[...].. .Crash Cultures: modernity, mediation and the material from the crash The emancipatory, humanist politics of Marxism and feminism have emphasised the use of machines by the ruling class to enhance their own dominance over their ‘others’, a dynamic in which those others become structured into a dualistic framework In this dualism it is the body of the western white male that fuses with the machine,... Moving closer and travelling faster than the horse and cart, the driver and his two passengers notice the camera/audience and begin gesturing at it/us to move out of the way The car veers across the road, towards the camera, and, just as it is about to collide with the camera, the entire frame filled by the coachwork of the car There is a cut, and hand-written text is flashed very briefly on the screen:... pleasure to end it It is not the human characters who are the vehicles of sexual identity, nor are they the conduits of desire Rather they suffer the effects of autosex, they become its victims and they eroticise themselves precisely as such in the form of their wounds and scars The generalized lack at the core of this libidinal economy foregrounds sex as disaster The crashes in Crash are not isolated events,... vanishes around a bend The static camera is positioned at waist height on the left-hand side of the road The film opens with a horse and cart travelling teasingly towards the camera/audience, and then passing safely by, on the other side of the road, to move out of the right-hand edge of the frame The road is momentarily obscured by the clouds of dust kicked up by the horse’s hoofs, and, as it clears,... that the libidinal economy of Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), with its repetitious sequence of sex then crash then sex then crash, is the expression of a drive that is working towards the total consumption and consummation of all the energies stored in mechanical and biological apparatuses alike We invite you to explore in these essays the tangled wreckage of crashes and the traces of their impact in the. .. and Hardy, the inherent irrationality of capitalist relations is 7 Crash Cultures: modernity, mediation and the material revealed By the end of the century the crash is figured as violent and unpredictable in its consequences, in a world devoid of moral certainty or just rewards for virtue Failure or success becomes the only moral standard Good is what survives Modernity’s ‘other’ erupts in the non-realist... mechanosphere, whose crashes seem to denote some ‘other enjoyment’ beyond the scope of human subjects Faster and faster, fact and fiction, absence and 25 Crash Cultures: modernity, mediation and the material presence, become indistinguishable in the hyper-real/reel Ironically, the objects created by a human desire for increased sensation, be they films, games, computers, drugs, often leave the subject empty,... unpredictability; the epistemology has shifted from an individual to a systemic basis to occlude the act of resistance, and to efface plots of recuperation and renovation In The Whirlpool (1897) Gissing, like Eliot, re-positions the crash by bringing it to the forefront of the narrative, making the crash the trigger for the major developments in the text In chapter five of the novel, the banker, Bennet... translations of material and John Wilson for technical advice 23 Crash Cultures: modernity, mediation and the material complicated sort’ (Gunning 1989: 37) An analogy for the appeal of these films can be found in staged locomotive crashes, a popular spectacle at the turn of the century, or a Coney Island switchback ride called ‘leapfrog’, which sends two cars racing towards one another on an apparent... feminism and Adorno’s negative dialectics to argue against the selfsufficiency of the concept that subsumes the object Jean Grimshaw: The Iconic Body and the Crash The cultural significance of Diana’s iconic body produced the ritualised, collective response to her death This could be compared to the sacrifices held in primitive cultures, but differs in important ways The intensity of the response to the crash . to analyse the materiality of the crash. Central to a materialist account of the crash, is the relation between the imaging of crashes that proliferate across the mediascape and the phenomenology. Cultures: modernity, mediation and the material 6 works to blur the distinction between imagination and material reality. Haraway uses the figure of the cyborg to address the problems posed by the. (Benjamin, Simmel, Marx and Junger) to argue that the binary distinctions commonly drawn between the real and the imaginary, the base and the superstructure, the material conditions of existence and their representation