3 - The Body and the Machine: The Sensory Discoveries of the Cyclist

Summary

Of course [humans] aren't things, but things aren't things either […] Anyone who has looked at machines knows how unmechanical they are.

Bruno Latour

The bicycle offers a mechanised yet embodied experience of movement – in contrast to the disembodied, vision-focused experience of travelling by train and in motorised vehicles – that vividly enacts the exchange between human and non-human actants. Throughout the nineteenth century, the dividing line between humans and machines, the organic and the mechanical, seemed to grow more and more salient. Raymond Williams points out that ‘mechanic’ and ‘organic’ were near synonyms before the industrial era, when Romantic poets began to formulate opposing definitions of the two. At the end of the nineteenth century, with the multiplication of new technologies, this question was of particular pertinence. Mark Seltzer suggests that turn-of-the-century discourses on bodies and machines were articulated around four main concepts: machines replacing bodies, people becoming more machine-like, technologies creating bodies, and finally the possibility of an intimate coupling of bodies and machines. As we shall see in the course of this chapter, elements of all of these possibilities recurred and overlapped in literature about cycling in the period. Cycling went some way towards mechanising human movements and perception, industrialising the body's motion while exposing it to the possibility of shock and injury. Yet the bicycle also offered an intense sensory journey, reconnecting its users to an embodied experience of movement in the wake of the railway era and providing a means of achieving a unique synthesis of human and mechanical elements. The bicycle was technology on a human scale, capable of reconnecting its users with their senses, while encouraging a porous, reciprocal exchange with the landscapes, people and objects encountered by the mobile subject. In this way it was an industrial machine that offered a means of escape from the pitfalls of industrial civilisation.

In examining the cyclist's relationship with the machine, it is particularly useful to integrate materialist criticism that has focused on the exchanges between subjects, objects and their surroundings. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of assemblages, the actornetwork theory of Bruno Latour, Bill Brown's research into how things have shaped the modern subject and Jane Bennett's work on vital materialism all influence my readings of texts that express an intimate dialogue between people and their bicycles, with the senses acting as an interface between the two.