‘Safety is in our speed’: Reading Bauman Reading Emerson
‘Safety is in our speed’: Reading Bauman Reading Emerson

Summary/Abstract: Taking the lead from John Tomlinson’s call to think of modernization and globalization not only in terms of ‘metaphors of territory and borders, of flows and the regulation of flows’, but also as ‘shifts in the texture of the modernity’, the essay offers a tentative exploration of how mechanical velocity and acceleration have contributed to the reshaping of the American cultural imagination. The essay focuses in particular on a few passages from Ralph Waldo Emerson, read through the lenses of Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity, and argues that the former’s response to speed is not only ambivalent, but for the most part paradoxical. Speed is certainly a feature ‘of a generalized global modernity’ and therefore, as Tomlinson argues, it makes little sense to think of it ‘as the original property of any one national culture’. On the other hand, the essay insists that global traits of modernity may be differently perceived and culturally constructed within specific geo-cultural spaces. Emerson, for example, tried to come to terms with mechanical velocity by imagining that abundance of ‘free’ spaces could attenuate the more disruptive consequences of velocity, a notion inherited by some of the more visionary US counter-culture of the Sixties and Seventies.

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