[...]... that the libidinal economy of Cronenberg’s Crash (19 96), 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. .. 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,.. .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,... Routledge, 14 9 18 1 Latour, B (19 91) We Have Never Been Modern (tr Catherine Porter) New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf Žižek, S (20 01) Welcome to the Desert of the Real www.cms.mit.edu/zizek 13 2 ‘Will It Smash?’: Modernity and the Fear of Falling William Greenslade The first thing that strikes the moral enquirer into our social system is the respect in which wealth is held … with us, Money is the. .. G and F Guattari (19 72) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (tr Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R Lane) New York: Viking Freud, S (19 20) ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud 18 , 1 64 Haraway, D (19 91) A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century In Simions, Cyborgs and Women: 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... economy In this reading, the crash into the desert of Amersy, the pilot in The English Patient, works as a symbolic expression of the totalitarian ambitions of a disembodied, white, masculine subjectivity to master the marked corporeality of others, to eradicate all distance and difference The corporeality of things eludes the overseeing eye/I and its imaginary geographies The other of the disembodied subject... 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. .. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, these writers propose that the ‘age of technology’ has speeded up the oscillations of the fort/da process to the point that all feeling has been deadened Only in the crash can we find an approximation to the plenitude of barely imaginable intensity’ which virtual death provides Staged rail and car crashes were a popular spectacle in the cinema of the turn of the 19 th... Roland Barthes, Ben Highmore’s essay demonstrates that there is more to connect semiotic analysis and traffic accidents, photography and the everyday experience of modernity than might at first be thought He draws on key writers on modernity (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 . Grant 10 . Racing Fatalities: White Highway, Black Wreckage 11 7 Harjit Kaur Khaira and Gerry Carlin 11 . Negative Dialectics of the Desert Crash in The English Patient 13 1 Anne Beezer 12 . The Iconic. 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. 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 end of the