Histories of Time and Technology – Session 5

Human perspectives on time have not always been the same. Since the advent of Modernity and the introduction of new technologies – first mechanical, later electronic – we have come to celebrate speed, innovation and ‘the new’. In this panel two researchers will investigate the myth of the new, the culture of speed and stress, and explore new approaches to the history of culture and technology.

With David Edgerton (UK) and Enda Duffy (IE).

David Edgerton
The Shock of the Old

Music is a wonderful example of the mixing of the old and the new – new music on old instruments, and vice-versa, the long life and the rehabilitation of the old – from period instruments to vinyl discs. In this music is a microcosm of the human world. Yet when we think of science, technology, and the modern, we resort to crude stage theories in which the new supplants the old, is radically more powerful than the old, and renders the old merely of antiquarian interest. We need to understand the modern technological world in less naively ideological ways, and get to grips with its materiality in richer ways.

Enda Duffy
High Energy: Soma, Techne, Stress

A talk about the history of stress. Coined only in the 1930s, ‘stress’ is perhaps the modern medical term which has become most pervasive as a description of our relation to the material world, yet it has never really been theorised outside physiology and psychology. Continuing issues raised in The Speed Handbook (2009) regarding adrenaline, Duffy discerns in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century a scientific project to rethink organic life in terms of rates of motility and mobility – as a mechanism for the generation, dispersal and conservation of energy (of which ‘speed’ is one component). This invariably allies issues of human and animal energy to issues of affect and emotion.