And this cognitive unconscious rises out of the layerings and interleavings of body
practices and things which we might frame as ‘instincts’ or, more accurately, ride
on the back of the cognitive unconscious. Rather, every moment is processed as
a prior intent, style or tone which arises from perception-in-movement, every
moment is the fleeting edge of a sensory forecast (McCrone 1999), quite literally
a stance to the world.
With these ‘thoughts in mind’ (how easily we use these questionable phrases),
we can now move to a consideration of how body practices show up in the modern
world and how the modern world shows up in them. To do this, we first need to
clear away some tired old pictures of the world.
The go-faster world
Elsewhere (Thrift 1995, 1996, 199 7 ), I have criticized the notion that we live in
a speeded-up world in which friction has been lost and everyday life skids along
on the plane of velocity. Much of the literature which enforces this notion is based
upon a simple technological determinism which unproblematically maps the
apparent powers of things on to subjects. While it is undeniable that people and
messages now move faster than they did, old practices have been adjusted,
and new practices have been invented, which make it impossible to simply read
off this physical fact on to culture. Further, it is possible to argue that speed is itself
in part a cultural creation, a classical modernist trope now in general cultural
circulation (see Kern 1983) as a series of metaphors and analogies and as a rhetoric
of ‘speedy’ things.^5 This cultural creation of speed itself depends upon the depic-
tion of certain places, things and people as slow-moving, most particularly those
places, things and people connected with nature, the countryside and so on.
This is, of course, a very strange opposition since one might just as well argue
- precisely through the instruments which have become available to measure
speed – that nature is actually very fast. The speed of light is, well, the speed of
light. Chemical reactions can work at astounding speeds. Even that slow old thing,
the human body, works reasonably fast. Though in our brains, nerve impulses only
tend to crawl along – at between 2 and 20 miles per hour – along the heavily
myelinated nerves (such as muscle and the sensory nerves) nerve impulses travel
at up to 2 4 0 miles per hour (McCrone 1999; Norretranders 1998).
But, more than this, the opposition ignores a general reconstruction of
time which has taken place (quite literally) over the last 150 years, a sense of body
practices which constitute and value the present moment, rather than spearing
into the future. Ironically, these body practices have all taken shape around the
increasing awareness of kinaesthesia, a sixth sense based on the interactive
movement and subsequent awareness of body parts:
we obtain a sense of our own movement not only from specialised receptors
in the inner ear, joints, tendons and muscles but also from what we can see
hear and feel... vision, ‘for instance’, is kinaesthetic in that it registersStill life in nearly present time 63