Car accidents are, however, predictable and preventable. As any STS scholar would tell you, the technical solution to dangerous driving is not a speed camera or Latour’s iconic road bumps. The way to regulate speed is to design slower cars. But car engines are specifically designed and marketed for their capacity for high velocity and fast acceleration. Cars are not only transport machines but also intimate objects expressive of individuality and lifestyle choices. (Even I must admit to being seduced by the allure of speed, having owned an MG sports car as an eighteen-year-old in Australia and enjoying its close-to-the road feel.) According to J. G. Ballard’s novel Crash, the car crash may even be a source of sexual fetishism. The incongruity of the automobile’s promise of freedom of movement with the actuality of a largely sedentary existence in a landscape dominated by trafic-overloaded motorways is even more pronounced today. However, it is the speed of information flows rather than of motorcars that is at the forefront of our imagination.
The Metropolitan Pace of Life
A sense of acceleration has thus accompanied the path of Western modernity since its origins. The modern metropolis is the prime site for the intensification of time use, as it creates a dense set of possible interactions in a small space. As we move into an era where more than half the world’s population lives in cities and the number of global cities has mushroomed—estimated to number about seventy worldwide—the urban experience is becoming ever more pervasive.33
It is in this context that Simmel’s writings have once again become resonant. For Simmel, in contrast to other social theorists, it is the metropolis rather than the industrial enterprise or production or rational organization that is key to modernity. His insights about the increasing pace of life in fin de siècle Europe, his take on the zeitgeist, have such affinity with postmodern discussions of our contemporary condition that I want to recall them here.
In The Philosophy of Money, Simmel analyzes the ephemerality and briefness that have become signifiers of the temporality of modernity. For him, there is an intrinsic connection between the increased pace of life in the city and the peculiarity of money. Indeed, he draws a direct parallel between the efects of the mathematical character of money and the general use of pocket watches: “like the determination of abstract value by money, the determination of abstract time by clocks provides a system for the most detailed and definite arrangements and measurements that imparts an otherwise unattainable transparency and calculability to the contents of life, at least as regards their practical management.”34
Chapter two
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