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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 vehicle’s 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 flipped 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 century’s first 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 affirm that the magnificence 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 breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot—is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.1 (figs. 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 finally

Fast (slow) modernJeffrey T. Schnapp

1. F. T. Marinetti, “Le Futurisme,” Le Figaro, February 20, 1909. Translated by the author.

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lead to the text’s appearance on the front page of the Parisian daily Le Figaro. The rest, as they say, is history (fig. 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, profit, 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, traffic 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 (fig. 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 (fig. 2): Filippo Tommaso Marinetti seated in his four-cylinder Fiat, 1908.

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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 movement’s 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, fixity versus portability, safety versus risk. As already noted, speed also signifies 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 first is entitled Speed Writings and contains ten commissioned essays written by dis-tinguished scholars on such topics as vehicular traffic, economic production, cognition in/and motor sports, the built environment, capital flows, modern materials, communications systems, media capture, the culture of accident, and the nature of aesthetic experi-ence. The second is configured as a series of fifteen 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 (Gérard de Nerval) to the present (Oiwa Keibo) made up of major or symptomatic statements regarding the powers and limits of the modern era’s 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 reflection upon some of the critical issues of our day, from questions of resource management

Opposite (fig. 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.

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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 influential 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 modernity’s 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 moment—whether the decisive moment or not cannot be taken for granted—within 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 Vidler’s “(The speeds of) History,” where a range of historical conditions of movement or repose—from the slow but progressive to the abrupt and fast-paced to the stopped to the backward moving—is matched with a set of architectural implications, vehicles of reference, limits, and penalties. The argument’s structure lays out a template that is fleshed 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 Mastruzzo’s fine-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 five 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

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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 confines of the eras of industry and information. Meikle shows how the central role played in engineering, architecture, and industrial design by such defining 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 signified com-paratively and materials do not take one another’s place seriatim. Pre-industrial, industrial, and post-industrial materials—or paleo-technic, eotechnic, and neotechnic materials, as Lewis Mumford would have it—all coexist, making their perceived velocities a matter that is culturally determined even as it is influenced 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 Niox’s 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 fly.” Yet Niox implies that the sort of real-time, mind-body fusion required by racing is little more

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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 Dimendberg’s “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 fixed 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 Seltzer’s essay on the normal accident. Seltzer’s frames of (self-)reference are multiple: “chance” encounters in novelistic fictions 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 traffic flows, 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-fic, the topic of Marjorie Perloff’s contribution to the volume. Perloff traces the rise and fall of the romance of auto-mobility from the

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avant-gardes (Marinetti and Khlebnikov) to the Beats (Kerouac) to Reyner Banham’s 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 flows find 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 Goldsmith’s 2006 col-lage novel Traffic, 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 Godard’s 1967 film Week-End and J. G. Ballard’s Crash (1973), parking lots in which dreams of progress and individual freedom are revealed as a cruel and costly joke. A fourth and final 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 flows, or the behavior of markets. Maria Gough’s essay, “Production,” approaches the topic through the lens of a cultural project: El Lissitzky’s 1926 maquette for a monumental “photo-fresco” entitled Record, in which the image of a hurdler is profiled against the backdrop of a fast-moving, electri-fied American cityscape, so as to serve as a double incitement to Soviet workers—to become record-breaking “athletes” both by means of the embrace of physical culture and by accelerating their productivity on the factory floor. 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 scientific 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 Alborn’s contribution to the book is framed within the field of economic history strictu sensu. It examines the history of

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efforts to impose velocity controls on capital and credit flows 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 credit’s capacity to fuel a financial 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 flows. 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 fine-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, Bois’s 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 difficulty, 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 Gérard de Nerval, among whose poems are found two of the earliest ruminations on speed’s impact upon the perception of land-scape. The first evokes speed’s 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 five main the-matic threads. The first is composed of pioneering descriptions of

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high-speed travel: from the era of stagecoaches and trains (Thomas de Quincey, Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman) to the first decades of automotive travel (Mario Morasso, Maurice Maeterlinck, Octave Mirbeau, Marcel Proust) to early evocations of flight (D’Annunzio and Marinetti). The second is dedicated to speed’s 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 traffic and data flows. The third thread is devoted to the accelerating pace of life and its consequences, whether from the standpoint of mental habits (Georg Simmel, João 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 figuratively (as was the case in the early literature of high speed travel from De Quincey to Morasso), literally (as in Harvey Cohen’s Amphetamine Manifesto), or both (as in Abbie Hoffman’s Revolution for the Hell of It). The fifth and final 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 Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, it features negative assessments of the modern cult of speed from Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Morand, and Valéry 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 era’s 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 traffic 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 finitude 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 flight speeds have plateaued, constrained by

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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 defining 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

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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 (fig. 4): Road-sign, Germany: “30 kilometers per hour speed limit zone.”

Below (fig. 5): Road-sign, Germany: “end of 30 kilometers per hour speed limit zone.”