The Arts of the Motorcycle: Biology, Culture, and Aesthetics in Technological Choice

Anyone trying to understand the role of the motorcycle in society today routinely encounters one variant or another of a line used by some Harley-Davidson fanatics to explain why they love their bikes: "If you have to ask, you won't get it." Though this is meant to be a conversation-stopper, to anybody serious about researching the many cultural dimensions of motorcycling it's a sign of beliefs and emotions underlying technological choices that are almost religious in their intensity--and hence tantalizing hints of human truths-in-hiding. The task for the researcher thus becomes getting to and then understanding what's behind those beliefs, which are so often dressed as fashions and obscured by passions.

The passions that drive technological choices obviously involve aesthetics, and some thirty years ago, Cyril Stanley Smith proposed that we should incorporate an understanding of aesthetics at what he called the "structural" level in technohistorical research. "Everything complicated must have had a history," Smith wrote, and in his essay "On Art, Invention, and Technology" he laid out the many reasons why "neither art nor history can be understood without paying attention to the role of technology; and technology cannot be understood without history and art." ¹ In the context of studying motorcyclists and their machines' roles in history, I have concluded that the most productive approach to understanding the technological choices people have made with motorcycles begins with a Smithian analysis of their roles as "art."

I use "art" here in quotation marks not to suggest that motorcycles might be a sort of faux art but because, as I'll try to show later, the word actually should encompass much more about what we do for "artistic" pleasure with, to, and because of motorcycles than we usually realize. In the essay noted above, Smith pointed out how many fundamental technological processes and products were created specifically for aesthetic pleasure and appropriated after their discovery or invention by innovators seeking so-called practical applications in everything from metallurgy ("begun with the making of necklace beads") to rotary mechanical motion ("first used in the drilling and shaping of necklace beads"). He suggested that historians who wanted to understand technology in history needed to understand the "relation between real structure and properties" in the complex structures created by human behavior, just as "the messier sciences such as old-fashioned biology or my own metallurgy have been concerned with complex structures." Smith was particularly intrigued by the then-recent development of what he called "new methods capable of revealing the whole structure at all levels" to physical scientists, methods that, he believed, had the benefit of "thereby incidentally opening a new level of funeous record for study by historians." ("Funeous" was Smith's term for the "internal structural features" that arise from the history of "everything complicated," and which "provide a specific record of it." He named these "structural details of memory . . . after the unfortunate character in Borges's story 'Funes the Memorious' who remembered everything"). ²

My own efforts to understand motorcycling have shown me the value of the conclusions Smith reached about relating "funeous" and "afuneous" details by means of careful structural studies of the "real structures" involved. With motorcycling, the most important "real structures" are the riders--human beings--and their machines, which both must be analyzed not simply as what they are or seem to be "in culture" but as what they are as structures, one biological and the other mechanical. The bike and rider together make up a kind of "complex structure" that is assembled first and foremost at what the human-factors profession calls the "Man-Machine Interface," or MMI, even before the cultural constructs are built around, for, and because of the bike-rider combination. Focusing analytical attention on the MMI and what it does when the bike's wheels roll is how I've...