Accelerating modernity: Time-space compression in the wake of the aeroplane

Journal of Transport History, The, Sep 2005 by Simonsen, Dorthe Gert

It is not easy to get a firm grip on the concept of modernity. Moreover it is probably not a very modern gesture, to follow Charles Baudelaire's classic definition, and identify the modern by its transient and fleeting character. Yet, in the prevailing tangle of attributes defining modernity, one stands out as especially interesting to historians of transport. In the last decades the modern quest for speed - the idealisation as well as the actual manifestations of acceleration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - has come to play a significant role in the definition of modernity as a historical epoch. This focus on speed has led to the idea that the invention of mechanical vehicles marked the rise of modern society. Contrary to movement stemming from the legs of humans or animals, machine-based transport could be accelerated, seemingly, without limit. According to this theory, modernity originates in the mechanical ability to speed movement up, because the subsequent acceleration of transport and information affects the basic categories of time and space or, to be more precise, it distorts the pre-modern stability of the relationship between time and space.

Thus, in Liquid Modernity, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman offers an account of the rise of modern society based on acceleration and the resulting ability to manipulate time: 'History of time began with modernity. Indeed, modernity is, apart from anything else, perhaps even more than anything else, history of time.' Time acquires history, Bauman argues, once the speed of movement becomes a matter of technology. From this point on 'all extant, inherited limits to the speed of movement could be in principle transgressed. Only the sky (or, as it transpired later, the speed of light) was now the limit, and modernity was one continuous, unstoppable and fast accelerating effort to reach it.'1

In this way the fleeting and transitory character of modernity can be linked with the increasingly swift circulation of goods, information, capital and people. Baudelaire's modernism - the idealisation of the transient and the pursuit of the new and 'modern' - is coupled with a will to go ever faster. In this respect one could argue that the development of mechanical means of transport has not only responded to a practical need for shortening distances, it has also been a prerequisite for conceiving and 'performing' the idea of the modern.

Historians of transport may applaud Bauman's view of modernity, seeing in it a recognition and confirmation of the central position of their field of research. While historical studies can verify the claim that the development of mechanical vehicles has had a crucial effect on the formation of modern society, also the quest for speed has been used by historians to describe the aim and effect of multitudes of inventions in their accounts of modern transport development. Bauman's record, in other words, may be nicely aligned with the narratives of transport history. Even so, the pursuit of speed is often held within a descriptive realm in historical studies, while sociologists often analyse modernity in broad terms. In both instances, the purpose of modern acceleration remains vague, and there is a tendency to let the arguments run in a tautological circle. On the one hand, Bauman, in his generalising form, accounts for the quest for speed and the haste of modern life by referring to the innovation and ongoing acceleration of the mechanical means of transport. On the other hand, historians of transport frequently use the quest for speed as an unproblematic, causal explanation or motivational factor in historical narratives of technological progress. Hence the social ideal of acceleration is explained by technological capacity, while the technological development of faster vehicles is accounted for by elusive references to the modern need for speed. What, however, were the values and specific meanings of speed in modern society?

A focus on speed offers common ground for intellectual exchange and dialogue among scholars of modernity and transport studies. To perform that role, though, speed needs to be wrested out of its hypostatised state, first by studying the differing perspectives on velocity in the historical sources and second by breaking up the linear narrative of speed and acceleration. Though the numerical speed of vehicles may have shown a more or less straight-line progression since the invention of the railroads, past conceptions of speed during the same period have not. In other words, the 'reality effects' of acceleration during the modern period, or the social construction of speed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, should not be framed as an evolutionary story.

In this article I attempt to 'unstraighten' the path of speed by following the trail of the aeroplane. I do so by exploring the ways the aeroplane has been perceived by two significant representatives of modernity: first, the Italian avant-garde movement, Futurism, in the 1910s, and its conception of the flying machine and its effects, and, second, the Swiss architect Le Corbusier's view of the aeroplane in the 1920s and 1930s in light of his functionalist ideas. Both the Futurists and Le Corbusier were influential in defining what was modern about modern society or, rather, what was passé and what should be done in order to create a truly modern world. They both confirmed the key role played by transport technologies - notably aeroplanes and automobiles - in establishing modernity, even if they reached quite different conclusions as to what that role implied. Focusing on its temporal and spatial implications, the speed of the aeroplane led the Futurists to proclaim the destabilisation and annihilation of time and space as the core of modernity. A decade later, Le Corbusier reached the opposite conclusion as he celebrated the flying machine's stabilising effects, its objective 'supervision' of the world underneath and its incarnation of the functionalist ideal of the straight line.