158: Carolyn de la Pena's The Body Electric

In The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American, Carolyn de la Pena examines the relationship between bodies and machines in American from the 1850s to the 1950s.  Using novels, cartoons, trade mags, health fraud investigation records, newspapers, manuals, and other primary sources, de la Pena recovers a wide range of technologies and devices designed to restore the body to its natural state.  In doing so she shows how industrialization led not just to a reorganization and mechanization of production and society, but to a technologically-mediated experience of the body as well.

The Body Electric is divided into three general sections: Dudley Sarget and Gustav Zander's weight-lifting machines and training programs designed to "balance" the body through uniform muscle development and "unblock" energy trapped within; technologies like electric belts, vibration devices, and magnetic collars (mostly from 1880 to 1930) that supposedly injected energy into the body to increase its reserve force; and radium (radioactive) waters that were taken as tonics and in baths to flood the body with heat and energy, mostly from 1902 to 1940.  Throughout, de la Pena examines the relationship between these technologies and gender (increasing male strength; electrically stimulating male sexuality; curing neurasthenia), class (upper classes went to gyms; middle classes bought a wide range of technologies; working classes bought radium dispensers), and race (a Dr. Pancoast at UPenn treated African Americans by applying x-rays for up to 15 minutes at a time "allegedly" to turn their skin white.)   She also shows how these treatments were often supported with the language of science: the laws of Thermodynamics; offsetting entropy; electric transfer; energy.

Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about this book is that much of this "better living through technology" discourse held on until the atomic bomb, and some of it, like using physical fitness to cure neurasthenia, lives on in only slightly modified language today.

128: Tim Cresswell's On the Move

In On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World, Tim Cresswell explores mobility - which he defines as "meaningful movement" - at a variety of scales and in a variety of places in the (mostly anglophone) West.  Pulling from case studies that range from Frederick Taylor's time and motion studies to British ballroom dancing to the LA Bus Riders' Union, Cresswell argues that mobility is "both center and margin - the lifeblood of modernity and the virus that threatens to hasten its downfall."  While the "mobility turn" had been taking the humanities by storm since 1996, this book is the first to interrogate what mobility is rather than defining it against what it isn't (place, boundedness, foundations, stability.)

For Cresswell, mobility is actually three mobilities that mutually constitute one another.

• Empirical mobility is the actual movement of people, things, birds, etc.; it is the closest to actual movement and thus the most abstract (because it traces displacement, not necessarily the meaning of displacement.)  
• Representations of mobility are the photos, literature, philosophy, etc., that capture mobility and try to make sense of it, usually in ways that are ideological.  They might link mobility to freedom, transgression, creativity, life and so on.  They reproduce mobility and interpret it according to a particular worldview.
• Experienced mobilities are mobilities that are practiced, embodied, ways of being in the world, as well as how we experience and feel about mobility.

Mobility is both subjective and objective, and the perspective from which we experience/ study mobility has a lot to do with how we interpret it.  Because mobility is both subjective and objective, it is also both socially constructed and universal, in the sense that everything moves, and the interplay between this universal fact of life and a particular movement within a particular context gives that movement meaning.  Mobility is thus a "necessary social production," and a way of inextricably integrating geography with the politics of social life.

Cresswell's writing style is wonderfully clear and engaging, and his many case studies, as well as his brief history of the development of mobility into an individual right in the modern capitalist state, cover mobility at a variety of scales ranging from the individual to the workplace to nation, empire, and the placeless place of the Shiphol Airport.  The only thing missing, maybe, is a study of imperial movement from the perspective of the colonized, with some attention to the relationship between labor migration and uneven development.

119: Yi-Fu Tuan's Space & Place

From my notes from Spring 2012: 

In Space and Place, Yi-Fu Tuan develops three themes: the relationship between space and the human body; the relationship between place and space; and the range of human experience or knowledge of space and place.  He argues that human experience of the world (in all its fullness) both shapes and is shaped by space and place.  Tuan develops this humanist argument against more abstract geographical conceptions of space; this book is generally considered to be the first “human geography” book.  For Tuan, experience is both feeling and thought.  Experience consists of all the myriad ways in which humans interact with their environment: via the body (the five senses, along with “sensorimotor,” moving through a space, and “skin”), via the imagination (including myths, fantasy, narration, memory), and conceptually or rationally (a big-picture, god’s-eye view).  Space is more abstract, something that you move through and dominate; think openness, spaciousness.  Places “stay put;” they acquire value when humans pause in their movements through space and stop to experience them, to create memories there, or to otherwise create links between themselves and a physical location.  While a single human experience cannot possibly encompass the complexity of the real world, full experience of space and place, is integral to the development of human consciousness and culture and to the reintegration of body and mind (discourse).