Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860-2000 (review)

Nicholas Daly continues to produce useful books about the rise and evolution of modernity. Literature, Technology, and Modernity, 1860–2000 is inventive, resourceful, and well-grounded in the social and cultural history of the hundred and forty year period the book covers. Broadly speaking the book works in an area of study that has become more important in the last dozen years or so. It goes under a number of names but "mechanization of everyday life" is perhaps the most accurate. The collision of the human body and nervous system with the new technologies of the twentieth century defines the point of entry for Daly. His "texts" are the late nineteenth century the sensation novel, two kinds of cinema, and David Cronenberg's film version of J. G. Ballard's novel Crash. Each of these discourse types reflects and produces new kinds of bodily and nervous energies, and each locates the intersection of a new technology and human interactions with it.

Daly attempts to rethink modern subjectivity along new lines. His general thesis proposes that the body has been modernized by its various encounters with new technologies. Take sexuality for example; Crash brings us to a new arena of eroticism. The hard metal and plastic body of a car running up hard against the soft pulp of human flesh supposedly arouses us. In the novel and film this is taken to an extreme that most people will not have actually experienced, but no doubt stimulates dream and fantasy life in new ways. But think of the amount of sex, from intercourse to oral sex to mutual masturbation, which has occurred in cars parked in secluded places, or even moving cars for that matter, ever since the first Model As rolled off the assembly lines in Detroit. The car is as important a place in the geography of sexual activity as the bedroom or the modern office photocopy room. I'm not sure we need to follow Ballard and Cronenberg out past the sexual norms of suburban car culture to understand how the hot red muscle car with sub-woofer shaking your heart has helped to mechanize a certain kind of not very deep, not even very intimate sexual action. Perhaps a motorcycle or biker film, with that great big beast of a machine throbbing away between your legs, might have made for an interesting chapter on the interplay of the human body and its mechanical appendages.

Cronenberg's Crash is a cult film for small audiences of cinéaste or avant-garde tendencies. The war documentary, the Hollywood glamor film, and the sensation novel, on the other hand, are not remote from the everyday experience of everyday people. These chapters offer the more lively and convincing insights in the book. About the sensation novel, Daly tells us, against the grain of the criticism, that the genre does not tell the tale of individuals trying to escape from a hostile machine culture. The novel and drama of sensation help to acclimatize readers to industrial time and space. It is through the stimulation of a reader's nervous reactions that the novel actually brings about the acclimatization. Industrial time and space may overwhelm the senses, but rather than trepidation, the subject experiences a whole series of new pleasures and excitements via shock and suspense. These new pleasures, Daly argues, help to synchronize the reader's nerves, not to mention his or her sexual life, to industrial modernity.

Daly's principal icon of the industrial state is the railway. He sees, with good reason, that the railway, at the level of technology at least, drove modernization all through the nineteenth century. It helped to modernize the senses and to make a certain style of nervousness a common experience for all. The railway journey assaults the nervous system of the traveler and the sensation novel naturalizes the experience, readying it for the next great leap forward in the structure of feeling. The railway was the first great shaper of a specifically...