Travel’s Disciplines

Canadian Review of American Srud1es/Revue amad,emze d'itudes m11er1cmnes Volume 26, Number 2, Spring 1996, pp. 83-115 Travel's Disciplines Mark Simpson Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and our furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. (Benjamin 1968, 236) Certainly we are moving foster than before. Or, more correctly, we are being moved faster. (Ford 1926, 4) Introduction 83 In 1904, a cinematic attraction called Hale's Tours debuted to great acclaim at the Saint Louis Exposition; over the next two years, it took the U. S. movie-viewing public by storm. 1 Miriam Hansen tells us that "designed like a railroad car, complete with conductor and simulated sways and jolts, dickety-clack and brake sounds, this theater projected scenic views taken from a moving train" (1991, 32). Marshalling the hypnotic bond between travel and cinema, Hale's Tours rendered rail, the great nineteenth-century motor of system and industry, a simulacral commodity realized between motion and stasis, mediation and immediacy. Celluloid limned the repertoire of the written travelogue even as, by the same logic, it encroached on conventional travelling practice. This is one way for capitalism to keep bodies in their proper place, spending money to remain stock still-transfixed 84 Canadian Review of American Srud1es Revue Cmtad1em1ed'etudes amerimines by recorded movement. And kinesthesis makes it happen, holding viewers m thrall not only with a simulation of travel, an illusion of motion through space, but indeed with the very fact of motion from reel to reel. 2 Such enthralled fascination helps to suspend and, at the same time, to make profitable a host of anxieties (whether in travellers, or in consumers, or in makers of culture) about the unpredictability of modes of travel and also of bodies in motion. Broadly speaking, such anxieties concern the politics of cultural movement, of cultural mobility. And in the decades surrounding the turn of the century, these anxieties hit fever pitch. The great railroad strikes of 1877 set the tone for an era in which emergent social classes (as, for instance, immigrant workers) vied with more traditionally secure ones (the aristocracy, the middle class) for control of the terms of social mobility. In this period, waves of immigrants arriving from Europe and Asia and great numbers of African Americans moving south to north (and often back again) profoundly transformed not only the circumstance of U.S. social and cultural movement, but indeed what it might mean to stay put, to occupy a place at all. Newly arrived immigrant and alien bodies, mobile, animate, dynamic, proved indispensable to established and emerging industries (rail and cinema among them); at the same time, these bodies threatened standing social orders and cultural proprieties, not least with their indispensability. 3 Thus, it stands to reason that an attraction like Hale's Tours would find such a large and readily enthralled audience, playing as it did on the tensions connecting bodies and motion-tensions that, in very real ways, must have marked as they constituted any and every audience to 'take' the tour. 4 As I understand it, Hale's Tours did the work of a discourse I want to call 'disciplinary pace,' analogous to "disciplinary individualism 11 as elaborated in Mark Seltzer's Bodies and Machines (1992). Seltzer argues that at the turn of the century in the U.S. persons become individuals through the double logic of system and individuation. In Seltzer's account, machine culture does this work because it extends yet suspends human agency. In thus regulatmg human unpredictability, machine culture-and especially the body/machine complex-helps to render individuation systematic, disciplinary. Seltzer puts it this way: Mark Simpson I 85 The fabrication of disciplinary individuals involves the differentiation, supervision, and regulation of populations and the political 'anatomy' of the body; it involves the circular process of systematizing and individualizing , the techniques of classification, individuation, and representation that fashion statistical persons...