The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism (review)

It is difficult to make strong claims after just one reading of such a dense and innovative book, but this is undoubtedly one of the stronger monographs I have read recently. Although the theme of the book seems quite ordinary (there have been a lot of publications on speed and velocity in the year we celebrate the first centennial of the Futurist Manifesto), it brings such a new breadth and depth to the theme that one can only conclude that we have here a really groundbreaking study on a topic we falsely believed we already knew too well.

Duffy's larger framework is much indebted to Fredric Jameson: The Jamesonian axiom of "always historicize" is the basic stance of the book, together with the desire to fully politicize the stakes of whatever historical data are put forward by the historical analysis. Moreover, Duffy shares many of Jameson's visions on modernity, commodification, alienation and, more importantly, on the necessity of reading history and society from a Marxist point of view. Finally, and totally in accordance with Jameson, Duffy accepts the dialectic relationships of time and space as the most fundamental issue in the development and understanding of modernization. Yet The Speed Handbook is not at all a simple application of Jameson's thinking to the period of high modernism (1900-1930), which is central in this book (despite some smaller excursions to previous and later periods).

First of all, the author does not fully adopt all of Jameson's critical paradigm as developed in his theory of "cognitive mapping," in which Jameson interprets some of Modernism's strangeness in geopolitical terms, that is, as a side-effect of the gap between life at home and the colonies abroad. What Duffy puts forward is something completely different: The Speed Handbook takes as its starting point that at the end of the 19th century there are no longer blank spots on the map. It argues that the complete colonization of the world through Western empires has created a new situation, in which the disappearance of any real frontier provokes phenomena of more intense colonization (Duffy uses the term "endocolonization," or "interior" colonization), no longer of places out there but of the citizen's sensorium and body. This rereading of modernism as endocolonization is an important step forward in the materialist history of culture as defended by scholars like Jameson.

Second, and corollarily, Duffy manages also to nuance the very strong distinction between modernism as a time-ruled (and hence historical) paradigm and postmodernism as a space-ruled (and hence ahistorical, if not antihistorical) paradigm as theorized by Jameson in much of his writings on contemporary culture. Although the focus of The Speed Handbook is not at all on postmodernism, Duffy makes very clear that notions of space and place are definitely at the very heart of modernism, including at the very heart of its obsession with the seemingly temporal aspects of movement and speed. In the wake of his basic assumption of modernity as a geopolitical situation deprived of any external frontier (since the various empires covered the whole world by around 1900), Duffy argues that space and place are not "ignored" or "marginalized" by the dominantly temporal or chronological paradigm of modernism as innovation, but that the very notion of speed (as well as the related notions of movement, progress, innovation, etc.) can only be read as a specific answer to the destruction of place and its substitution by abstract space. The vanishing of any frontier produces both a destruction of the heterotopic utopia of the colony and of the place formerly called home (which can no longer be defined in contrast to a heterotopia that no longer exists), while at the same moment the concreteness of all these places starts to be replaced by abstract notions of movements between points in space. This terribly unsettling evolution, which disintegrates traditional subjectivity, is then compensated for by...