and
script been displaced by ever more instantaneous, paperless forms
of messaging, whose reliance upon abbreviations and acronyms
mirrors scribal practices from the pre-print era.
In Materials, Jeffrey Meikle pursues a parallel track, though
within the connes of the eras of industry and information. Meikle
shows how the central role played in engineering, architecture,
and industrial design by such dening materials of modernity as
iron, steel, glass, and plastic is never reducible to considerations
of functionality. Symbolism plays a leading role, often trumping
functionality, in a context within which speed is signied com-
paratively and materials do not take one anothers place seriatim.
Pre-industrial, industrial, and post-industrial materialsor paleo-
technic, eotechnic, and neotechnic materials, as Lewis Mumford
would have itall coexist, making their perceived velocities a matter
that is culturally determined even as it is inuenced by actual usage.
A second heuristic assumption made in the course of the
book is that there is no simple way to disentangle somatic from
cognitive iterations of velocity: the accelerated circulation of bodies
from the accelerated circulation of thoughts, perceptual stimuli, or
data; physical hyperactivity from mental hyperactivity. As demon-
strated in a cluster of essays that straddle the mind/body divide, the
external and the internal histories of speed represent two sides
of the same coin. A case in point is Pierre Nioxs essay, Frenzy,
concerned with high-speed games that hinge upon instantaneous
life and death decision-making processes. Based upon a lifetime
of experience as a road racer and engineer, it makes a double
philosophical argument. On the one hand, it points to the existence
of an erotics of speed whose feverish transports and inherent de-
structiveness have led cultures throughout history to situate them
somewhere in the borderland region between the world of spirit
and the senses, the human and the divine. On the other hand,
it makes the case for speed as a distinctive attribute of human
intelligence that has come to the fore with the democratization of
mobility in industrial and post-industrial societies. Philosophies
of mind from Plato to the present, Niox argues, have consistently
neglected forms of thinking on the y. Yet Niox implies that the
sort of real-time, mind-body fusion required by racing is little more
32
than a distilled version of a cognitive skill set that is fundamental to
all aspects of modern life, from navigating the modern cityscape to
reading complex signage while on the move to cruising the informa-
tion superhighway. To celebrate this skill set as a distinctive form of
intelligence is to intervene, alongside the futurists with their cult of
multiplied man, on the pro-speed side of the ongoing debate over
the powers and limits of mental multitasking versus contemplative
models of reasoning, of thinking as blinking versus thinking as
distraction-free rumination.
The third assumption that informs the book derives from the
second: namely, that communications media perform a decisive
role in structuring the interplay between bodily and mental experi-
ences of modern time and space. The case in point analyzed in Ed
Dimendbergs Capture is the medium of moving pictures, initially
wedded to the architectures of modern fun palaces (arcades, cine-
mas), then introduced into domestic spaces (via televisions, home
theaters, and the like); eventually so pervasive that the entire built
environment, indoor and outdoor, becomes a potential messaging
and display device. This decoupling of moving pictures from xed
places is accompanied by the transformation of once passive ordi-
nary citizens into active masters of velocity, able to accelerate and
decelerate, reverse, remix, and replay image streams captured by
ever more miniaturized and ubiquitous devices.
The resulting fracturing of the world into a kaleidoscopic
multiplicity of actual and perceived paces places humans,
machines, and media devices on the collision courses examined in
Mark Seltzers essay on the normal accident. Seltzers frames of
(self-)reference are multiple: chance encounters in novelistic
ctions by the likes of Patricia Highsmith; the crime story (Poe to
CSI); cybernetics, systems, and information theory; and game theory.
Each opens up a window on the same fundamental paradox:
an intensively monitored and controlled world in which, due to the
normativity of accelerated movements and the multiple, complex,
intertwined systems that support these accelerated trafc ows,
uncontrollable concatenations of cause and effect become the norm.
The normal accident arises due to interactions so complex that
they defy prediction within a world in which the calculation of risk
has been elevated to the status of a science.
The everyday setting within which modern individuals most
frequently experience the above-described reality is vehicular traf-
c, the topic of Marjorie Perloffs contribution to the volume. Perloff
traces the rise and fall of the romance of auto-mobility from the
33
avant-gardes (Marinetti and Khlebnikov) to the Beats (Kerouac) to
Reyner Banhams writings on the Los Angeles freeway system to the
era of gridlock. Initially a privileged realm of adventure and for the
expression of individual freedom; later the supporting infrastructure
for various utopias of urban and/or national development, highway
systems have come to embody the dreams and nightmares of a
civilization built upon extreme mobility. On the one hand, their
ows nd themselves naturalized, abstracted away into a kind of
human meteorology, tracked in the terse language of commuter
sigalerts, the very stuff out of which Kenneth Goldsmiths 2006 col-
lage novel Trafc, with which Perloff opens and closes, is composed.
On the other hand, they become the apocalyptic theaters of paraly-
sis and perverse pleasure like those evoked in Jean-Luc Godards
1967 lm Week-End and J. G. Ballards Crash (1973), parking lots in
which dreams of progress and individual freedom are revealed as a
cruel and costly joke.
A fourth and nal assumption, closely associated with the
prior three, informs the volume and is of special pertinence to two
essays: namely, that the cultural and technological history of speed
is of a piece with that of modern economic systems, whether from the
standpoint of consumption, production, capital ows, or the behavior
of markets. Maria Goughs essay, Production, approaches the topic
through the lens of a cultural project: El Lissitzkys 1926 maquette for
a monumental photo-fresco entitled Record, in which the image of
a hurdler is proled against the backdrop of a fast-moving, electri-
ed American cityscape, so as to serve as a double incitement to
Soviet workersto become record-breaking athletes both by
means of the embrace of physical culture and by accelerating their
productivity on the factory oor. The essay goes on to show how
productivism became one of the unifying ideologies of early decades
of the twentieth century, associated with Americanism because
it blended together the application of scientic management
techniques with Fordist production models, but appealing equally to
dictatorships and democracies, to free-market and command econo-
mies. Whereas in the teens and twenties, the focus of efforts to
modernize production were organizational, in the 1930s, particularly
in planned economies like that of the Soviet Union, the focus
becomes the acceleration of growth as measured and proved by
statistical data, itself the object of constant manipulation, elabora-
tion, and visualization.
Timothy Alborns contribution to the book is framed within
the eld of economic history strictu sensu. It examines the history of
34
efforts to impose velocity controls on capital and credit ows in Britain
and the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The controls in question, Alborn suggests, were modeled upon prior
attempts by engineers to limit mechanical speed, so as to reduce the
risk of failure: the governor of the steam engine found its Victorian
match in self-acting laws designed to restrict credits capacity to fuel
a nancial meltdown. During the subsequent century, speed
bumps, circuit breakers, and other similar devices become associ-
ated both with markets inherent ability to regulate their own dynamics
and with techniques and regulations for averting market panics and
crashes. Alborn shows how, paradoxically, such braking mecha-
nisms actually end up further contributing to a speeding up of capital
and credit ows.
The essays conclude with Slow (fast) modern, a brief essay
by Yve-Alain Bois that assumes the form of an apology for slowness:
or rather, for the value of the sustained gaze that returns to the same
object over and over; that probes the depths and subtle rhythms of its
surfaces; that pays tribute not to the fast and loud, but to the fragile,
the delicate nuance, the ne-grained. Though his plea is for the
enduring value of a medium with deep roots in tradition and craft
(painting) and his case study is Nicolas Poussin, Boiss stance is not
outside and against the modern, but rather within, even as it marks its
distance from the digital and the contemporary. His points of arrival
and departure are, respectively, Piet Mondrian and Kenneth Noland,
and for their art he is quick to reclaim a power usually reserved for
contemporary navigator-producers of image streams: that of choreo-
graphing multiple simultaneous paces. The difference is less the static
nature of the painted object than the demands that it makes upon the
expert viewer to locate rhythms and velocities that never give them-
selves away easily. So slowness in and of itself is no guarantee of
quality; rather the true values of an alternate contemporaneity would,
for Bois, be difculty, friction, and resistance.
The spectrum of themes explored in the Speed Writings
section of the book is mirrored in the Speed Readings anthology.
Here a single author both introduces and concludes: the romantic
poet Grard de Nerval, among whose poems are found two of the
earliest ruminations on speeds impact upon the perception of land-
scape. The rst evokes speeds enchanting powers; the second a
limit: the fact that, once started, the rat race must go on.
Sandwiched in between these Odelettes is a chronologi-
cally ordered sequence of texts woven together out of ve main the-
matic threads. The rst is composed of pioneering descriptions of
35
high-speed travel: from the era of stagecoaches and trains (Thomas
de Quincey, Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman) to the rst decades of
automotive travel (Mario Morasso, Maurice Maeterlinck, Octave
Mirbeau, Marcel Proust) to early evocations of ight (DAnnunzio
and Marinetti). The second is dedicated to speeds impact upon the
landscape and built environment. It includes writings by Kazimir
Malevich, Erich Mendelsohn, Virgilio Marchi, Norman Bel Geddes,
Le Corbusier, and Marshall McLuhan on subjects ranging from new
construction techniques to urban planning to the rationalization of
trafc and data ows. The third thread is devoted to the accelerating
pace of life and its consequences, whether from the standpoint
of mental habits (Georg Simmel, Joo do Rio), the tempo of the
workplace and the home (Frank Gilbreth, Christine Frederick),
innovation and education (R. Buckminster Fuller), or works of the
imagination (Italo Calvino). The fourth explores the history of speed
as stimulant, whether understood guratively (as was the case in the
early literature of high speed travel from De Quincey to Morasso),
literally (as in Harvey Cohens Amphetamine Manifesto), or both (as
in Abbie Hoffmans Revolution for the Hell of It). The fth and nal
thread is composed of critiques of speed from a multiplicity of
perspectives. Along with samples from the history of protest against
velocimania from the socialist Paul Lafargue to Ken Keseys Merry
Pranksters, it features negative assessments of the modern cult of
speed from Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Morand, and Valry Larbaud
to contemporary apologies for slowness by the likes of Pierre Sansot,
Folco Portinari, and Oiwa Keibo.
An anthology with this kind of breadth cannot aspire to
comprehensiveness. Rather, its aim is to provide a richly varied but
selective documentation of one of the modern eras enduring domains
of debate. When futurism proclaimed its gospel of speed as the
religion morality of modern life, it stood on the promontory of a
century that saw in wireless communications, auto- and aero-mobility,
and the industrial metropolis the promise of new freedoms, not laws
and limits, not to mention trafc or data jams. Likewise, in the accel-
eration of technical progress and industrial growth, it saw the
triumph of human art and invention over nature, not the nitude of
natural resources or the long-term costs of sustaining a civilization
built upon consumption.
Viewed from the promontory of a new millennium, our
perspective is at once continuous and discontinuous. On the one
hand, the romance of speed might well seem to belong to the past.
Average roadway and ight speeds have plateaued, constrained by
36
fuel costs, the load-bearing limits of the transportation infrastructure,
and environmental regulations. The voices of protest against unre-
stricted growth, environmental devastation, stressful lifestyles, and
fast food have grown into a chorus. They have been joined by educa-
tors decrying the cognitive consequences of a culture in which speed
equals distraction. Few of the leading currents of experimental art
espouse the beauty of speed as a dening contemporary virtue or
value. Streamlines have become a form of kitsch.
On the other hand, ours remains an age of limits that are
perpetually postponed. The pace of everyday life continues to acceler-
ate, supported by the ubiquity of portable media and communication
devices, as well as by transit and data infrastructures. Car culture
37
invades ever new and more populous areas of the globe while air
travel is rapidly becoming the equivalent of travel by bus. Business
books with titles like The Need for Speed, Speed is Life, Rev it Up, and
The Age of Speed proliferate on bookstore shelves, vastly outnum-
bering their go slow counterparts. Speed sports are as popular
as ever. The wheels of commerce and banking never cease to turn.
And the tempo of entertainment forms, from the television news to
interactive media, is noticeably brisker than even a mere decade ago.
This is the contentious terrain examined in Speed Limits.
Opposite (g. 4):
Road-sign, Germany:
30 kilometers per
hour speed limit
zone.
Below (g. 5): Road-
sign, Germany: end
of 30 kilometers per
hour speed limit
zone.