![]()
p.1
1 Architectures of hurry
An introductory essay
Richard Dennis, Phillip Gordon Mackintosh and Deryck W. Holdsworth
(Lao Tzu, Chinese philosopher, sixth century BC)
(John Wesley, English cleric, eighteenth century)
(Will Durant, American philosopher and historian, early twentieth century)
(Earl Monroe, American basketball player, born 1944)
In his survey of Keywords, Raymond Williams famously observed of ‘Community’ that ‘it seems never to be used unfavourably’.1 Had he been writing about ‘Hurry’ as a keyword, he would probably have reached the opposite conclusion. Writers may be ambivalent about ‘Speed’, they may use ‘Haste’ both positively and negatively – Wesley’s godly haste (above) is matched by the proverb warning that those who ‘marry in haste, repent at leisure’ – but few of them have a good word for ‘Hurry’. This collection of essays takes its title (albeit pluralized to imply a diversity of meanings) from E.M. Forster’s disdainful reference to ‘the architecture of hurry’ in his novel, Howards End (1910). But Forster is by no means the only novelist to denigrate ‘hurry’.
Writing in journalistic mode for an American popular magazine, the prolific English novelist Arnold Bennett commented that, ‘The first-rate organizer is never in a hurry’. He went on, in the gender-biased spirit of his times (1929), to claim that:
In so doing, he was recognizing the subjective, emotional and less-than-rational character of ‘hurry’, in contrast to the physical laws that govern and measure speed, but he was also questioning the place of ‘hurry’ in modernity. Bennett could hardly be described as ‘modernist’ in literary style, but he was quintessentially ‘modern’ in his productivity and efficiency as an author of at least 40 novels and short-story collections, 21 books of non-fiction, 11 plays and countless magazine articles.3
p.2
Yet ‘Hurry’ as much as speed is intrinsic to modernity. We cannot conceive of modern society and modern capitalism without invoking, not just speed, but the desire for speeding-up, the fears and anxieties associated with acceleration, and the physical, psychological, and emotional consequences of hurry. We are accustomed to exploring processes of rationalization, liberalization, and regulation of the movement of populations and things as central features of the modern urban-industrial world. The subsequent requirement cum desire for people, goods, money, information and even weather to ‘be somewhere’, at some ‘when’, birthed extraordinary cultures of interaction, expedited and warranted by transportation and communications innovations. Bicycles, buses, trains, streetcars, automobiles and ferries whisked everyday people from homes perhaps to go to school, open a shop, clock in at a factory, rise in an elevator to a skyscraper office, or attend an evening or weekend social – all mediated by modernity’s preoccupation with time and space compression. Yet ever-changing transportation and communications infrastructures simply stimulate more connectedness, more mobility, more distant and near interactions – and more hurry – to perpetuate still more ironies of modernity, the clash of its conveniences and securities with its ambiguities and absurdities. Long ago, Marshall Berman demonstrated these conflicting tendencies in his brilliant dissections of Baudelaire’s Paris, Dostoevsky’s St Petersburg and Robert Moses’ New York, just as David Harvey trenchantly deconstructed the modern contradictions of late capitalism at every scale, from the global and imperial to the streets of Baltimore and Paris.4 Hurry epitomizes these ironies and contradictions. In seeking to speed up, we often end up doing things more slowly (as another proverb, ‘more haste, less speed’, reminds us); if we do succeed in physically speeding up, we often fail to anticipate the negative psychological and emotional side-effects: order and discipline provoke resistance, de Certeau’s ‘tactics’ and ‘transgressions’, and a resort to ‘short cuts’.5
Hurry and mobility
Recent scholarship in the social sciences and humanities has produced substantial literatures on modernity and speed, and on modernity and mobility.6 Studies of mobility first of all focused on flows of people and commodities; more recently on information, ideas, policies and practices. There were explorations of the friction of distance, of differentiation by class and gender, of time–space compression and distanciation and their political and economic correlates.7 Meanwhile, new strands of social and cultural history and human geography have focused on the senses and the emotions. How were speed and mobility experienced?8 Variously, this research has been related to physics, physiology, neurology, psychology and aesthetics. When we travel, do we experience our own moving through the landscape, or does the landscape move past us? Of course, it is both, and this is the two-pronged point about mobilities and modernity: their capacity to marry technologies and emotions to fashion exhilaration. So, moderns hurry corporeally through technologically mediated landscapes, even as landscapes move through them, modern human bodies and minds subject to the science and sentiment of motion. Thus, there have been discourses on the thrill of acceleration, ever-increasing speed, and on the anxieties associated with excessive speed, mobility and displacement. Mimi Sheller and John Urry have taken these notions to their logical conclusion, averring that speedy mobility is the enemy of public civility; mobility in modernized landscapes daily produces tragedy, as speed, mass and inertia converge in distinctly modern and antisocial ways.9 This collection, however, focuses not on mobility per se, nor on speed as an objective attribute of modernization, but on ‘hurry’, a necessarily relative phenomenon. You can travel at high speed without hurrying, and you can travel quite slowly but still be ‘in a hurry’.
p.3
Tim Cresswell differentiates between ‘movement’, which he aligns with space and location, and ‘mobility’, socially produced movement laden with meaning, which he associates with place.10 In the same way, we might suggest that we speed through space, but we hurry from place to place.
In his agenda-setting Mobilities (2007), Urry identified five interdependent ‘mobilities’ that contribute to the production of social life: First, and the most obvious form of physical mobility, the corporeal movement of people, extending from daily routines of movement to or from work through to once-in-a-lifetime migrations chosen by intercontinental settlers or forced upon exiles or refugees; second, the physical movement of objects, such as manufactured commodities, moving through the production cycle from raw materials to finished product, and then traded, deployed, re-traded, recycled or abandoned; third, imaginative travel through diverse print and visual media that allow us to experience places otherwise inaccessible; fourth, communicative travel through the transmission of messages, letters, telegrams, phone calls and, now, various forms of electronic communication; and fifth (and perhaps less relevant to the historical focus of this collection), virtual travel. Urry argued that there are increasingly complex systems that make mobility both possible and – through their guarantee of repetition – predictable.11
In the nineteenth century, which Urry described as ‘the century of “public mobilization” through new times, spaces and sociabilities of public movement’, mobility systems included national postal services, commercial electric telegraph networks, railways and steamship companies offering scheduled services advertised in timetables, and other sources of trustworthy information such as guidebooks and package tours, organized by expert agencies such as Thomas Cook.12 These networks were sustained by a fixed infrastructure of rails, roads, pipes, cables and their terminal or access points: railway and bus stations, telephone exchanges and kiosks, sewage works, hotels, post offices and postboxes, warehouses and department stores, a veritable architecture to facilitate the mobility of people, things and ideas.
p.4
George Revill also discusses the significance of infrastructure, but from a methodological perspective, as a way in which historians and historical geographers can engage with the ‘mobilities turn’.13 He notes that, in mobility studies of the past, often our only forms of evidence are apparently mute buildings, structures and machines of transport archaeology and second-hand accounts in print and visual media. This may be unduly pessimistic, as effectively first-hand accounts in diaries, novels and witness statements can replicate the ethnographic and participatory sources employed by researchers of contemporary mobilities (as several chapters in this collection demonstrate). But Revill’s point is that, even in restricting our attention to assemblages and the agency of infrastructure, we can move beyond traditional ‘transport history’ into ‘mobility history’.
Mobility is about more than connectedness; it is also about the speed and frequency of intermittent connections. Today, when we rely so heavily on continually available and updatable electronic communications, we may think of newspapers or letters as impossibly slow ways of spreading information. But the Victorian press and post office were not the sad remnants that we experience today. Nowadays, our daily newspapers often take several days to publish reviews of live events such as plays and concerts, and, if we are unlucky and our newsagent receives copies printed the previous evening, we miss out on the latest sports results or, indeed, any news that breaks after about 6 p.m.14 The assumption seems to be that the printed paper doesn’t really matter. For the latest news, we go online. But, through the nineteenth and even into the late twentieth century, major newspapers published several editions daily, frequently changing their headlines and layout to accommodate ‘breaking news’, and an early morning edition would publish full reports and r...
