Infernal Machines

Abstract

Goodman and Faulk continuedfrom previous page modernity. Art historian T. J. Clark is decisive on the point of modernity's codependence on capitalism. In Farewell to an Idea (1999), he reminds us that the dislocations of modernity are indistinguishable from the triumph of industrial capital, the massive accumulation of capital in Europe generated by empire , and the ongoing triumphal progress of global capitalism. The nineteenth century witnessed the invention of underwater telegram cables, steam engines, telephones, telegraphs, and train travel: the mechanical foundation for our current techno-utopias ofinformation gathering and our new modes of spatial (non-temporal) perception. From the outset, modernity 's self-representation was always about speed and simultaneity, the euphoria of instant sensation. Modernity, then, is less about a future orientation that breaks with tradition, than the re-construction of "the present" as a fetishized moment. The new hegemony of the moment makes it increasingly difficult to think about little else but the present, even as the content of "the present" diminishes to that of the single instant, indistinguishable from the next. Modernity is the time of hell: that is, the time of eternity, of instants that accumulate and pile up, like so many "things." Reviewer Adam Tobias Schräg finds fault with Mike Davis's history of the car bomb, but realizes the forces that currently go against acts ofhistorical retrospection. Our everyday experience ofthe war goes against Davis's labor. How can you think of the history of the car bomb when the nightly news has effectively turned car bombing in Iraq into a repetition sans significance? Schrag's remark concisely sums up the current phenomenology of perpetual war: its practice is conjoined with a mode of consciousness that fastens on the present, and so evacuates history. Yet in this regard, the tradition of modernist writing may not be the surest guide for future practice. If modernity is in fact the historical emergence of the truly horrible—that is, a world where all practice is ruled by the chance configuration of profit and loss—modernism itself can be read as a huge misunderstanding, or, if you prefer, a sublime misreading of modernity's chaos as teeming possibility . "Modernism. . .had truck with a modernity not yet fully in place," T. J. Clark reminds us, and thus modernists had the luxury to misread modernity's void as but merely the pre-condition for a revision ofaesthetic and social practice that modernity would ratify when it finally arrived. Now that it has arrived, we know better than the European avant-garde did about what capitalist modernity really looks like. Modernity: the time of hell. This is to say that we should regard perpetual war not as an event or a new ontology but, more generally , as part of modernity's extensive dislocations. Benjamin's aphorism elegantly captures one side of the coin, of modernity as negation; the possibility that modern societies can now actto transfigure their circumstance is the other. In our moment when the triumph ofmodernity, impossible to distinguish from its ravages, threatens to turn us into one nation, under amnesia, the most important task is to historicize our experience and thereby contextualize it. The struggle to keep the history ofmodernity from becoming our ontology is the first step out of the war machine: to keep modernity's version of the present at bay, and re-activate our memory. Reading these books can help us do that. Robin Truth Goodman is an associate professor of English atFlorida State University. Herpublications include World, Class, Women: Global Literature, Education, and Feminism (Routledge, 2004) and Infertilities: Exploring Fictions of Barren Bodies (University ofMinnesota Press, 2001). Barry J. Faulk teaches Victorian literature and cultural studies in the Department ofEnglish at Florida State University and is the author o/Music Hall and Modernity (Ohio University Press, 2004). Infernal Machines Adam Tobias Schräg Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb Mike Davis Verso http://www.versobooks.com 228 pages; cloth, $22.95 The unprecedented ubiquity ofthe car bomb in Iraq—sometimes more than a dozen a day—has become such a redundant piece ofthe nightly newscast that it almost seems mundane from the comfort ofour living rooms. In...