Bicycling, Motorcycling, Rhetoric, and Space [1 ed.] 9781666928464, 9781666928471

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Bicycling, Motorcycling, Rhetoric, and Space

Bicycling, Motorcycling, Rhetoric, and Space Hunter H. Fine

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fine, Hunter Hawkins, author. Title: Bicycling, motorcycling, rhetoric, and space / Hunter H. Fine. Description: Lanham, Maryland : Lexington Books, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022034573 (print) | LCCN 2022034574 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666928464 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666928471 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Cycling--Social aspects. | Motorcycling--Social aspects. |  Communication--Social aspects. | Thought and thinking--Social aspects. Classification: LCC GV1043.7 .F56 2023  (print) | LCC GV1043.7  (ebook) |  DDC 796.6–dc23/eng/20220830 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022034573 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022034574 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Chapter 1: On Cycling



1

Chapter 2: Horse Metaphor Chapter 3: Bicycle Idea



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55

Chapter 4: The Bicycle and Nostalgia



Chapter 5: The Motorcycle and Conflict Chapter 6: Motorcycle Image

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97



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Chapter 7: Sophistic Rhetorical Theory and Movement ‌‌‌Chapter 8: Poststructuralist Distance and Cycling ‌‌‌‌‌‌‌Works Consulted Index







149 179 211

223

About the Author



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Chapter 1

On Cycling

Riding motorcycles and bicycles builds on the individual and collective experiences of riding horses. By riding two-wheeled human-powered and motorized vehicles, humans comment on their spatial, social, and theoretical surroundings. In doing so, they take part in the constructions of these contexts. Through riding, we write cycling into being, becoming cyclists in the process. When viewing or discussing them, we associate and distance ourselves from the experience while coming to better understand the meaning of the practice itself. In this book, I describe a way of thinking and communicating that arises from bicycling and motorcycling adding another level of commentary concerning the conceptual implications of the practice. The use of these industrial objects results in deliberate and intentional forms of human movement, which are envisioned here as active ways of understanding, approaching, and responding to ongoing sociospatial environments. In turn, they are partially produced by the discourses surrounding them and the ways in which everyday practitioners respond. To better understand these aspects, I examine the practices of riding bicycles and motorcycles alongside sophistic rhetorical and poststructuralist theory. Equestrian relationships, particularly those associated with horse-mounted mobility, play a significant role in establishing our spatial configurations and expectations. We are often reminded of this in everyday space and symbolic discourse. I draw from the perspectives of performance studies, critical cultural studies, and postcolonial studies to further examine these connections. The matrix of social, political, and philosophical theory I employ in this book aims to move the thinking within each field in particular directions while focusing their lenses on a common artifact, the technical objects themselves, and the practices of riding them. The overall intellectual attention to these subjects and paradigms presented in this text functions within the contexts of human, cultural, and critical communication studies. Throughout, I use the term cycling to describe a shared ontology or nature related to riding 1

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two-wheeled machines. In this theory of riding, I include the horse as a referent, in use for over six thousand years, the bicycle for over two hundred, and the motorcycle for around one hundred. I argue that each are extensions of the previous and have much to offer as sites of academic, social, and cultural inquiry. By looking at cycling in this tripartite arrangement, we can further understand the ways in which various movement-based practices are epistemological or capable of providing a way of knowing. Humans that ride these forms share a similar subjectivity or conceptual identity that remains connected through history, practice, and text. By bringing forms of movement that are often separated in everyday spatial arrangements together, we can create physical sites of harmony. Similarly, by bringing intellectual traditions such as sophistic rhetorical theory and poststructuralist thought together, we can create discursive sites of unity. These forms of mobility, and the ways of thinking they foster, are endeavors that inform our structural and social environments, remaining open to further examination. They largely occur within everyday public space, and as we ride, whether pedaling pedals or twisting throttles, we contemplate and comment on an on-going conversation. Here, on the page, I hope to further inform the audience of some of the symbolic productions at play and how they, at times, intersect and inform one another. In Surfing, Street Skateboarding, Performance, and Space: On Board Motility (2018), I explored the cultural and symbolic implications of surfing and street skateboarding. In the process, I outlined a particular way of thinking which arises from riding boards. In this text, Bicycling, Motorcycling, Rhetoric, and Space, I construct a similar framework to examine the social, cultural, and theoretical impacts of bicycling and motorcycling. By looking at the progression of riding practices alongside the development of theory beginning with the Sophists, I seek to understand individual mobility as a deliberative function within participatory societies. Cycling, like riding boards, offers us a way of viewing our spatial situations. Motility is discussed here as an intentional and therefore conscious physical movement derived from, when combined with a cycle, an ontological orientation pertinent to riding. The Latin root mot, or to move, “includes an equally active mental engagement that stems primarily from bodily movement and position sensations” (Fine vii). I recognize this ontology as an intentional manner of moving and communicating. It is a type of movement-thinking that blends conceptualization with articulation through practice. Spread across the processes of thinking, communicating, and practicing, the form of critique the practice of riding offers is based on its performance, which entails a series of physical, rhetorical, and theoretical functions. A cycling ontology is an awareness, sustained through types of motion and interpretation that involve reading, contemplating, and responding to

On Cycling

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ongoing verbal and nonverbal environments. This awareness is ephemeral and durable, a way to understand the world and communicate this understanding to others. It is a form of immediate articulation; a method of qualitative inquiry that immediately expresses its findings. Within this framework, I attend to a series of questions. How has riding drawn our bodies into specific postures, prompted us to create unique objects, captured our imaginations, and encouraged us to relate to one another in particular ways? What can an examination of cycling tell us about other forms of moving, communicating, and thinking? What does it mean to ride bicycles and motorcycles through collective spaces? And finally, how can cycling be viewed as a form of structural critique? To answer these questions and others, I ground this work in the humanities and the liberal arts, the global intellectual perspectives of Western philosophy and critical theory, and communication studies. Along the way I also draw from some of my own experiences as a bicyclist and motorcyclist as qualitative forms of performance inquiry. The development of horses, bicycles, and motorcycles as vehicles of human mobility is illuminating when read alongside their cultural, societal, and political impacts. As subjects they play a large role in the configurations of our social and individual identities. To a lesser degree, I examine the transportation technologies surrounding these forms of mobility; however, they primarily function as supporting vehicles for the various social contributions pertaining to forms of mobility and theory. Because we have been riding in similar ways for thousands of years within environments that have changed significantly, it is also an important subject matter to explore in relation to its rhetorical and theoretical dimensions. This examination of specific ways of moving has much to offer how we view various practices that might be read as texts. Thus, I state that bicycling and motorcycling, drawn from horsemounted movement, functions not only as a mode of transportation, and thus physical communication, but also a way of thinking. Ultimately, cycling can offer us a path to understanding other nonverbal practices as forms of critical inquiry. The act of cycling, either by human pedaling or machine-powered operation, can be described in many ways. Bicycling, motorcycling, cycling, biking, and pedaling, for example, all suggest riding, which in turn references the horse. It is the human-animal/object configuration and riding posture as an extension of our bipedal gait, that connects these differing forms of movement. Thus, we ride, putting one leg over the saddle of a horse, bicycle, or motorcycle in similar ways. In the process, who we are and the nature of the spaces we encounter alter. Each share a unique and shared orientation to the various objects, animals, and spaces they intersect. Being almost ubiquitous as forms of daily transportation, they have become ingrained in a U.S. and global consciousness. As products of modernization we have produced,

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consumed, and interpreted the bicycle and motorcycle; as they have developed alongside modernity and into postmodern contexts, we continue to reflect on these relational functions. I present segments of a vast history of cycling, exploring both its practices as rhetorical theory and articulation as well as an analysis of the discourses surrounding them. While the act of riding horses entails a far-reaching history, I am primarily concerned with riding on two-wheeled bicycles and motorcycles. The horse has had a profound impact on human civilization and development, but here it is discussed primarily as the foundation for bicycling and motorcycling. This arrangement of cycling is framed by a theoretical framework informed by sophistic rhetorical theory, concepts from the Situationist International, and poststructuralist thought. We can look at almost any form of movement through the perspective provided in this text, and I encourage others to do so. As I move through the development of riding, I also move through a lineage of thinking and communicating to outline a way of understanding and reading the way humans move and how such movement can be read as forms of thinking and writing. Cycling is a movement-based communication practice. In its various iterations, it has had a serious social impact on society as riding itself contains messages that are forms of theory and, at times, advocacy. If things are said to occur, as cycling has, then they do so in a context. Studies indicate that bicycling is simultaneously marginalized in public space and encouraged as a form of resistance to social ills such as the harmful environmental impacts of automobility and the negative effects of sedentary and unhealthy consumer-based lifestyles (Furness 76–77; Mapes 14; Vivanco 8). If we are to promote and encourage certain cycling occurrences in the future, as I do, then we can better serve these campaigns by examining their larger societal and historical contexts. This will undoubtedly lead to the fostering of future cycling renderings. In doing so, I also hope to envision a way of viewing movement itself as thought. In this first chapter, I examine the historical, cultural, and political contexts in which cycling is grounded. This involves interpreting the various conceptions of social and physical space. These spaces are partially constructed by the movements within. In the following pages of this chapter, I examine the theoretical discourse on space as both social and physical. From this perspective, everyday space is not a neutral container; and similarly, words and symbols do not simply describe an inert material world. Rather, both are socially produced, bringing materiality into being in particular ways. Later in the book, I reconnect space, bicycles, and motorcycles with poststructuralist theory to elaborate these points further. Spaces and symbols are socially constructed, and each can be interpreted, negotiated, and reproduced. Cycles are symbolic and spatial, functioning here to explore these discursive and

On Cycling

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physical territories. In this arena, the bicycle and motorcycle, based on the mobility of the horse-mounted rider, enter and develop as their own forms of commentary. Before I examine the specific forms of movement of bicycling and motorcycling, which have evolved into an almost standardized way to approach space and orient one’s body, I unpack, in these first two chapters, the subjects of space and horse. In chapter 2, “Horse Metaphor,” I discuss the role the horse plays in partially constructing modern configurations of social and physical space. This environment in relation to horse-mounted movement and the subsequent notions of identity that are created by the horse-riding practitioner leads to the primary subjects of this text: bicycling, motorcycling, and theory. The now-common expectations concerning individual movement and the constant rapidity of collective life are first established through horse mobility. They play a large role in the development of the substructures of civilizations and the spread of ideas, cultures, and empires. They are a significant component in almost every major civilization in Africa, Europe, and Asia, including Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Indian, and Chinese societies. In its use by Europe to colonize the Americas the horse is used to establish the model of equestrian colonization (Thomas 169). In the name of exploration, conquest, trade, and the pursuit of knowledge our global understandings of social and physical space are linked to the horse. They are referenced in multiple ways as the reminders of an equestrian influence are everywhere. In physical elements, such as roads, in symbolic forms, such as everyday phrases, and in references to scale, such as units of measurement; it is still referenced as a form of measurement in horsepower, which equates to the strength of about five horses. These subtle reminders encourage us to approach life as if it were a horse: saddling up to get a leg up while providing free rein to pull up and ride hard. I include them as a foundational element of both the contemporary spaces cycles move through and the bodily orientations involved in cycling. The widespread use and eventual reliance on the horse sets up the conceptual search for its mechanical counterpart, which is initially referred to as a hobby horse. In chapter 3, “Bicycle Idea,” and chapter 4, “The Bicycle and Nostalgia,” I discuss the development of the bicycle object as a form of mobility, which promotes a way of thinking. In these chapters, I attend to the history of the bicycle as reflective of larger societal contexts. I also look at the ways in which the device itself produces meaning through the discourses surrounding its use. As the velocipede or walking machine develops into the highwheeler and stabilizes into the safety bicycle alongside modernity, the bicycle and the bicyclist become associated with numerous societal values. The practice of riding a bicycle through spaces already influenced by the

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horse and dominated by automobility is now a public and political act. One origin story of the bicycle attributes its invention to a catastrophic natural event, a volcanic eruption, that eventually leads to a shortage of horses. This results in an invigorated search for its alternative. Conversely, when gasoline prices rise, individuals often search for an automotive alternative. The bicycle fulfills both needs and continues to remain an idea. As the concept of the bicycle comes into reality, the spaces and routes initially traversed have already been established by the horse, and after its invention those same roads become synonymous with automobiles. The bicycle is not only a product of industrialization, its development ushers in the creation of the industrial age, along with a series of other precision objects such as the cannon, steam engine, and loom (Winchester 40–46; 102). At the core of the bicycle object are some of the foundational inventions of industrialization such as the ball bearing, chain, and pneumatic tire. The paradigmatic ways of thinking associated with modernity and postmodernity arise from such industrial developments and processes of fabrication. With modernization comes modernity, an overarching perspective that entails a series of at times violent and at others liberatory values, concepts, and perspectives. These determinations come to represent our shared consciousness while conditioning the nature of objects. First through perspectives of modernity and then as a critique of its tenets in postmodernity, the bicycle becomes signified or thought of accordingly. Through continued discourse, such symbolic determinations further territorialize material worlds based on relationships of power. In the rest of chapter 4, I examine the bicycle and its various discursive and material functions, attempting to connect the symbol-using animal with the tool-using animal (Burke 7). The advent of bicycles builds on our experiences and uses of horses, which serves as the mechanical foundation for the motorized bicycle or motorcycle. In chapter 5, “The Motorcycle and Conflict,” and chapter 6, “Motorcycle Image,” I discuss the motorcycle object and its potential to promote ways of operating and thinking. Furthermore, I discuss the ways in which the motorcycle has been discussed in narrative and film, which has produced a certain image of motorcycling. In this process, I highlight aspects of postmodernity that present themselves as relevant to our understandings of motorcycle mobility. Here, I attend to the object of the motorcycle as an invention that occurs alongside the bicycle and thus the advent of modernity. As it develops into a machine-powered extension of the human-powered version, it becomes its own unique form of movement, writing, and thinking. The motorcycle consisted of, and in many ways still does, the basic componentry of a bicycle, with the addition of an internal combustion engine. This engine ushers in an intense era of manufacturing change, notably in forms of transportation. Its inventor, Nikolaus Otto, is credited with creating

On Cycling

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the thermodynamic cycle, which is now contained in most ignition piston engines and therefore motorcycles and automobiles (Tissot). This engine can propel the rider of a motorcycle faster than object and road will allow helping push modernity and its values toward their logical limit or rupture. Capable of travelling at one hundred miles an hour in the early 1900s, the motorcycle represented a way of moving and thinking that looked beyond modernity. Whereas the bicycle functions at the pace of human power, the motorcycle represents a transcendent force in this global setting of change early in the twentieth century. From its inception, the motorcycle is posthuman as it moves beyond the scope of human ability, safety, and rationality. For these reasons, it has the potential to expose the irrationality of modernist concepts. These paradigmatic designations are mostly a matter of interpretation as the bicycle and motorcycle are everyday practices that span the advent of both modernist and postmodernist concepts. At the same time, they are products of each, modernization and industrialization and contemporary postmodern discourse. Within these two chapters, I discuss the motorcycle as both a territory of materiality and thus reflective of tangible moments in history and as a symbol presented in discourse, image, and film. The spatial configurations and social expectations previously established through horse mobility provide the foundations for the inventions of the bicycle and the motorcycle. This paves the way for the industrial and mechanical age. Along the way communities, societies, and civilizations establish the importance of communication in forming collective consciousness. Cycling as public acts of communication within this space become political and therefore rhetorical. In the next two chapters—chapter 7, “Sophistic Rhetorical Theory and Movement,” and chapter 8, “Poststructuralist Distance and Cycling”—I connect these forms of mobility with sophistic rhetorical theory and poststructuralist thought. I also discuss these traditions as possessing shared themes. These practices and their impact provide the opportunity to combine two forms of thinking that are often separated. The Sophists were itinerant intellectuals that sought to move closer to the elusive sites of truth, and here they present an apt theoretical perspective for examining cycling. Cycling can be seen as a form of rhetorical display that communicates a series of nonverbal messages. Both sophistry and cycling are forms of commentary that are based on physical practices, riding, and oration. Ultimately, this sets the tone for their combination to better understand and apply poststructuralist theory. Cycling is a practice that entails an epistemology, informing the practitioner of their own subjectivity and how to approach situations. It is a performance based on structural interaction much like poststructuralist theory. Furthermore, texts on cycling create a dynamic

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and expansive discourse that partially determines what cycling is, which can be further deconstructed as a rhetorical discourse on cycling. In this book, I hope to contribute to the intellectual and cultural discourse on bicycling and motorcycling. I do so to further frame these practices as emergent subfields of study. I also hope to extend our thinking on rhetorical theory as initially discussed by the Sophists and position their tenets as forms of proto-poststructuralist thought. Together the intersections of these four distinct subjects, along with the foundational aspects of the horse, provide the opportunity to find further meaning in our social, cultural, and political worlds. Cycling is a form of articulation that contains meaning and promotes ways of thinking. It often occurs today in relation to automobility. In this regard, it diversifies our approaches to physical space allowing alternative perspectives, paces, and spaces to exist. In turn its examination can possibly offer paths to understanding various ways of moving and cultural practices as forms of structural critique. By examining the implications of our nonverbal ways of moving through the world, we can be better equipped to predict and produce more rewarding and equitable situations in the future. CYCLING AND SPACE The physical practices of cycling, its technical objects, associative symbols, and popular narratives form a rich collection of traditional and nonverbal texts. Bicycling remains the most widespread, economic, and accessible form of human-powered mobility on the planet. The same can said of the motorcycle, motorbike, and moped regarding motorized transport; yet bicycling is often portrayed as a youthful, leisurely, or purely athletic pursuit particularly in Europe and the United States, while contemporary films, television, and media tend to portray motorcycling as an intense reality that enlivens the more prosaic aspects of daily life. Like street skateboarding, the act of motorcycling turns the identity of an individual into a rebellious, criminal, or exceptional character based on mobility. Movement itself is a form of communication, and what is often framed as exceptional, youthful, and leisurely should more aptly be described as practical and reliable. Just as street skateboarding disrupts spatial expectations of conceived industrial environments, motorcycling disrupts our understanding of individual speed and safety; while bicycling evokes our pasts to redeclare a more human-powered expectation of pace and efficiency. These social object-human relationships remain firmly entrenched in both the rational and the sensational due to normalized expectations that predetermine what it means to ride.

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Bicycling and surfing are often evoked within narratives of leisure and nature, while motorcycling and skateboarding are frequently associated with the signification of a countercultural norm and a sense of rebellious indifference to public policy and safety. These significations comprise a discourse that at some point stem from the actual ways of moving these forms of mobility offer. Each are forms of performance writing that are rhetorical. Bicyclists and motorcyclists are situated around the globe, numbering in the millions while spanning across cultural identities and societal positionalities. Bicycles are a widely accepted and publicly managed aspect of social life that are at times protected, restricted, regulated, and celebrated. Unlike street skateboarding that is regularly banned and criminalized or contemporary surfing that occurs in specific aquatic environments, the bicycle is accepted in everyday space through reception, signage, infrastructure, and policy. Bicycles have increased in popularity several times in ways that are telling of society and its role in it. These increases in use are indicative of much larger collective contexts and societal shifts. The initial increase occurs shortly after its invention. In the 1890s the bicycle becomes the first private form of individual transportation. It helps a collective realize their own individuality and further grounds independence and freedom with physical movement. It establishes the expectation of rapid multidirectional movement, outside of the horse and canoe (Tobin 383). The safety bicycle was nothing short of a breakthrough that changed society in numerous ways. People of all walks of life, in locations around the globe, began relating to their physical surroundings, neighbors, and themselves differently due to the invention of the bicycle. In the 1970s amid a gasoline shortage and a renewed interest in health and environmental concerns, bicycle use once again increased, particularly in the United States (Reid). After this rise in popularity diminished due to the lowering of gasoline prices and other factors, another surge occurred in the 1980s surrounding the creation of the mountain bike and another renewed interest in exercise. The mountain bike allowed for an even more comfortable ride through varied terrain. Almost every bicycle is a direct development of the breakthrough invention of the safety bicycle, and today most bicycles in use are mountain bikes. Both developments make riding a bicycle more accessible, opening new terrain to explore, survey, and territorialize. In the early 2020s a global pandemic reduces long-distance travel and public transportation options such as planes, trains, and busses. Many automobiles are removed from the road in the process and numerous motorways across the world are closed to their use, sometimes, such as in Oakland, California, up to as much as 10 percent. In this context, the bicycle increased in popularity once again. Sales rose over 100 percent in many areas (Goldbaum). By 2022 as group events resumed and facilities, borders, and roads reopened,

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this upward spike dropped just as it had after each of the previous moments. Nevertheless, U.S. and global cities continue to create more bicycle-specific spaces and infrastructure, marking a steady upward trend of bicycle use. As with periodical increases due to social, environmental, and political contexts, there is a lasting tangible effect due to each increase. Many of these situational factors and subsequent shifts are durable. The environmental and health awareness that the bicycle symbolized in the 1970s is a quality continually attached to the bicycle. As people return to indoor spaces, the safety of outdoor environments in relation to possible contagion remain, associated with bicycle mobility. And as roads reopen to automobiles, the quality of urban life with less automobiles remains intact, which is an aspect promoted through bicycle use. In numerous cities, increased bicycle infrastructure is on the rise (Whitehurst et al. 2; Stehlin 5). With this spatial shift from automobility, there are numerous individual and collective benefits that center around the bicycle. Despite these outcomes, as Zack Furness notes, bicycle advocates are hesitant to engage in a sustained critique of automobility and the “socioeconomic, cultural, and political conditions” that determine its shape (76). Rather, they more often simply argue for a right to exist. While there is no end in sight to the spatial domination of automobility, there is a persistent challenge to its hegemonic presence in the bicycle. This is physically and spatially evident, even while it is frequently left out of bicycle advocacy rhetoric. The motorcycle also significantly reduces the spatial domination of automobiles by taking up far less physical space on the road. Urban environments are significantly less crowded when more commuters use motorcycles as opposed to automobiles. Cities promote such use by offering motorcycle-specific parking, awareness signage, and architectural infrastructure, making it easier and safer to operate motorcycles in a sea of automobiles. The liminal and often forgotten spaces of public roads such as shoulders, the interstitial spaces between divided lanes, gutters, alleys, and driveways are utilized by motorcycles at times for safety and necessity. Unlike the bicycle, there is rarely a lane dedicated solely for the use of motorcycles; however, countless paths, passageways, routes, and roads around the world remain too small for automobiles. Originally developed around walking, horse riding, or bicycling, these networks are accessible by motorbikes and motorcycles. The scale of the motorcycle is like that of the bicycle and the speed of the motorcycle is akin to that of the automobile, which makes it a wholly unique form of mobility that can compete for the territory of each. The motorcycle has been harnessed in most major conflicts, as I will discuss in chapter 3. As a result, the object itself has shifted in technological form as has the identity of its riders. This is based on differing social conceptions,

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receptions, and manifestations that arise after each conflict. Since the inception of the motorcycle, the device has been used to meet the transportation desires and needs of various individuals and communities. After World War II, Japan’s population needed reliable, efficient, and affordable transportation. At which point, the Honda Motor Company introduces its first small motorcycle, transforming its society and later, the globe. The Honda Cub, an extension of this initial Honda motorbike is still the largest selling motorized cycle in the world. This small unassuming 50 CC motorcycle with extraordinary gas milage per gallon and user-friendly ergonomics represents the dominant manifestation of global motorcycling. In the United States in the late 1970s one of the first off-road production motorcycles or dirt bike is introduced by Suzuki. The K-15 expands the territory of where motorcycles can travel, no longer needing a path. Stamped the Hill-Billy this 80 CC motorcycle is directed toward and successfully increases the U.S. market. The name of this motorcycle reflects intercultural instances of communication as does the Kawasaki Ninja. This motorcycle, similarly, is a Japanese product named in the United States and marketed to U.S. customers. It expands the U.S. motorcycle market once again—this time in terms of sportbike usage designed for smoothly paved open roads. Recently during an economic downturn due to the global pandemic, motorcycle sales, especially off-road dirt bikes, specifically designed for rough terrain, and enduros, designed for off-road and cross-country travel, also experience a surge in popularity, raising sales around 20 percent in parts of the United States (Cherney). The motorcycle as a development of transportation technology has played an important role throughout history and is able to compete with the automobile in terms of speed and reliability. It develops from or rather alongside the bicycle, and together they provide the mechanical and spatial foundations for the inventions and industries of the automobile as well as the airplane. More people continue to enter roads and use the bicycle and motorcycle for their daily needs and venture off-road using dirt bikes or mountain bikes to experience often seldom explored, outdoor spaces. These riders act out the symbolic performances of cycling in the social and spatial environments of the everyday. Ben Highmore notes that while everyday life might be a vague term and possibly a problematic concept that obscures as much as it highlights, “to allow everyday life to question our understanding of the world is to specifically invite a theoretical articulation of everyday life” (3). Furthermore, the ways in which we now examine societal norms as cultural elements is a hallmark of critical postmodern perspectives. In these moments of cycling, there is much to be learned about the directions collective spaces and societies take. Such a movement into the future, and recurrent increases in popularity, position the bicycle and the motorcycle as unique forms of

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mobility. They both revolve around older technology and represent a path toward more sustainable, friendlier, and healthier spaces. In other words, we have much to learn from each of these bicycle and motorcycle moments. Both objects and the mobility they offer have changed the way we think about physical space and ourselves. Marshal McLuhan’s oft stated quote concerning mediums as messages offers some insight into the ways in which our practices and ways of communicating impact our thinking and social interactions (McLuhan and Fiore 10). He states that every technology, notably means of communication, builds on the previous and as our use of them changes, so do we (McLuhan and Fiore 41). Along with offering functional urban, suburban, and rural forms of transportation, cycling enhances our abilities to communicate across distances. The ability to do so brings the presence of disparate individuals into contact with another, altering the ways in which much larger territories are transformed socially. Unfortunately, McLuhan and others such as Walter Ong give in to prevailing modernist hierarchies and warn of a return to orality, an “all-at-onceness” that forgoes the specialization of the detached written word (McLuhan, Galaxy 81; Ong 9). Bicycling and motorcycling are everyday forms of movement and communication that are akin to orality and similarly might be pushed to the background and deemed unnecessary to consider as meaningful; however, if we attend to all aspects of the everyday with scrutiny, then cycling and the space it traverses moves to the foreground. Likewise, if we recognize physical practices as potentially meaningful, then we can reconnect them to their detached symbolic structures and better understand them and their contexts. In The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), Michel de Certeau notes that the goal of his study is to bring the spaces and practices relegated to the passive arena of the everyday into the spotlight precisely because they have been treated as secondary. He states that his purpose is “to bring to light the models of action characteristic of users whose status as the dominated element in society” is concealed (xi–xii). Henri Lefebvre produces three volumes of his text The Critique of Everyday Life (2008), noting in the third that in “the past, philosophers excluded daily life from knowledge and wisdom,” relegating it to the background as “mundane” and ultimately, “unworthy of thought” (3). Yet, he is quick to point out that things are changing as everyday space is a lively social and conceptual environment as well as a material space. Daily life is not a series of disconnected tasks that one completes out of necessity but a larger arena in which individuals, in relation to society, perform their collective values. With theory primarily placed in the intellectual arena of the written word and cycling in the realm of the nonverbal, this text entails a synthesis of ways of thinking and types of movement.

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Lefebvre’s impact on Situationist thought is dense, what he referred to as moments the Situationists later refer to as situations. This connection is most apparent in the Lefebvrean and Situationist attentions to space as both a physical and a social product. After his connections with the group were severed, as they were with many others, Lefebvre’s own work in philosophy and critical sociology entails a distinctly spatial turn, and the Situationists remain distinctly Lefebvrean. The social existence of these spaces is central for both. Many scholars have followed Lefebvre’s lead by critically examining the implications and constructions of physical space. This has brought about an even larger intellectual and spatial turn. Marc Augé (1995) has noted the social productions of space; Yi-Fu Tuan (2007) and Tim Cresswell (2004) have examined the interplay between physical places and more ideological spaces; similarly, de Certeau (1984) and Pierre Bourdieu (1990) have studied the ways individuals and groups embody, reify, and resist such spatial productions through everyday practices; while Gloria Anzaldua’s (2007) work on borderlands explored connections between geographical borders and identity. Scholars as far back as W. E. B. Du Bois in the late 1800s, around the time the safety bicycle is becoming used in U.S. cities, examined urban space from a critical sociological perspective. In his seminal study on race and living conditions in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1996), he brings attention to the ways in which marginalized communities suffer from the spatial manifestations of racial inequality. Authors such as Mitchell Duneier in Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea (2016) have looked at more contemporary conditions and mark the ongoing ways in which power and race function spatially. Numerous studies and texts reify how spatial and social inequality are closely linked. The essays in Marginal Spaces (2017) edited by Michael Peter Smith attend to various manifestations including homelessness in Chicago, Illinois, gentrification in New York City, New York, gender and space in New Orleans, Louisiana, and Mexican/Mestizo/a community dynamics throughout California. Similarly, the chapters in The Paradox of Urban Space: Inequality and Transformation in Marginalized Communities (2011) edited by Sharon E. Sutton and Susan P. Kemp underscore the many issues surrounding spatial inequality covering issues such as affordable housing in Seattle, Washington, and community organizing in Chicago, Illinois. There is contemporary scholarship that notes the intersections of bicycle infrastructure, gentrification, accessibility, and development. John G. Stehl’s work Cycloscapes of the Unequal City: Bicycle Infrastructure and Uneven Development (2019) exposes the ways in which neglected sites suffer from a lack of bicycle infrastructure. Indigenous scholars such as Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (2001; 2012), Epeli Hau’ofa (2008), Marissa Muñoz (2019), and Vincent Diaz (2016), among others, have noted the ways Indigenous

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paradigms are revealed by paying attention to place. These scholars reflect a distinct spatial turn that exposes conditions of power and reflects the spatial influences of place on human subjectivity. This spatial subjectivity plays out in the ways we inhabit, dwell, occupy and move through both material and electronic spaces. The increasing regulation of the everyday according to the rationale of safe movement results in the heightened awareness of our individual performances of mobility. We are now concerned with not only spatial influences but also the ways electronic environments have fragmented and multiplied our conceptions of social and physical space. Cycling is a performative activity that can be captured and disseminated across space and time. A foundational mechanical pursuit of the industrial revolution, the bicycle—and by extension the motorcycle—paves the way for an industrial and postindustrial modernity. This entails a vast territory of underexplored theoretical value. In the forms of paved roads and designated paths, these visible public performances constitute a large portion of our physical landscape, making the subject an unavoidable reality for many. Various conceptions of this can be seen in architecture and are often associated with modernity itself. The industrial age is discussed as a revolution because it breaks from the past just as modern architecture attempts to override the natural and ornamental for more standardized machined landscapes. The uniform spaces of a standardized material reality are created and celebrated by architects such as Georges-Eugène Huassmann and Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier. They, particularly the latter, frame blankness as utopian spaces of possibility (Le Corbusier 74). Such spatial configurations have become synonymous with modernity and modernization. Steven Best and Douglas Kellner state that for “modern architects, the reconstruction of space and the construction of a new type of architecture thus constituted an important part of a revolution against the past” (143). This emptiness invites objectivist thinking pertaining to space and entails an erasure of history and cultural development. This central aspect of modernity further relegates the everyday and its forms of mobility to the background. Such a constructed neutrality situates an intellectual thought based on a logic of “freedom” offered through spatial “order” (Le Corbusier 214). Le Corbusier is not simply an architect designing material forms for varied use, but deliberately issuing a spatial ideology, a theory of nonspace. His architectural designs are accompanied by texts that express his rationale, which come to exemplify the central themes of modernity. His structures and spatial configurations produce a way of interacting and thus thinking. The designs are public declarations of theory that alter human relations through physical form. He describes the intentions behind

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his architectural work as a manifesto, and the practices that play out within these structures functions as a commentary on these ideas. Guy Debord, Lefebvre, and the political avant-garde group the Situationist International deliberately engage in practices within these spaces as forms of critique. The Situationists, for example, summarily reject these spatial designs, viewing them as quotidian forms of domination. For the group, this is one of the many forms of “poverty” experienced in the everyday. Debord refers to the modernist condition as the spectacle, an environment in which practitioners are coerced to become passive nonparticipants. An arena where “all that once was directly lived has become mere representation” (The Society of the Spectacle 12). In a response to this growing lack of lived culture and history in modernist architectural forms and its accompanying rationale, the group carries out a series of tactical performances intended to intervene into the current situation. Le dérive is a deliberate and disruptive drift, détournement is a recomposition of exiting elements, and constructed situations are an extended performance of a new spatial and social moment (Plant 59). Daily, ritualistic, and celebratory bicycle and motorcycle rides such as individual commutes, group sessions, and deliberate displays, for example, are within the realm of the dérive concept. Such practices sought to function and challenge the hegemonic discourse of modern architectural space and its attendant forms of regulation (Fine 113). Within this emerging territory of industrialized modernity, cycling becomes a symbolic performance, text, image, and sound that is constantly envisioned and interpreted in relation to its surroundings. In the “Situationist Theses on Traffic” the group defines their intent to “replace travel as an adjunct to work with travel as pleasure,” a response to the standardized forms of Le Corbusier’s modernist architectural aims (Debord, “Traffic” 69). For the Situationists, this physical side of the spectacle, informed by a global trend toward passive consumerism, contains the seeds of more authentic ways of operating. I argue that bicycling and motorcycling are examples of such a way as they can reinsert joy, creativity, risk, and community building to create new situations out of everyday moments. The Situationist International embodies a search for a physical and conceptional connection between the ways we inhabit space and the theory that they present and construct. Mostly in a manner to reject the prevailing norm which has only increased in postmodern and hypermodern settings. Their tactics combined in unique performative displays of creative resistance that are part direct action and part theoretical and artistic expression. In this regard, their self-titled label of “last avant-garde” is fitting as they note the ways in which artistic and political elements have become absorbed into everyday ways of moving and interacting. Forms of movement such as bicycling comment on

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everyday space as the concept of the dérive suggests, and by moving between destinations fluidly, the bicycle détourns existing elements to construct new situations. Sadie Plant in The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (1992) notes that the Situationists “took the words, meanings, theories, and experiences of the spectacle, and placed them in an opposing context” (3). Similarly, the poststructuralists are said to have created a form of critique based on structures of opposition. Both methods use the elements of the structure to comment on its authority and thereby disrupt its power. The author notes that their attention to the social relationships, elements of power embedded in language, and their desire to disrupt through constructed everyday experiences provide the foundations for postmodern attacks on established ways of thinking (6). This can be seen, she states, in “Lyotard’s railings against theory and Foucault’s maverick intellectualism” as well as in “the desiring philosophies invoked by Deleuze and Guattari” (112). During a decade when much of the world responds critically to dominant societal norms, the Situationist International embodies a search for alternatives to the lived banality of the everyday “spectacle” and a rejection of its influence that precedes postmodernity and poststructuralist theory. This standardized urban and suburban environment is the space single-speed, fixed-gear, lowrider, incumbent, road, electronic, mountain, and freestyle bicycles, as well as motorcycles of most types, are designed for and traverse through. Alongside the history of these objects and ways of moving are the histories of these spaces. The devices and the spaces reflect each other as they continue to perform dialectically. The rider, like the dériveste, consumes space and time, exploring them for their own reward. The movements of bicycles and motorcycles, especially in the United States, are often referenced in relation to the ride rather than the destinations they serve. Even when used for commuting, working, and necessity, they are often framed as a slight breach of these functions. The ride that bicyclists and motorcyclists engage in functions like Debord’s description of the dérive as the practicing of a “technique of transient passage through varied ambiances” (“Dérive” 50). Elements of restriction are resisted through dérives, which Alastair Bonnet describes as an unhindered and unstructured wander in relation to the regulations and spatial expectations of everyday space (198). For the Situationists, space is an element of modernity that is revealing of some of its most confining elements. Their thinking is revealed in a series of tactical responses intended to reinterject the practitioner into a space that seems to function without their presence. Plant notes that the notion of détournement is the major theme of resistance for the Situationists (89). Détournement or “detournement of

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preexisting aesthetic elements” entails an “integration of present or past artistic production into” differing constructions (Knabb 52). Through reorganizing elements, the Situationists exhibit a structural disruption which never fully leaves the structure. Debord notes that the distortions détournement creates can be verbal and nonverbal recombinations of the original elements. Debord and the Situationists hoped that the practice would become “widespread” (Knabb 21). Today, the widespread practices of street skateboarding reorganize physical elements in space, while hip-hip practices are largely based on reusing verbal, physical, auditory, and visual elements. Nicolas Bourriaud uses the term “postproduction” as a concept to refer to a now ubiquitous culture in which the “remixer has become more important than the instrumentalist, the rave more exciting than the concert” (13; 35). By using objects, narratives, and themes already in cultural circulation to create new forms we produce through our habits of consumption, this is a hallmark of many bicycling and motorcycling cultures. The conceptual and physical practices of the Situationists align with both postmodernity and the routes of cyclists. They are ways to confront everyday structures and work with existing attributes to create new meanings and configurations. Like the riding of cycles, the goal is to create a new temporary situation based on symbolic movements or “the concrete construction of momentary ambiances of life and their transformation into” a more dynamic quality (Knabb 22). This methodical intervention is based on the material environments “of life and the comportments which it gives rise to and which radically transform it” (Knabb 25). The Situationists serve as a link between sophistic rhetorical theory, which positions truth in a state of becoming through context, practice, and poststructuralist thought. By reordering and reproducing societal elements to produce new social and physical environments, the situationists critique their own performances as producing elements. Ultimately, they saw an issue with everyday ways of operating that produced a state of nonintervention as the defining element of the spectacle. Cyclists, similarly, by rolling into the automobile-dominated road, intervene into the structure of public space. There is a connection between the Situationist avant-garde, sophistic rhetoric, and poststructuralist theory that can be related to the physical mobilities of cycling. The values of modernity “organized around mechanical metaphors, deterministic logic, critical reason, individualism and humanist ideals” become highly contested by postmodern critiques (Best and Kellner 18). These manifest themselves as a series of intellectual trends growing initially out of structuralism and its subsequent critique by those associated with poststructuralist theory, notably Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva. Such readings question the modernist search “for universal truths and values” recognizing that such values undoubtedly will not produce

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the “state of human emancipation” envisioned (Best and Kellner 18). Such rebuttals can be seen in decolonization, desegregation, civil rights movements, demilitarization, and countless calls for social justice, inclusion, and the reconciliation of Indigenous and First Nations rights. The cultural damage now associated with modernity positions its constructions as a critical barrier to overcome in achieving spaces of human emancipation, equity, and agency. Such postmodern reflexivity concerning the suffering experienced by many due to its various projects are now also a part of our poststructuralist critiques and our critical examinations of the everyday. Attention to the quotidian as a sociospatial political field of inquiry entails its own theoretical perspective. The everyday is a specific and general construct involving space as a social, political, and cultural environment, which calls for a series of negotiations. Soja extends Lefebvre’s thinking on space as a social product and moves toward a spatialized ontology (Lefebvre, Production 26). He writes that “social life must be seen as both space-forming and space contingent,” which in this regard, positions everyday acts of movement such as cycling as “a producer and a product of spatiality” (Soja 129). The physical territory that produces cycling entails an equally vast conceptual and discursive terrain. Such fields of experience have connections to one another, enabling, restricting, and encouraging cycles and cyclists to move in certain directions. Don Mitchel remarks that the ideas behind urban public space can be seen in the notions of the Greek agora as an open space of deliberation for citizens. It was a physical space that “encouraged nearly unmediated interaction” that was distinctly political. It provided “a meeting place for strangers, whether, citizens, buyers, or sellers, and the ideal of public space” (131). From the Greek agora to the more central polis or city center and finally to modernist architecture, the ways in which spaces function are indicative of collective societal values. Augé makes the distinction between “anthropological place” and “nonplace” illustrating how spatial configurations depress human interaction (42, 79). Anthropological places, he notes, are material and symbolic constructions that are meaningful for people that live in them, while providing a level of understanding for those who visit. They possess the lived social history of their spatial identity as well as the qualities of possibility that can be geometrically and politically mapped according to the relations of people (52). Such spaces are overshadowed by Le Corbusier’s celebrated monolithic forms. Many current structural configurations fit this model, resting over razed, destroyed, dated, decayed, or more socially organic spatial formations. This is seen in the preference throughout modernity and into the present for more ahistorical developments such as airport terminals, mall food courts, and rental car agencies. We might think of the slow developing of societal

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and communal locations that come to represent not only a contemporary place of meaning but how places come to be over time. When one enters, they come into contention with forces revealed through physical form and embodied through social interaction. Augé notes that nonplace occurs when a place cannot be defined according to the previously mentioned elements. They instead, become entrenched in “supermodernity,” which encourages conformity and nonperformance as well as ahistorical, submissive, blank, transmutable, and directional qualities (77–78). The ability to construct our own worlds turns nature into something distant and the social, possessing its own nature, becomes tertiary to the functions of nonplace. Le Corbusier remarks that machinery is the result of geometry, which is the foundation of the perfect architectural environment he hopes to create. He writes that decorative art and “nature all around us thwarts us” (xxi-13). Plato thought something similarly about philosophy while exalting the noumenal aspects of geometry in the process. The social constructions of humanist values are deployed spatially as the spaces we move through are imbued with meaning that partially define us. We are products of this discussion, creating an identity that is formed through our interactions with space. Riding motorcycles and bicycles along paths, roads, trails, and tracks is an everyday declaration of a spatially informed identity. It is epistemological in that we learn from these performances and pedagogical in the ways in which this moving informs others how to approach space. Through movement and dwelling we learn how to be, becoming in the process. To this degree, Erin Manning proposes “that we move toward a notion of becoming-body,” which involves sensing our bodies in movement as “bodies-in-the-making are propositions for thought in motion” (6). To cycle is to become an embodied form of rhetorical inscription that is inseparable from the rhetor, each in a state of becoming. The operators of horses, bicycles, and motorcycles create a relationship between two integrated subsystems. Working in combination, the system introduces new characteristics that are not necessarily present as a simple aggregation of their combined characteristics (Spiegel 41). As a cycle turns into cycling, human and machine inform each other. Each come into being through movement. The spatial influences we experience through riding inform our embodied identities during and after each ride. Like most practices, we are informed by cycling. The riding of horses, bicycles, and motorcycles is performed in tandem between two systems. Each are in control to some degree. When effectively leaning into a curve on both a bicycle and a motorcycle, the rider typically turns the front wheel in the opposite direction. At the same time, a rider can steer in one direction but find themselves leaning in another and to compensate catch themselves heading in an unintended direction. The fundamental negotiation of the animal and the technical object requires the manipulation

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of a series of interfaces. The rider is a classic example of an integrated system that increases benefits past the sum of its parts. The ways in which we learn from our relationships with machines influences or social and organizational relationships. Walking away from a ride, one takes with them the quantifiable effects of the equation, which surpass its sum further. The abilities and functions of each work together to produce movement and homeostasis or rupture, separation, and stoppage. In addition, the affective impacts of those who audience riding performances, through symbols, words, and imagery further the social, technical, and political equations involved. Thinking and writing about the subject separates one from this movement physically; yet, just as coasting on a bicycle allows the rider moments of contemplation, one is reintroduced to its practice through a conceptual and discursive distance. By reading cycling, we continue to move its signification along representational fields; the practice itself is both drawn from and is at once a commentary on its fields of operation. The mobile practices of riding bicycles and motorcycles are forms of nonverbal communication that have epistemological merits. To ride cycles is to negotiate, discuss, and interpret sociospatial environments in particular ways. It is in these renderings that we locate forms of knowing and reading pertinent to cycling. Affect theory is an interest that spans numerous fields of inquiry, which in short explains “a process that is social in origin but biological and physical in effect” (Brennan 3–4). It is the ways in which discourse is felt and involves the transference of symbolic materiality. The Latin term affectus translates to passion, emotion, and desire and has been used historically in Latin and Greek to describe such individual and collective sensations. What starts out as a discourse, an inert object, or image becomes an embodied state or emotion that takes material forms. The words that are used in a situation have a material impact on the bodies that encounter them. Language in this regard, as Kenneth Burke described in Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (1966), is a symbolic form of action (15). Rhetoric as we understand it is the foundation of a democratic society precisely because it is a way to make material change in society through symbolic and therefore peaceful and artistic means. Sarah Ahmed connects seemingly separate manifestations within daily life such as objects, values, and emotions such as happiness and sadness as capable of sticking to various material realities (35). The experiences of riding, viewing, and discussing cycling sway individuals and communities in ways that constitute a series of exchanges materializing in various forms. A ghost bike memorial, for example, is a bicycle painted white, specifically placed on the sides of streets and highways to mark the loss of individual cyclists on public roads. They most often are erected at or around the location of the accident. These memorials are widespread across the world, and like

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the presence of the bicyclist themselves, the honoring signifies the absence of a rider. They are a rendering of cycling, like the ride, that impacts a larger audience. The affect produced from this equation, practice, symbol, and reading, reveals itself in the emotions and feelings of viewers, which comments on our shared spaces and values. Teresa Brennan notes that affective exchanges between people are capable of “establishing and enhancing a sense of collective purpose and a common understanding” (70). Such exchanges are symbolic and material, emotional and rhetorical. They can enable complex theoretical states of mind to be transmitted among people (70). When we enter public spaces, we come to understand the movements of others in relation to our own. Similarly, the public ride-out and motorcade, particularly for a funeral procession, use the motorcycle as a symbol of memory, life, and presence. Moving in uniform along public roads is a rhetorical display of our shared values based on ways of moving as a commentary on public space and social life. Our movements are telling of these nonverbal exchanges, and whether a bicycle is on the road with a rider, painted white on the side without a rider, or appearing in symbolic form in signage, the experience of these encounters alters riders and viewers alike. On this stage our own communally constructed nature unfolds in relation to the presence of others who tap into and resist social forces. Deleuze and Gauttari refer to these sensations as desire, which prompt our own daily productions to comingle within rhizomatic conditions (14). Their notion of a rhizomatic network connects individuals and sites stretched across physical, mental, and social spaces such as roads. These avenues stretch like pathways through which social and political forces flow. This network of desire is visible in the ways affect is transferred through discourse to impact individuals and communities. Poststructuralists analyze systems or structures that become influential of the signs within as every point is connected to all others. When youth communities of bicyclists, for example, spring up across the nation performing wheelies and other maneuvers while playing music and riding similarly modified cycles—such as fixies in Brooklyn, New York; scraper bikes in Oakland, California; or lowrider bikes in Los Angeles, California—these material manifestations are evidence of how affect travels through rhizomatic networks based on discourse. These groups and their public declarations of identity based on bicycle mobility, are often a positive life-affirming response to conditions of neglect. When policy is changed, or public sentiment responds to a similar presence in disparate parts of the country, the public is connected to the spatial configuration of the rhizome. As Deleuze and Guattari state, one cannot leave, except in total rupture, the interconnectedness of the rhizome (21–25). At this point, for example, the

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ghost bike is erected and projected through channels of communication just as are the performances of public ride-outs. The historical and contemporary act of riding cycles through varied ambiances, like many forms of spatial and social interaction, are ways of knowing and embodying relationships with nonhuman forms, what Deleuze and Guattari might refer to as heterogeneous assemblages (399–408). In this doing-thinking, the gestures themselves become symbolic and continually shift as identities find meaning, feeling the rhythms and currents through relationships between movements and social situations. When we balance on two wheels, we’re going into a state of motion. To balance, we must continue to move, tracing the possibilities of the system in relation to the network. Stopping entails rupture in the cycling process, a precarious act on roads that require rapid movement as well as a series of stopping and starting procedures. A cycle, small in relation to vehicles, lacks visibility, which makes stopping potentially dangerous due to approaching traffic. In addition, road bicycles often entail clip-in pedals, thin tires, and radical ergonomics, which make stopping difficult. The power of a cycling ontology exists in its fundamental operation of movement coupled with the desire of riders to enter ongoing structures in which they are often at risk. Cycling is more than a physical exercise or performance of physics and engineering, it is political, theoretical, and expressive. Within daily space, cycling is a social act of deliberation that is a commentary on its environment. The ways it encourages us to move and interact with contemporary conditions is also reflective of its development and reception throughout history. The ways in which people navigate through space and leave nonverbal traces in their wake are, according to de Certeau, akin to verbal enunciations. These involve the recognition of a system and an engagement with it at the levels of participation and production (97–100). In this equation everyday space constitutes a language, and our movement through it uses this language to form statements of our own. To mount a bicycle and push down on the pedals or start the engine of a motorcycle and twist the throttle is to use a medium of communication and enter an ongoing conversation. Just as we imagine the impact of our words when we go about formulating messages, we contemplate the destinations of our next movements and the gestures that we must perform to complete the task. In this regard, riding develops as a way of thinking and communicating through an exploration of social and physical space. The public sphere and the roles public deliberation have played in constructing our shared notions of political and social life are the mediums through which these practices engage. The participatory notions of public space as developed in ancient Greek culture surrounding the city-concept or polis and the larger agora, is engrained in Western and global interpretations

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of the public sphere. The movements of those within the scope of the polis situate all public acts as epideictic rhetorical displays. The Sophists, nonAthenian citizens, established their theoretical and practical perspectives while travelling throughout the Hellenic world making a lasting impact within its Athenian center. Such displays are a commentary and creation of publicly accepted or challenged values. The pre-Socratic philosophers were concerned with nature and the movements of objects and bodies, often referred to as natural philosophy. The Sophists extended this thinking to emphasize the ways in which language and symbolic acts have the power to alter public perceptions—thus affecting material change through symbolic use. They provide a link between the material and conceptual worlds and embody the ways in which human practices can bring about transformation through thoughts and words. The social contract developed by John Locke, David Hume, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau positions individuals as free within political and governmental arrangements. Their ideas add to our notions of an open public and political space that stems from our understanding of the Greek polis as a physical exemplar of the public sphere. Influential public acts of communication or rhetoric shape collective conceptions concerning reality and shared existence. This dialectical process of deliberation is the foundation of knowledge production, consciousness, and democratic situations. The ability to influence public life through articulation and presence revels itself in everyday space and the dominant spatial elements of roads. The right to use space for deliberation is evident in the right to use roads for transportation. This right to use a public space turns into the argument for quality roads, established initially by U.S. bicyclists in the Good Roads Movement of the late 1800s. As the advent of the motorcycle is soon overshadowed by the automobile and both come to represent individual and mass mobility, bicycles are pushed further to the margins of a space they helped create. Effectively bicyclists argue for the right to simply exist in this public space and remind us of the larger need for “transportation equity” (Furness 11). They are comparable to the Sophists, as they are often considered outsiders that are nevertheless accepted because of their ability to influence the public through communication. Numerous people find the mobility provided by two wheels as a site of resistance to dominant structural spatial norms. They are situated between the sanctions of the road, the restrictions of pedestrians, and the transportation requirements of mass transit and automobility. Socrates is famous for walking around the polis in debate with other thinkers, students, and citizens. He is also known for remaining in Athens throughout his life. The Sophists, on the other hand, moved extensively while teaching and often substantially explicated their perspectives in writing, as in

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the case of Isocrates (Ober 25; T. Poulakos, Speaking 66–67). The practices of physical movement influenced their thinking as did the absence of travel for Socrates. The various contexts they entered and audiences they encountered influenced the themes that unify the group’s perspectives and theories. The outcome of their thinking is intertwined with their practices of both oration and travel. Thus, physical performance linked to oration and cultural context connected to travel are important factors that help determine their theoretical approach. The flux between the two frames the ways in which their thought unfolds. For them, like the cyclist, stoppage equals rupture, and their thinking exhibits a desire to avoid it. Because of this, a definitive stance, like the poststructuralists, outside of context is often elusive. To stop, whether physically in cycling or conceptually in the centralization of theoretical positions, goes against these perspectives. These mobile sensibilities unify the Sophists, poststructuralist theory, and cycling both as theoretically thematic groups and related subjects. The ancient Greek spatial concept of the polis, with the Acropolis as its center, is situated physically and conceptually within the agora. These ideas develop into the wider notion of the public sphere, a geographical and discursive arena in which meaning is formed and framed as political. For everyday practitioners and cyclists our understanding of shared space partially conditions the meanings we associate with various ways of using it. The agora represented an extension of the polis concept “beyond its visible spatial limits” (Mumford 162). In the physical place of the polis and the conceptual space of the public sphere the dialectical tensions involved become the foundations of a participatory society. Such a configuration of Acropolis, polis, agora, and beyond, according to Lewis Mumford, are indications “of a more formal order, with a new criterion of spaciousness and beauty of setting and indeed a new consciousness” (162). Ancient Greek consciousness is founded on the ways in which public acts of communication become meaningful in both physical space and symbolic discourse. The Sophists as the founders of rhetorical theory are the first to systematically attend to the relationship between verbal and nonverbal acts of communication and public influence. The functions of rhetoric discussed by the Sophists exists in the shared physical spaces of the everyday. The impacts that are made through public displays of cycling can be examined as rhetorical theory. The bounded city is often viewed as sedentary, an inert sovereignty that rules through a centralized perspective and a series of related concepts that surrounds its physicality. The city is often metonymic of the nationstate. The physical space in which such debates unfold in the process are mitigated through the influence of metaphysical constructions that also might emanate from a center. I will refer to this place throughout this text

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as an essentialization. This essence often arises from a spatial context that is also physical. This is seen in the classic debate between the Sophists and the philosophers. The cultural assumptions latent in Plato’s work are also visible in the linguistic determinations of Saussure and other structuralists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, which we will visit later. While Plato recognized the presence of a linguistic community, in his pursuit to establish universal concepts, he forgoes its importance in constructing thought (Poulakos and Poulakos 100). Martin Bernal notes that the early linguistic work of Saussure attempts to establish a reading of the Indo-European language family that separates it from Afroasiatic influences. This has important ramifications as Western society is systematically linked to ancient Hellenic culture and severed from its Egyptian, Phoenician, and Indian influences (Bernal, Volume I 399). Much structuralist work is caught in this hierarchy, which dominates Western intellectual pursuits at the time. This is what makes the poststructuralist turn toward critique so vital to the examinations of symbolic structures as indicative of material life. The Sophists and the poststructuralists, respectively, provide critical rebuttals to these assumptions. The ways in which structuralism, largely attributed to the linguistic work of Saussure, does not pay enough attention to history are evident in this point. This inattention to the influence of place on culture and the philosophical perspectives encountered in the more contemporary discussions of the everyday by de Certeau and Lefebvre returns us to our subjects. Bicycling and motorcycling are everyday practices that enter social situations. Jane Sutton notes that the practice of everyday life within the space of the polis is wrapped in identity, subject positionality, and the rhetorical formations of these elements. Women, for example, are subject to the laws and expectations of the patriarchal structure of the polis (113). Likewise, rhetoric is created in ways that exclude individuals such as women from entering public space and therefore public consciousness. This reflects the conditions and ideas behind the construction of the polis and the agora. Thus, there is a spatial aspect of modernity that reflects its thinking. Our performances within the physical space of the everyday and the conceptual spaces of our discourses represent one another. Initially, the bicycle improves the lives of millions. Before its invention, people seldom traveled far from home without the availability of horse, carriage, boat, or train. With the advent of the automobile, the bicycle remained a more accessible and less restricted form of travel. Those who are economically or politically restricted from driving can do so on bicycles, motorized bicycles, and motorcycles. Bicycling provided a way for women to move outside of patriarchal domesticity and into the public sphere. The ability to physically move quickly was empowering for women in the context of

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sex-based oppression. Because the bicycle is used in the same manner by all sexes, it does not discriminate as a bus, train, or road might—although it is always connected to these larger structures of inequality and often takes place on everyday roads subject to the regulations of place. The concept of open space and the idea of the shared road are grounded in forms of exclusion that make such rights conditional. Mitchell notes that while this ability to move without obstruction comes to define “Western civilization,” such a notion of “freedom of movement is only possible by denying others the same right” (189). Bicycling attire for women is illustrative of the impact of the bicycle on gender equality and revealing of how seemingly innocent gendered constructions are implicated in systems of oppression. Women could not comfortably perform the task of riding a bicycle in the given constrictions surrounding dress at the time. This element of equality is still being discussed as uniforms and titles shift to gender neutrality. The result of the exposure of inequality comes in the form of bloomers or baggy knee-length pants, which are invented due to the posturing necessary for bicycle operation regardless of sex. Women break restricting social norms such as the wearing of long cumbersome and restrictive dresses and skirts as well as independent movement into new territories. This is one of a series of moments that eventually lead to the dismantling of numerous gendered restrictions concerning attire, namely the functionality of wearing pants, based on the need for functional attire for bicycling. The bicycle object itself is a product of social networks and represents a sexual othering in the women’s bicycle. With an unnecessarily lowered top tube, the object is a form of segregation but also an indicator of the power of female bicyclists and their impact. The continual patriarchal structure is implicated in feminist calls for equality as the bicycle object becomes a medium of communication and advocacy. In the process, the bicycle functions as a vehicle for social and physical mobility. Becoming a social advocate, a female riding a bicycle, which gains popularity alongside the feminist struggle for suffrage, challenges their deliberate removal from public life. The gendered structure and its inherent inequalities coalesce in material forms such as the bicycle. Urban environments are often diverse lively places where people congregate and share information while establishing cultural values in the process. It is this contemporary manifestation of the ancient concept of the polis that riders enter, contributing to our notions of the public sphere in the process. The public sphere and movement within public space are connected through the various systems attached to ways of moving. The identity a cyclist assumes momentarily, in this instance, is harnessed to transform social and physical formations that become durable. In another example, a short ride, when

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conducted by many periodically, can produce a more permanent awareness exhibited by motorists or the constructions of bicycle-specific lanes. The development of roads within the contested public space of urban, suburban, and rural life comes to be centered around the automobile, growing directly out of the technological achievements of the bicycle and motorcycle. Cycling reflects the spaces and expectations concerning the performances of riding established by the horse. Today the speed, comfort, and destructive capabilities of the automobile as well as the sheer amount of space dedicated to its use, marginalize most other forms of transportation. As a structural norm, like the functions of language, this appears normal or natural. This seemingly universal spatial reality makes the automobile and its accompanying spaces hard to question or resist; however, studies show that alternative and active use of the bicycle encourages other forms of mobility, which lessens the domination of automobility (Furness 138). During times of economic downturn, such as that from 2004 to 2012 when the cost of driving increased and wages decreased, automobile use decreased while alternate transportation and bicycle use increased (Manville et al. 42–43). Such contextual factors and the presence of bicycle infrastructure will, as studies indicate, be a stronger reason to bicycle than its health benefits (Batterson et al. 14). The lack of bicycle infrastructure and overall acceptance of alternative modes of transportation other than the automobile are the largest obstacles for potential bicyclists. Everyday space has been appropriated in the name of automobility. The structural and symbolic normality of often empty roads and parking lots function, as Foucault notes, as “a silent, cautious deposition of the word upon” the blank page. Here, it says nothing but the “brightness of its being” (Order 300). A spatial element, like a word, is given meaning by its corresponding symbolic structure. A word or symbol, Foucault notes, returns the thing to its materiality with its own conditions. A parking lot only makes sense because of the road it serves, and the driveway correspondingly only makes sense because it links the two. Each construction leaves little room for the bicycle to assert its presence in the structure. Symbols applied to material and emotional structures do not capture the territory but are tangible in their ability to confer meaning. In this configuration, words are the objects they describe (300). To change the nature of the object—the road, for example—we might change its symbol and in turn what it signifies. The movement between the two—materiality and the symbolic structure—is presented as knowledge. With this spatial knowledge in mind cyclists enter the conversation and pedal to be heard. Bicyclists often move into an environment that is neglectful or hostile to their presence. This is due to the movement itself and what it communicates. A bicyclist informs motorists to slow down and pay attention to the road. Just as the Sophists were considered outsiders when in Athens, sophistic rhetorical

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theory is encountered through the defensive lens of Platonic philosophy. Poststructuralist theory necessitates its form of inquiry in relation to a deliberate critique of structures that are built upon the foundations of such thinking. Just as our cherished spaces disallow us from performing in particular ways so do these intellectual traditions. Sutton notes that women are hardly heard from within the tradition of rhetorical theory, as the paradigm of thought is bound in various exclusions. This is also clearly witnessed in the silencing of perspectives pertaining to indigeneity, ethnicity, sexuality, and nationality among others. Cycling emerges in relation to forms of thinking that are revealed spatially. This can be seen in the segregation, either in social norms or formal policy, of individuals of certain marginalized and oppressed groups—Jewish ghettos throughout Europe; U.S. Irish, Italian, and Jewish neighborhoods during the early 1900s; and the Latina/o, Asian, and Black manifestations of spatial segregation visible after. The use of space during eras of slavery and segregation in the United States reflect the way structural marginalization is executed spatially. African Americans in a society of white domination experience a power differential that produces a segregation of bodies in space. After emancipation, segregation is formalized, and the social confinements of African Americans are visible spatially as well as socially. The bicycle, shortly after its invention, is used to challenge these social boundaries. In public spaces entrenched in forms of social domination, swift individual movement equates to a modicum of resistance. The ability to move on your own via a private bicycle circumvents the restrictions for Black and People of Color practitioners present in forms of public transportation. Nevertheless, those marginalized in society are still subject to those same forms of discrimination when riding a bicycle. The first Black internationally celebrated athlete, Marshall “Major” Taylor, rises to global recognition as a cyclist within this racially hostile context. Twelve years before Jack Johnson and fifty years before Jackie Robinson do so through boxing and baseball, he does so through bicycling (Kranish 5). The skills acquired to rise to the highest level are initially honed by Taylor within everyday space. His achievements communicate power. This power of the public citizen is harnessed through performing cyclist. As a professional athlete the bicycle is the medium of communication for the representation of a marginalized group. Due to athletic prowess on the bicycle, he occupies a large public space, refuting widely held notions of white superiority in the process. Traveling around Europe and Australia, the world becomes more aware of this misconception and structural forms of domination both in the United States and abroad. His success in cycling, like that of women bicyclists, carries its own logic that challenges racist and sexist constructions. Taylor goes on to become one

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of the most well-paid athletes in the world and a world-record-holding bicyclist at a time when bicycling is the second most popular U.S. sport. Almost as quickly as it is invented, the bicycle is connected to identity and power. In contexts of patriarchy and white supremacy it is harnessed as a medium of social advocacy. The mobility provided by cycling allows several social transgressions from the confines of dominant structures. It also exists at the heart of these spatial configurations, as the bicycle is used as much to police and confine as it is to challenge these forces and liberate. Physical routes connect us to one another and are symbolic sites of interaction. Gathering is an important element of a participatory society, and even in passing, public roads play an important dialectical function. In this network that connects us we are reminded of the everyday ways in which we engage in democratic participation. Yet, these paths are primarily created to facilitate the movement of automobiles and serve the functions of economic production and political control. Nigel Thrift notes that “whole parts of the built environment are now a mute but still eloquent testimony to automobility.” Its movements have reconfigured society into distinct ways of inhabiting and interacting, situating the physical body as secondary (46). If we look at ways of moving as political and theoretical, then there is an important dialog in which the bicycle is both present and meaningful. Cycling can play a recuperative role in that it challenges certain modernist trajectories. Bicyclists do so every day as they simply remind motorists of the shared nature of the road. There is, in the bicycle, a function in its mobility that is also a form of advocacy. The economic and spatial acquiescence of cities, towns, and regions to the individual automobile has left a large amount of space unused. In many ways the bicycle is recuperating, used to take “back” some of this unused space (Longhurst 233). In this situation, as de Certeau notes, sanctioned places governed by “authorized power structures” and “regulatory strategies” are capable of being converted into more contested and lived spaces by the temporary performances of practitioners within (117–18). While everyday environments cater to the automobile, the road, parking lot, gas station, drive-thru, and other automobile-specific spatial configurations leave little room for other considerations. The road, as an interactive site, constitutes a discourse surrounding movement, yet presents itself mostly as a series of regulatory and barring elements. Cyclists, through their specific negotiations of these elements, represent a theoretical and rhetorical approach to ongoing structures of meaning. Thrift notes that just as de Certeau discussed in his chapter “Walking in the City,” he surely would have to concur that there is a parallel “Driving in the City” that also entails a “rich phenomenology” in terms automobility. This practice is filled with corporeal postures, a form of writing pertinent to both walking in the city for de Certeau and driving for Thrift, which “cannot be

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reduced simply to cultural codes.” Thrift concludes that this “is particularly the case if we are willing to travel off the path of language as the only form of communication” and accept the premise that ways of moving in social contexts are akin to forms of speaking, writing, and reading (Thrift 46–47). While de Certeau discusses walking and Thrift driving, I use their attention to nonverbal traces of movements as forms of articulation to examine cycling. The body and the body-object, from this perspective, are intertwined to create an identity, a bodily and technical writing made possible through the spatial medium of everyday space. The dedication of the road to the use of the automobile by the “ordinary practitioner” informs each accordingly (93). Both theorists are concerned with the ways in which people experience urban environments and extend our thinking to allow a certain riding ontology somewhere between the material and symbolic sites of road, pedestrian, and automobility. CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have discussed the conceptual and spatial contexts in which movements and ideas concerning cycling unfold. As communicators of the everyday, our bodies perform a spatial discourse through cycling. As the author of this text and part of this network of cyclists, I engage in both the performance and discussion of this area. The spaces in which these performances exist are physical and symbolic. Commuting to work on a sportbike, riding in the peloton or group during a sanctioned road race, and writing this text, I encounter and determine the nature of the practice. Cycling is a product of history and a producer of future environments. The ways in which we ride and choose to move play a large role in shaping how we think about ourselves and the spaces we inhabit. The horse, the bicycle, and the motorcycle are forms of movement that entail corresponding ways of thinking, communicating, and inhabiting. The conceptual themes that connect sophistic rhetorical theory as a cohesive theoretical perspective are like the themes that connect poststructuralist thinking. In their attention to everyday space and desire to intervene into its structure, I observe a link between the two in the Situationist International. Related individuals such as Lefebvre and de Certeau and the general attention to critical spatial perspectives provided by others mentioned in this chapter further frame this theoretical and physical zone in which our discussion of cycling unfolds. The practices of oration from the Sophists, the physical and symbolic performances of the avant-garde, and the practices of cycling direct us toward poststructuralist theory to frame a cycling ontology.

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The horse, bicycle, and motorcycle reflect their surrounding contexts and are informing of ways of thinking. As a persistent presence throughout history, these forms of movement constitute their own interdisciplinary subfield of inquiry. They frame a way of looking and possibly critiquing these contexts. Next, I examine the horse as a lasting reminder of the origins of cycling and this space.

Chapter 2

Horse Metaphor

Before the development of the technological, mechanical, and industrial processes that make bicycle and motorcycle mobility possible, the horse-mounted rider establishes its foundational riding posture and spatial orientation. To examine the history and the theoretical implications of riding on two wheels, I turn to its preorigin in the horse. With the invention of the wagon and chariot, the wheel, and other basic components such as axle, spoke, and frame, the foundations for future bicycles and motorcycles are laid. The presence and influence of the horse on human civilization is substantial. Its use as a form of mobility and communication informs our general approach to everyday space and each other. When bicycles were first invented, they entered a sociophysical environment already influenced by previous equestrian relationships. In many ways the bicyclist and motorcyclist enter the world as if they were riding a horse, and our material performances of riding cycles starts here with a discussion of the horse. A cycling ontology or way of thinking offered by riding is informed by the developments of horse, bicycle, and motorcycle mobilities. A child is often introduced to bicycling and motorcycling through the posturing initiated by the horse-mounted rider. The hobby horse, broomstick, or even an imagined horse or cycle serves the purpose of preparing one to ride. In the performing of this spatial orientation, body posturing, and control of a simple object are the foundations of cycling and a reminder of our collective experiences with horses. By the time ancient Greek and Roman civilizations form, the horse had already been in use by societies for hundreds if not thousands of years. They represent a long history of collective human movement and influence. Some of the earliest known inscriptions by humans contain images of the horse. The preserved etchings in the Lascaux Cave in modern-day southwestern France are drawn in charcoal and clay and are estimated to be around seventeen thousand years old. A prominent feature of the cave complex is a panel of horses. As far back as 1171 BCE rock paintings featuring the horse were 33

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located across the Sahara in Africa. The Egyptian pharoah Ramessēs III during this time claims to have captured hundreds of chariots and horses from Libya. At the time, Bernal refers to this ancient civilization as the “horse country par excellence” (Athena II 117). The success of civilizations from Egypt to China are linked to the movement provided by the horse as they become synonymous with the history of humanity. The chariot follows in importance, invented during the sixth century BCE the horse-drawn chariot combines the biological capability of horsepower with human ingenuity in service of mobility. This way of moving becomes symbolic of individual and collective identity evoking connotations of strength, speed, and power. As a result, entire cults start to surround the horse and chariot. The horse-mounted riding orientation provided by equestrian relationships is transferred to bicycling and motorcycling. Likewise, the symbolism attached to the horse and rider is also transferred to the devices that are based on their use. This animal is not simply something next to the human but becomes part of their identity in the horse-mounted rider, a realistic representation of the centaur. Already inscribed in mythology, this literal figure becomes associated with leadership, sovereignty, and virility. Numerous celebrations of the horse-mounted figure appear in a variety of settings around the globe. They serve various social functions but notably come to signal revolutionary strength as in the case of Simone Bolivar, state power as in the horse-mounted George Washington, or colonization in the case of Francisco Pizzaro. These renderings are also connected to the identity of the rider, signifying leadership, masculinity, and achievement among other qualities. Each symbolic reference to the horse-mounted rider adds to the discourse of mobility. They appear on almost everything throughout history from coins, bowls, and cars to paintings, buildings, and films and almost always serve symbolic purposes according to the human context in which they are placed. They function in various contexts and represent differing stances depending on whom they are underneath or beside. The symbolic territory surrounding the horse takes on a meaning of its own as we will see in later chapters concerning the motorcycle image. The materiality of the horse changes our collective spatial awareness, scale, and expectations. The movement from natural spaces to conceived social and material environments occurs when humans interact with nature and harness its potential for their own means. Many associations, stances, and spaces still attached to cycling are established through the horse-mounted human. Through everyday space and transportation networks, such as the general size of roads, automobiles, and railroad tracks, we are reminded of our equestrian-dependent past. Peter Sloterdijk remarks that an existential modernity has produced a symbolic social space, which frames who we are at the expense of where we are. He refers to this forgetfulness of being as “an

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obstinate willful ignorance of the mysterious place of existence” (Spheres I 27). The understanding of ourselves involves an epistemological negotiation of space. The theorist reminds us that this is often forgotten. In Timaeus, Plato refers to this space of existence as the chora, a receptacle where images form and things come to be through a spatial dialectic (lxv). At the heart of, often rigid, Platonic theory is this space of possibility, which allows for movement and growth. The chora, the space where things come to be. Lefebvre notes that every society exudes its values spatially while de Certeau remarks that we are all spatial practitioners contributing to the constructions of space (35–38). From these perspectives we impact our environments, and in them, we become. Every breath reminds us of our body and emanates out to inform the atmosphere surrounding our corporeality. This atmosphere is part of our body. As we start to move deliberately, we comment on those conditions, bringing with us our own spaces. Often circling back, the traces of our movement create spheres of presence and influence. For Sloterdijk we are globes connecting with others to create foam, a series of connected globes. He describes these structures as enclosed shared realms defined and created according to our own dimensions (Spheres I 28). The horse extends these dimensions, while bicyclists and motorcyclists continue to traverse these spheres in declarative and reflexive ways. These mobile trajectories represent an inquiry into location as a “place that humans create in order to have somewhere they can appear as those who they are” (Spheres I 28). In doing so, we remind ourselves of our place, based on the movements within and reintroduce ourselves to the world. To further articulate the ontology of these social and physical encasings, the theorist draws parallels to bubbles, foam, and globes. For the author, the sphere, like the horse, is locatable almost everywhere throughout human history. The horse appears as one of the first symbols produced on a cave wall and, like spheres, continually appears in the carvings, paintings, and texts of many cultures. As producers and consumers of these “foams, heaps, sponges, clouds and vortexes” we can trace the development of our movements within and learn more about our conditions and selves (Spheres I 71). In this instance, I trace the spatial and social reflection of a particular horse metaphor as it develops throughout history. We can look at horses in the ways that Sloterdijk examines spheres, as an “amorphological” metaphor, which helps us understand “the formation of inner worlds, the creation of contexts and the architectures of immunity” that enclose and open our everyday practices to new ways of being (Spheres I 71). Bicycling and motorcycling, as forms of movement, are derivative of the horse-mounted rider, and we are reminded of this in everyday space. The roads we use to ride and the seemingly more natural settings we blaze trails through connect us to the globes of others.

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The symbolic systems we utilize to connect environmental realities with more metaphysical conceptions of these material renderings are part and parcel of a cycling rhetoric. To ask how cycling functions as a way of thinking, larger notions of space and movement become implicated. Space, structured like language, is conceived in ways that includes and excludes those that encounter it. A cyclist enters an environment in which their presence is expected and sidelined. There is a precedent, grounded in this history, for their function as well as a set of challenges that mark their station. An exploration of specific movement, I suggest, is one way of opening such structures to new ways of inhabiting and thinking. And by viewing physical movement as text, a performance of rhetoric, we can better understand movement as a way of thinking. By combining the bicycle and motorcycle together and including the horse as part of their lineages, we can also better understand the shared aspects of our mobile pasts. Through a historiographic lens, I examine sophistic rhetorical theory and poststructuralist theory. Through a similar undertaking, I attempt to write a history of bicycling and motorcycling based on their precursor, the horse. By connecting ways of thinking, such as those offered by sophistic rhetorical theory, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theory, I also hope to enliven connections between thought, movement, and communication. Herodotus notes that quadrigas or four-horse chariots were introduced to Greece from Libya, and Homer mentions their use as early as 800 BCE (Bernal, Athena II 117). The walking human when mounted turns into the riding one, forming a unity of operations and a new way of moving independently and swiftly. The foundations of modern cycling practices exist in the early combinations of horse and rider, which meets the conditions of a “super-ordinate system that subsumes its two subsystems” (Spiegel 41). The mobility that arises from riding horses forms the foundations of cycling. The walker becomes the horse-mounted rider, which becomes the walkingmachine strider, the pedaling bicyclist, and finally the motorcycle rider. This combination produces an image, sensation, and terminology pertinent to cycling as discussed here. The riding practitioner can move swiftly, intentionally, and with much less effort than walking. In this, they bring places and people, once distant, into contact. Presence is an early form of communication. McLuhan notes that “media work us over completely” as physical attachments to reality are altered by differing technologies. The first medium of communication, physical space, is a ubiquitous presence that involves a bodily rhetoric (Medium 26). When we move, we comment on a script that has already been transcribed and materialized in the form of the spaces we move through, bringing messages with us and passing them along to others. The body is its own medium, and when we combine this body with a horse, a third is produced. There are numerous

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examples of the horse’s importance to human societies: as a vehicle to bring people quickly to new locations, transport goods, communicate messages, compete for status, and control other animals, for example. Because of these many practical uses, their significance in cultural expression amounts to an equally large symbolic area. For McLuhan each medium of communication is an extension of the previous. In creating a framework for cycling as communication and theory, there is a clear development that starts with the horse. As we proceed through to mechanical and motorized versions of riding, we can see that the “extension of any one sense alters the way we think” (Medium 41). Horse riding is not only the first swift form of transit but also the first rapid form of communication. It changes our thinking about the world based on the altering of our spatial perceptions. The horse is a constant reminder of the development of cycling as well as the spaces cyclists enter and navigate. The large realm of the Greek agora is influenced by the expectations of movement they provide. The open territory in which people become citizens leads to the concept of the polis based partially on such a spatial awareness (Mumford 151). Physical movement and travel bring people together. Initially such transmissions are predominantly nonverbal and require physical presence. The shared space of the road, polis, and public sphere, discussed in the previous chapter, are partially constructed through harnessing horse mobility. As adults ride horses, youth are growing familiar with the use of a hobby horse, or simply a stick fixed with a mock horse head. Today there are numerous bicycle attachments that one can purchase to create a similar effect. Children mimic the gait of both the bicycle and the horse by riding-walking, an interesting type of jaunting and jogging as if one were riding. In the process they learn balance and body orientation as well as a self-constructed image of themselves as mounted rider. This figure, often evoked by a very young child, is learning how to move through and relate to social and physical worlds according to horse mobility. This posturing is epistemological, it teaches us how to engage with our surroundings and ourselves. It often occurs before the introduction of the animal or object and continues to this day. Similarly, I might, as I did as a youth, twist the fixed handlebar grip of a bicycle, evoking the throttle twisting procedure of motorcycling. Over time hobby horses have legs and wheels attached, which eventually turn into cycles (Perry 9–10). Prior to the creation of these technical objects, much of the experience of a single rider moving their body in relation to space has already been established. The horse-mounted rider and its mimicking by children prefigures the invention of the bicycle. The wooden stick horse that many are already familiar with is finally formalized in the form of the velocipede or draisine constructed by Karl

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von Drais in the early nineteenth century. In this object, the velocipede or walking machine is not necessarily a bicycle but more a simulated horse. This device contains, in retrospect, the now familiar bicycle components of wheels, handlebars, frame, and seat (Whitt and Wilson 7–10). Modeled on the gestural mount of the quick and agile horse, this early cycle mimics the familiar gait of walking and running. For our purposes it is not a bicycle or motorcycle, but it is a cycle. Walking, along with swimming, constitute the earliest forms of human movement and act as a natural referent for this device. Pedaling, yet to be introduced, is only one aspect of bicycling and is abandoned completely in the motorcycle which evokes a horse-mounted riding sensibility, often referred to as an iron horse. Each device and bodily orientation to space and object remind us of cycling’s connections to the horse. The velocipede is a hobby horse produced with intention for a larger market. Small children for centuries after are introduced to riding just as von Drais devised in 1817. This device continues to exist in countless forms around the world, in both mass-produced versions and in individual constructions. It is the way many, including the author of this text, first learn to ride, experiencing the reward and risk of doing so in the process. My first introductions to cycling consisted of pushing along on one of these devices made of plastic and shaped like a banana. Hitting a small crack in the floor, I went over the rudimentary handlebars and received my first set of stitches, learning a series of valuable bodily and spatial lessons in the process. This ancient technique of taking a header is a bodily performance that evokes the history of the horse, bicycle, and motorcycle mounted rider. There is a clear connection to the horse and walking at this point in cycling history. The industrial developments of the crank, chain, and pedal had yet to be realized, and in the search for the unique movement of the bicycle, these mechanical features remained elusive goals. Much of what we know about the performance of riding a bicycle today starts with the hobby horse and the ability to coast. Coasting without pushing or pedaling, like the relaxing of the reins of a galloping horse while sitting on the saddle, momentarily frees the legs. As it does on a horse, this also frees the mind, allowing for relaxation and reflection while in continual motion. The scooter has developed alongside the bicycle and the motorcycle as its own genre of mobility, which I consider slightly outside of the cycling ontology described in this text. Utilizing human-powered pushing strides and wheels, this device has also been motorized. There are electronic scooters, push scooters, and off-road scooter technology, which broaden the forms of scooter mobility. Such ways of moving predominantly on two wheels is an extension and a precursor to cycling. When forms of movement such as

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unicycles and scooters are combined with electronic technology and revived, the overall constellation of public mobility changes. Our spheres of influence change based on the ways we traverse spaces and establish boundaries. Sloterdijk describes these foam formations as “multiplicities of neighboring, interlocking, piled-up improvisations of habitat immunity that have attracted the attention of theory” (Spheres III 233). Electronic scooters pile up at the edge of their electronically sanctioned zone, bicycles compile outside the entry point of a venue, and motorcycles ride along on the back of trucks to the limits of paved roads. The nature of these spheres is constructed in the process. In these changes of mobility there is also a change in expectations regarding public use of space and the bodily abilities required to control these devices. As we exceedingly rely on comfortable and self-navigating vehicles such as modern automobiles, the revival of these devices constitutes a series of reflexive returns that primarily occur in bodily orientations toward space and objects. The cycle remains woven, as it always has, within a tapestry of other forms of movement. When the bicycle first appeared, it was placed alongside, at odds with, and at times, in direct competition with, the horse. The combinations of the bicycle and motorcycle themselves in the forms of cargo bicycles, rickshaws, tuk-tuks, jeepneys, taxi-bicycles, tricycles, four-wheeled cycles, and motorized bicycles move along with electronic scooters, tricycles, carts, unicycles, boards, and other combinations. These manifestations constitute productive assemblages, projections, and returns, which stem from previous methods of movement while incorporating emerging technologies. Each reintroduces the ways in which we moved prior to such inventions and in turn the ways in which we thought about spatial and social interaction. They all reference in some way or another the bodily gestures and spatial orientations established through horse mobility, and through everyday space, discourse, and objects such as the bicycle and motorcycle, we are reminded of this. THE HORSE METAPHOR The horse is the first widely used form of rapid transit and the only one for a long period of time that does not involve aquatic environments. While camels, elephants, yaks, and other animals have been used and, in some cases, ridden for thousands of years, the horse-mounted rider is central to early societal interaction, transportation, and expansion. The impact of the horse on collective human life in terms of space, movement, and communication lingers as a consistent symbolic equestrian presence or horse metaphor. Horse mobility offers swift movement, cargo-carrying capacity, and early military advantages that rearrange the way humans perceive and conceive

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environments. Equestrian militarism comes to play a defining role in the spatial configurations of political geography and is not mere horseplay. Because of this, the horse seems to play a ubiquitous role throughout history, and even stating this is like beating a dead horse. Further everyday colloquialisms remind us of this influence, horsing around, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, straight from the horse’s mouth, and eating like a horse, to name a few (Olsen 3–5). Each notes a general awareness and sensibility that is the result of our interactions with the horse. After millennia of civilizational reliance on the horse its presence is still felt long after its actual use has subsided. While the horse is a living breathing animal with physiological needs much like humans, and while I discuss the horse largely in terms of its use as a form of mobility for human needs, it should be recognized that this requires forms of domination that often entail animal suffering. Separated in time and space from the environments in which they were used regularly, this examination treats the horse as a memory. The care and cruelty that go along with framing the horse as a device of mobility is largely replaced with an attention to the ways in which the historical use of the horse has impacted our contemporary understanding of space and movement. However, the messy business of controlling animals and nature is not lost in this discussion. The mobility derived from equestrian relationships leads to our contemporary notions of everyday space. Each phrase frames an accepted sentiment that contributes to normalized social perspectives that are still common today, making good old common horse sense (Olsen 3–5). Horses were domesticated in Anatolia and Iran around 4000 BCE and used throughout the region for carrying capacity, sustenance gathering, ceremonial displays, and competition, as well as other purposes, including riding. The Sumerian culture that arose around the same time in Eurasia became a dynamic and powerful society and one of the first to integrate the horse into daily social life. They are recognized for a series of early inventions and functions related to the horse including the chariot and wheel. There is ample evidence that civilizations such as the Egyptian, Phoenician, Hittite, Libyan, and others used the chariot and horse extensively attaching great significance to their use. The horse-mounted rider and drawn chariot becomes a feature of civilization and its spread from ancient Egypt to Phoenicia and Greece. The Greek philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates turned to Egyptian philosophy as the partial grounds for their own as well as for their use of the horse and chariot (Bernal Volume I, 116–118). The success and growth of Indian, African, and Eurasian civilizations are all partially due to them. The Mongols are well-known for their harnessing of horse mobility for nomadic expansion and their threat to the longest running civilization, China, who also utilized the horse heavily to maintain their bounded territory. In the Americas the horse is infamously attached to colonization by Spanish

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conquistadors; and then subsequently celebrated as a vehicle of liberation for the former colonies of Spain in South America. Similarly, the horse is used to expand British and then American territory while becoming entrenched in the identity of many native American cultures after colonial contact. The utilization of the horse as a means of rapid transportation and communication leads to civilizational growth due to the ability to maintain societal cohesion and militarization. The speed and endurance of the horse as well as its maneuverability by a single practitioner play a pivotal role in the development of civilizations, the spread of collective life, and the creations of bounded states. Because of its prowess in war and in imperial and colonial expansion, for over six thousand years the horse has impacted most of the globe, aiding in the spread of civilization. The development of the most influential civilizations—from ancient Egyptian and Phoenician empires to those in the Middle East, India, and China—is possible in part due to the horse. Subsequently the horse is reintroduced to the Americas via its conquest by Spain, further solidifying its indelible global presence and impact. Pita Kelekna in The Horse in Human History (2009) remarks that this “horsepower” effectively establishes the model for “Atlanto-European planetary expansion and colonization” (2). Because of equestrian militarism, chariotry, and transportation, they extend the networks of society physically. The fastest quadruped was used to pull chariots and heavy wagons and was ridden for long and short distances. John Man in The First Nomadic Civilization and the Making of China (2020) states that Eurasian steppes stretching from Hungary to Siberia and western China stretched like an “ocean of grass” where neither hunter-gatherers nor agricultural societies thrived. In this space, pastoral nomadism developed, which highly relied on the horse (10–11). Today we can trace human history and civilizational growth from Saharan Africa to China by way of Europe and the Middle East through the horse. Thus, we are reminded of them when we look at the social, physical, and cultural configurations of the world today. Numerous texts discuss their importance to human societies such as Horse Power: A History of the Horse and Donkey in Human Societies by Juliet Clutton-Brock (1992) and On the Trail of Ghangis Khan: An Epic Journey Through the Land of the Nomads (2014) by Tim Cope. Just as Jack Kerouac took to the road in an automobile, Cope rides a horse through the Eurasian steppe mentioned above. He writes that the idea of riding through the important horse-influenced land “from Mongolia to Hungary” had gripped him since youth (6). Like the bicycle and the motorcycle when there are more comfortable forms of transportation such as the automobile and plane, horse mobility takes on a larger meaning. The horse becomes increasingly symbolic, coming to represent many facets of human life. The Tale of the Horse: A History of India on Horseback by

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Yashawini Chandra discusses the importance the horse has played in Indian civilization, while Imperial China: The Art of the Horse in Chinese History (2000) by Bill Cooke and Power and Virtue: The Horse in Chinese Art (2017) by Robert E. Harrist Jr. describe the aesthetic significance of horses in the art of China. There are numerous works that celebrate the horse, such as The Horse: The Epic History of Our Noble Companion (2016) by Wendy Williams and The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey Through Human History (2017) by Susanna Forrest. In The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (2010), David W. Anthony emphasizes the link between symbolic communication and the horse (5). Anthony links movement and communication with the creation of the modern world. There is ample attention, and rightly so, directed toward their influence on human society; there is also room for more attention to their impact on space and the creation of horse alternatives in the bicycle and the motorcycle. The horse-mounted rider becomes symbolic of individual and collective human identity. David A. Bell, for example, in Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution (2020) notes that democracy and the nation-state develop from a “history of Charisma” partially achieved through horse riding. From Washington to Napoleon Bonaparte to Bolívar, this identity of influence and power, noted as charisma, is connected to “men on horseback” (35). In these cases, the horse plays a large functional role in strategic and military success, but it also plays a purely symbolic and therefore communicative role. Horses and their physical enlargement of the human body as well as their expansion of territory are reflected symbolically. Ivan Jablonka in “Childhood, or the 'Journey toward Virility'” (2016) writes that horseback riding for youth was a learning and disciplining exercise in which they entered “into the definition of masculinity, and their practice is part of a skill set and a savoir-vivre” (233). Much of this symbolism is carried over to the rider and transferred to the bicycle and motorcycle later. The horsemounted rider becomes synonymous with masculinity and virility, which continues in depictions of the motorcycle. The general histories surrounding any of the people or societies mentioned here—such as A People’s History of the World (2017) by Chris Harman, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (1989) by Lewis Mumford, Black Athena Volume I (1987) and Volume II (1991) by Martin Bernal, and A History of Virility (2016)—all mention the horse at some point. Any general history of humans will most likely note the importance of the horse. The movement provided by the horse is harnessed as a form of transportation and communication. The initial necessity to communicate a message via a physical carrier positions the horse as an early form of

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rapid communication. They play an important symbolic, spatial, and physical aspect of human development. If they are, as I argue, a precursor to bicycling and motorcycling, then together these forms of movement also play a large social role. Horse riding is a performance of rhetoric, and it is easier to witness this aspect present in cycling, when stripped of the context of mediated and electronic forms of communication including the printing press. In this historical space, riding the horse, and in turn cycling, as a form of communication becomes apparent. We primarily discuss the horse’s communicative importance now as symbolic rather than physical. Because of this history, the horse-mounted rider is a figure that is read as masculine, becoming associated with the fatherland, the nation, and sovereignty. In turn it is closely related to the patriarchal family structure appearing frequently in national and family crests. Thus, the horse is aligned with domination and liberation, masculinity, and patriarchy. Its mobility is also part of society, which has normalized these themes. Figures such as Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Toussaint Louveture, and Bolivar possess leadership qualities that are transferred from the horse to the rider and then to audiences. Charisma and credibility along with physical movement and military use assist everyone noted to achieve success in their respective revolutions. The direction of these societies is based partially on the charisma achieved through the performance of the horse-mounted leader (Bell 6–7). The texts Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico by Hugh Thomas (1993), Bolívar: American Liberator (2013) by Marie Arana, and Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolutionary (2000) by Frank McLynn all refer to the horse in relation to the collective movements and individual leaders of those mentioned. The animal associated with masculinity, nationhood, and power is visible in contemporary representations of bicycles and particularly motorcycles, evoking these constructions. History is partially defined by the importance of the species. The relationship between humans, horses, and society finds traction in the Sumerian empire in Mesopotamia around the third millennium BCE as well as the Assyrian empire, lasting until around 612 BCE. These are examples of human civilizations or spheres of influence that feature sustained equestrian cultures. Associations of strength, power, status, and identity start to develop due to the strength of these empires and the central role the horse played. The traveler, trader, soldier, messenger, and countless other positions within society expand substantially. The horse is soon relied upon for knowledge, commerce, combat, and communication. The Sumerian, Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Mongol, and Chinese use of the horse harness a series of related technologies that improve mobility including saddles, stirrups, and chariots to

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name a few. This transportation prowess is transferred to symbolic and artistic displays in textiles, pottery, art, and architecture. The horse is commonly used to refer to national and family crests, further linking their use to masculinity, virility, and nationality. Its imagery is commonly used in heraldry, a system in which crests and armorial markings are used to indicate belonging, rank, and status. Statues around the world feature the lone male figure riding a horse, including Pizzaro in Lima, Peru, and Trujillo, Spain. Numerous paintings such as those featuring Washington and Bonaparte also depict them heroically mounted on a horse. These portrayals are based on actual uses of the horse and employ the riding posture and spatial orientation later seen in cycles. When bicycles are mounted, height is increased, speed capability increases exponentially, as does the ability to cover distance. Drawn from horse mobility itself, the symbolic associations also evoke these depictions and practical functions. Their uses in military strategy, political control, and trade are vast and varied. Roman historian Herodotus wrote of horse-mounted Persian messengers that were able to hold one of the largest empires together stretching from Egypt to Afghanistan over 2,500 years ago. He writes, “There is nothing in the world that travels faster than the” couriers of Persia (533). The Greeks and Romans drew from the Sumerian, Egyptian, and Persian use of the horse in transportation, communication, and militarization. They become part of our earliest narratives as a descriptive element of what makes us human. They are referenced in Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, and The Iliad and are found in the ancient myth of Hercules and Pegasos, as well as numerous human cults that surround them (Bernal, Athena II 115). The horse is part of the mythical and thus socially constructed nature of identity and plays out in themes of success, power, and competition. The Greeks and the Egyptians utilized and celebrated the horse-drawn chariot in competition, often for political and social status. Homer's The Odyssey mentions the horse in numerous instances, including the famous Trojan Horse, horse riding, chariot use, and racing (65). The Romans examined and maintained networks using the horse and chariot. The phrase “all roads lead to Rome” references some of the largest networks of maintained roads in history due in part because they are primarily established and held via the horse. The horse-mounted rider, the wheel of the chariot, and the use of each plant the seeds for the bicycle and motorcycle that follow. The leader of the Huns, Atilla, utilizes them heavily to threaten the Roman empire, which was spread through military conquest and this network of roads. The use of the horse by the Huns and its threat to Rome, is a classic example of the power of the horse in conquest and its threat to fortified settlements. The invention of the wheel and chariot by the Sumerians influences other societies. Hit-and-run tactics used by the Sumerians were possible

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because of the speed of the horse. This tactic is adopted by the European Crusaders and the Muslim jihadists as both sides embrace the horse. The nomads of Eurasia and around the world utilized horses for collective movement. The Mongol empire is the largest contiguous land-based empire in history and is sustained through movement and the swiftness provided by the horse and rider, notably Genghis Khan. The quintessential war machine of the horse-mounted Mongol forces held this space due to the mobility and communicative elements made possible by rapid mass transit. The horse becomes synonymous with communication and territorial control. A nomadic approach to dwelling involves mobility and as an extension of human movement, the animal adds to this ability. Capable of holding a larger swath of territory through semicontinuous movement, the horse is a major component of both sedentary and nomadic ways of life. Nomadic communities traveled along distinct circuits following social, animal, and environmental changes. As moving groups, they are in constant relationship with changing spatial patterns. Rosi Braidotti, Delueze and Guattari, and others draw from the physical movements of nomadic individuals and communities to construct a theoretical framework based on flux and flow. For Braidotti a nomadic subjectivity consists of a series of “mutations that follow no technological directives and no moral imperatives,” but rather declare their own direction through presence and change (4–5). From spatial orientations that roam we can find more fluid political and theoretical stances toward contexts that are also in motion. Horses and later their mechanical substitutes, the bicycle and the motorcycle, function as forms of human movement and can be read as nomadic, representing more fluid perspectives to knowledge and understanding. The spaces that they require to perform whether in a field, on a track, or along the road exist within an area that is held but not necessarily occupied. This can be viewed as a nomadic territory and a corresponding perspective. When riding alone or with a group, the tendency is to stop and rest, congregate, and fuel at certain locations, but the spatial requirement is the larger swath of space, which entails the importance of many points between. In the space of the between or “intermezzo” is where the performances of nomadic mobility unfold (Deleuze and Guattari 23). Sumerian and Mongol military expansion, due to their utilization of equestrian speed, are examples of their “innovations in war, in the areas of offensive and defensive weapons, composition or strategy, and technological elements” enabling nomadic orientations to be harnessed as a war machine (Deleuze and Guattari 418, 404). Despite the internalization of nomadic movements and the appropriation of its roaming, a way of knowing based on ambulatory practices can be examined in numerous settings, including cycling. Delueze and Guattari describe the elements of this nomadic science

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as hydraulic, shifting, and problem-posing (361). Each of these is marked in some way by morphing qualities of becoming that resists rigidity and stagnation. Similarly, horse riding and cycling are practices built and used to move, to react to dynamic spaces that are also in constant motion. Nomadic movements bring differing groups, tribes, and peoples into contact with one another. This gives rise to the spatial basis of sedentary civilizations. Sociologist Thomas J. Barfield notes that nomadic orientations throughout history have long captured human imagination as “writers have romantically lauded the nomad as a free spirit untrammeled by the petty restrictions” of more sedentary lifestyles. At the same time and perhaps because of these celebrations, “nomads have also been condemned by their neighbors for these same traits” (3). There is a tension between descriptions of people, groups, and cultures that reflects ways of living in relation to movement and space. Ibn Khaldûn in The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History (1958) examines this tension as part of the rise and fall of empires. The sixteenth century historian warns that “the qualities of character resulting from sedentary culture and luxury are” synonymous with ease and disconnected from group solidarity (Vol. 2, 296). Nomadic movement, on the other hand, was marked by a self-sufficiency that results in embodied insights of inventiveness, autonomy, and relational independence. Khaldûn remarked that humans created social organizations held together through a group feeling or asabiyyah and this collective ethos is stronger in societies that roam (Vol. 1, 135–37). Today movements are constructed in tighter more rapid trajectories but neglected in similar ways in relation to sedentary dwelling and perceived environmental, social, and spatial durability. Seminomadic routes unfold daily through various collective and individual performances of mobility; automobiles, pedestrians, and cyclists move along preconceived paths as part of a vast system of regulated and predicted movement. Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of a nomadic science makes the distinction between differing forms of inquiry, royal and nomadic. They state that science, thought, or method, from a nomadic standpoint “is more immediately in tune with the connection between content and expression in themselves,” as each concept implies “both form and matter” (369). Deleuze and Guattari refer to an orthodox or royal science in distinction to this nomadic way of operating. The metaphor becomes material when we reconnect it to the physical movements of horse-mounted riders and then cyclists. The royal structures of everyday conceived spaces can be approached from a nomadic perspective as a cyclist often does. The locations of place within a network of regulated routes to and from can be described, from the perspectives of Deleuze and Guattari, as a rigid segmentarity. They note that national borders and settlements instill a spatial striation, as a sovereignty projected through

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constructed inertness (360). They draw from the examples of the nomadic use of the horse to envision a disruption of this territorialization. The horse, like most forms of movement, is implicated on many sides throughout history. Spanish conquistadors, after travelling across seas, divided and repressed large numbers of Indigenous peoples, including the civilizations of the Mexica, Aztecs, and Incas. They do so in part due to the presence of the horse, a form of technology then new to the people but biologically reintroduced to the land. Horses previously existed but had more recently gone extinct on the continent before Columbus introduced them to Hispaniola and Cortés brought them to Mexico. Conquistadors used the horse to align with Indigenous societies such as the Tlaxcala, Cholula, and Huexotzinco and overtake the larger Mexica-Chichimeca empire led by Montezuma (Thomas 487). The horses carried to Mexico by Cortés were descendants of those Columbus carried, and many of them are remembered by name by Bernal Diaz such as El Rey and Roldanillo (Thomas 153). Their use by the Spanish in the colonization of the Americas was based in their use in combat against the Moors and centuries of established equestrian militarism (Thomas 169– 70). Thomas notes that if the Mexica had time to integrate and use the horse effectively as resistance to European colonization, the conquest of the Mexica could have had different outcomes. Nevertheless, the horse is integrated into Indigenous and Mestiza/o societies thereafter and will later be used to liberate most of South America and then continue the struggle against colonial legacies in the Mexican Revolution. Empires expanded and nomadic territories increased due to equestrian militarism and the ability to communicate and travel across distances increased. Empires broke into smaller entities and nation-states coalesced around tighter circuits of movements. The horse continued throughout the centuries that followed to be either the most dominant form of movement or its most symbolic. Roads established metropoles and colonial centers. Sovereignty became definitive of them as humans on horses became symbolic of power. The liberatory struggles of Bolívar represents the use of the horse to resist sovereign forms of domination. Bolívar and a series of Indigenous, Spanish, and Mestiza/o forces, via the horse, resisted and declared independence from Spain. They also nearly united an entire continent due in part to the harnessing of horse mobility. These diverse forces unified around a shared cause of liberation and utilized the horse as both a means and symbol of freedom (Clutton-Brock 85). Bolívar’s identity and success were tethered to his performance on the horse. A slight individual, his presence when combined with the animal was heightened. His ability, like others discussed here, to ride well added to his ability as a leader. The horse itself was a symbol and a vehicle for resistance.

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The horse is integrated into the relationship between physical environments and human life, associated with conquering and liberation through strength and speed. Virilio’s notion of a dromocracy notes that humans attach capital and power to those that move quickly, appropriating an early form of mobility for specific ends. Thus, history and contemporary life in general can be discussed in terms of speed and its function as power. Territorial acquisitions reestablish the polis from the distant perspective engrained in that of the metropole. The Athens-centric philosophical project continues as spaces resemble that of the metaphysical constructions of a distant place. Sophistic and poststructuralist theories resist those ways of thinking that lead to more objectivist, positivist, and essentialist conclusions. Colonial and imperial domination results in colonial reconstructions of distant locations emanating from a center. In turn revolutions and independence movements establish new citizens within various nation-states. To bring a nation into being requires a sovereign body defined by circuitous and expansive movement. In this action there is a political subjectivity that is formed by movement out of or within the nation. Postcolonial studies, critical Indigenous studies, and ethnic studies, for example, are disciplines that have formed in response to the ways in which such practices of territorialization have silenced, oppressed, marginalized, and appropriated Indigenous and native ways of being, thinking, and inhabiting space. After the inventions of cycles and automobiles, the horse is still key to the success of Mexican army generals Francisco “Pancho” Villa and Emiliano Zapata. A hundred years after colonial liberation from Spain, the northern and southern armies of Mexico led by Villa and Zapata respectively help overthrow the authoritarian regime of Porfirio Díaz. The horse is used to circumvent major roads and control the communication and transportation routes, which hold the country together, and to break up the hacienda system and centralization of power by the Díaz government, which is viewed as an extension of colonial power structures. For both revolutionary leaders, horses were vital aspects of military effectiveness, social communication, and symbolic identity (McLynn 49). This last element entails a large territory of rhetorical impact as the generals further the symbolic strength of the horse-mounted revolutionary already established by Genghis Khan, Washington, Bolívar, and others. Once again, their prowess as riders of great skill, stamina, and strength bolsters their forms of credibility. For each leader, horses are vital aspects of military effectiveness, social communication, and symbolic identity. Zapata was admired for his equestrian riding skills, and Villa, the infamous revolutionary bandit, becomes a horse-mounted Robin Hood–like figure. He is filmed in actual battle by a Hollywood film crew on horseback during the Mexican Revolution (Orellana 44). This identity is an aspect, as Bell argues, that aides in the establishment

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of entire nations and becomes indicative of the directions of society itself (7). In this movement, constructions of sovereignty, nationality, identity, and gender, among others, unfold surrounding the horse. As colonial conditions continue into the contemporary era, the physical and conceptual confining of people is a major element. Any movement within or outside of the designated areas of political entities is a potential disruption to the settlement and can be considered nomadic. As horse transportation and communication evolves into cycling and other forms of vehicular transportation take center stage, the cycle remains both reifying and resistant to dominant spatial discourse. Representing a nomadic approach within the sedentary apparatus of the stately road, the cycle can temporarily seize territory and hold larger spaces. The iconography of the horse is a representation of tamed space, the inert state carved out of mobile practices. At the heart of this space, in the empty road, pedaled bicycles and speeding motorcycles are a reminder of this human animal/object and the ways in which we communicate power through movement. As movement entails a changing of setting and the creation of presence, it is one of the earliest forms of rhetoric. Today movement is all around us and is often sidelined as secondary to deliberate forms of verbal communication. By examining cycling in this manner, I propose a way of looking at all deliberate human movement as potentially rhetorical. Physical movement, like oration, is an embodied performance that can be read by others and further discussed. The horse, when not inflated as emblematic of the war machine and national power, is used as a means of life-sustaining culture and communication throughout history. There are many examples of horse-mounted riders as carriers of messages or couriers throughout history. French postal services in the 1400s maintained a network of horse relays to transmit messages across the country. The aptly named, and still used, Pony Express in the United States was established during the mid-1800s. In this network, the animal was used to maintain contact between Missouri and Sacramento. Later telephone wires would stretch along the same paths previously trodden by horse-mounted couriers that hand-delivered messages. Horses represent historical ways of interacting with space and are reflected in our current conceptions and approaches to it. Their strength is also displayed in our symbolic understandings of identity and collective cohesion. Land is a medium as well as a problem for communication that horses and their associated technologies solve. Movement is a communication of power. When spaces are conceived as destination-concepts ahead of time, movement itself becomes secondary to the destination; however, the journey comes first. The term transportation refers to moving objects and bodies for means and purposes often greater than one’s own. In this regard, it is deemed a necessary

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act. For most it is. Virilio observes that the structure of paths and roads around the globe create collective articulations of passersby, a multitude of previous movements unfolding daily. Within this habitable circulation, remaining stationary is sought after while movement is a necessity. This generates a perspective of contemporary and historical life based on settling and built on movement (30–31). The desire to move faster than is allowed on two feet fuels our relationships with the environment and animals such as the horse. Today the desire to move independently and swiftly is often a need. Vivanco notes that different ways of moving entail divergent ways of thinking carrying the “potential for knowing, sensing, and interacting with the world in specific ways” (12). Our forms of mobility are often referred to as a choice, yet we might also ask if mobility itself is a choice in a society that requires it for survival. Emerging types of transportation result in new forms of social and environmental interaction. Even if in fleeting moments of passing, mobility entails dialog, and as instances and ways of moving multiply, so do interactions. Moving between physical locations entails moving between differing people, groups, and populations. The rhetorical aspects and affective impacts of movement are heightened as forms of mobility become commonplace. The territorializations of the globe from these early examples to the European colonial age and the liberatory struggles that follow bring horse-dependent civilizations to much of the planet. As many become familiar with their influence and the territories they help create, spatial expectations follow, which are the ground on which the practice and ontology of cycling takes shape. The horse, like the cycle, needs a space to exist when not moving. As the cycle involves a certain degree of fabrication, repair, and maintenance, the horse requires domestication and at times husbandry, care, and medical attention. The species is also dominated, confined to areas, and used to further conquer nature by holding new territories and controlling other animals and humans in the process. The horse is a living animal. At times, it is cared for greatly, respected, and revered. Horse and human networks stretch across most of the major land masses of the globe by the fifteenth century. Paths, trails, and roads as well as barns, corrals, pens, and grazing lands connect disparate locations and communities, just as there are now roads and garages, fueling stations, and workspaces for cycles. The motorcycle, which is built on the foundations of the bicycle, traverses the same roads argued for initially by bicyclists. Cyclists persist, at the epicenter of sedentary spatial organizations, disrupting normalized ways of operating, moving off roads and between lanes. As they both are eclipsed by the automobile, a more comfortable and sedentary form of mobility, they also reference the previous technology of the horse.

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The horse-mounted individual becomes the rider, which can be seen today in the modern bicyclist and motorcyclist. The motorcycle, with an engine measured according to horsepower and referred to as an iron horse, continuously reminds us of this past. Simultaneously they are also attached to societal notions of progress and modernity, expansion and military, identity, and masculinity. The archetype of the mounted horse rider has continued throughout history, exemplified in the Marlboro Man, which references the cowboy image. The lone horse-mounted male traversing across land is an archetype of both masculinity and the American dream. It comes with notions of rugged individuality, frontier spirit, and virility. It is a patriarchal and nationalistic construction that evokes images of colonial expansion. The western genre in films and popular artifacts symbolizes, through narratives, a discursive space much larger than its historical territory and centers on this horse/man archetype. Modern examples of them in popular culture are abundant, as are its spatial reminders. It helps form our spatial subjectivity and is an aspect of our more symbolic identities. As practitioners of mobility and space, we are implicated in the horse metaphor. The moving being. The social constructions of those that are capable and privileged to move. This marks these constructions as political. As women are marginalized from the public sphere and denied social mobility, so are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color as well as immigrants that have historically been excluded in physical and symbolic ways. This is relevant to the ways in which identity and subject positionality based on forms of movement are used to marginalize and oppress both physically and conceptually. What it means to ride entails who is riding where. All movement, if it is political, is therefore tainted by dominant spatial oppressions such as racism, sexism, xenophobia, heteronormativity, and other forms. These are not indelible conditions of human subjectivity but social constructions that are reified overtime and almost always part of our spatial considerations. Shifts in social mobility are first established in physical movement. Just as the horse allows new forms of interaction, the bicycle and motorcycle serve similar purposes. Cycling today achieves the purposes of short rides around closed and closely bound circuits as well as migratory, long-distance, and extended rides. In this manner horses and cycles are harnessed to indefinitely travel and maintain settlements, circle around tracks and areas, and explore new terrain. For the collective, movement is always relational and partly declarative of the social and physical environment. They communicate a host of messages through a fleeting presence. The horse gives us a leg up and spurs us into action providing a lasting conception of our identity and orientations. Their symbolic use is off and running to sell various products such as trucks, luxury automobiles, alcohol,

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and equipment. Today the metaphor continues as the riding of horses and their impact on human life are undeniable. This pervasive reality and way of viewing remain evident in other expressions such as dark horse candidate, bits and pieces, champing at the bit, giving free rein, and nightmares, to name a few more (Olsen 7–8). The symbolic is a reminder of the social and the physical. The presence of roads is telling of this history, as are these symbolic references, which together create a network of equestrian-influenced forms of moving and thinking. The nomadic trajectories of roaming societies are re-created in circulatory networks of sedentary cities. As the horse recedes to our memory and constructed social environments become ever present, new ways of moving develop without such a direct reliance on natural forms. Flora and fauna are reformed into architectural structures as objects such as bicycles and motorcycles replace animals. Eventually technical machines rather than nature itself moves us along an expanding network of roads and paths that are informed by these previous relationships. When we ride, we are reminded of the horse through discursive and spatial metaphors. Each of the moments, genres, and manifestations within cycling that I include in this text, whether in relation to the horse, bicycle, or motorcycle, are elements that constitute this territory and remind us of this equestrian past. CONCLUSION A horse walks at around four miles an hour, trots around eight to twenty, and briefly gallops at around thirty. They need to be trained, fed, and cared for while producing waste and requiring birthing and medical attention. They are living animals that have a brain, heart, and the capacity to suffer. In this regard, the animal as a form of mobility presents a series of ethical issues. As the bicycle and motorcycle are developed as horse alternatives, we can begin to formally discuss their involvement in an object-human dialectic. In terms of these types of movement, humans move from animal/animal to animal/ object formations. The bicycle object represents a kinder form of mobility that is cleaner and cheaper to maintain. It moves at a similar pace, capable of averaging ten to twenty miles an hour and from thirty to over sixty miles an hour downhill. In the 1890s the bicycle provided a liberating form of movement as an alternative to the horse from which many benefited. Just as there is civilizational growth based on the mobility provided by the horse, cities like New York, London, and Berlin grew in population alongside the increasing production and use of bicycles (Kranish 64). Riding horses leads to the development of the bicycle, and they both entail similar riding gestures and orientations that

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comment on the social, cultural, and historical spaces in which they take place; there is a clear correlation in the expansion of civilization and communities via the horse and the bicycle. Sloterdjik notes that humans create physical, symbolic, and technical spheres in which meanings and values are expressed to maintain cultural and political structures. These globular formations are determined by various practices of physical movement, symbolic communication, and technological development. The horse has played a significant role in each of these areas and is an example of how the formations of societies are partially defined through ways of moving. The bicycle is invented because of its functionality and a desire to replace the animal with a technical object. In this regard, the transition between the two represents a continuation and a severing. The motorcycle, automobile, and airplane are all first constructed using bicycle parts, designs, and workshops. Trains develop based on the horsedrawn chariot and wagon. These ways of moving evoke memories of horse mobility, but only cycling maintains the individual riding posture. Today a child often rides a small simple device that references this development from bipedality to riding. Like walking, it is almost a rite of passage to adulthood. This visceral understanding grows as they advance to the bicycle and then the motorcycle. In this process they are involved in shared practices thousands of years old. Whether riding horses or motorcycles, pedaling up hills or coasting down them, what we come to know about cycling is bound in the journey. The path of cycling begins with the horse and the spatial context from which it emerges, based on the spatial and mobile expectations reified over thousands of years of riding horses. I now discuss the bicycle and motorcycle in the next four chapters. The development of the bicycle object and the ways in which individuals and society have changed because of its presence are the subject of the next chapter. The signification of the object and the practice of bicycling constitute its own area of interest, yet in this area we are continually reminded of the horse.

Chapter 3

Bicycle Idea

Human history is partly defined by the invention, use, and development of material objects, tools, and machines such as the bicycle. The bicycle object comes into existence alongside industrialization and in many ways leads the way. It represents the search for mechanized forms of individual transport and the constructions of collective networks that they depend on. As the idea of the bicycle turns into a reality, public life becomes increasingly mechanized. As noted, riding bicycles is based on the experiences and postures established through years of riding horses; however, the bicycle itself is a human fabrication that exchanges the dependence on nature for a reliance on the capabilities to produce. The long history of equestrian and human relationships coincides with the development of human civilizations and the creation of a global network of land-based movement. In its earliest form, the walking machine or hobby horse, reminds us of this past. The shorter history of the bicycle coincides with that of industrialization and the development of many of the concepts now associated with modernity. The creation of machinery and increased standardization fuels the growth of a dispersed bicycle industry. Industrial processes lead to new forms of production based on previous forms. As the tool-using animal, we live among and within our technological inventions. As we turn from the horse and its ability to produce animal-aided movement, this chapter examines the unique form of human-powered mobility offered by the bicycle. The horse metaphor is a pervasive reminder of the ways in which they have influenced our notions of self, space, and society. Similarly, I describe the bicycle as a concept. The idea of a horse alternative leads to the bicycle as we know it today, which was formulated in pursuit of the ideation of a particular way of moving. Its foretelling in conceptual forms says much about our conceptions of identity, and in it we devised a way to belong in a space of our own creation. Once the bicycle becomes a material reality over a hundred years ago, it becomes an indelible aspect of our physical worlds and our collective consciousness. 55

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The industrialization of our natural spaces and the globalization of our transportation and travel networks, follows the paths already blazed by horses pulling wagons and chariots. This begins to take mechanical shape in the inventions and use of technical objects such as the bicycle. Along with this development, Gilbert Simondon observes, comes a technical individuality. Here, humans and objects are at times interchangeable in that they come to understand themselves as technical, viewing humans as machine-like (77). The two systems, human and machine, are informing of each other, functioning in dialog within the settings they help create. The objects we use and negotiate bring us closer together and divide us from others. This reflects how we think about social and physical life. Burke refers to humans as the animal that uses and just as quickly misuses symbols to produce symbolic acts of communication (Language 5; Symbols 110). Walter R. Fisher extends this concept to describe humans as Homo Narans or story-telling animals that form symbols into narrative arcs used to describe our internal thoughts in relation to external realities (1–3). Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1950) refers to humans as homo ludens or animals that engage in play. He notes that play is a voluntary engagement in a situation in which participants partially organize their own perimeters or rules. This is framed, like the other distinctions, as a defining aspect of our existence. Victor Turner refers to humans as animals that perform or homo performans because all our public acts are symbolic when viewed by others (Turner 81). Because of this performance aspect, we are seldom unaware of the rhetorical nature of our own gestures. From this perspective, shared and covered by others such as Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) and Richard Schechner in Performance Theory (1988), we enact differing roles to influence audiences (Turner 22; 14–15). There is an epistemological aspect to these presentations of self as our everyday performances turn bodies into sites of learning as well as display. Simondon notes that humans, before the nineteenth century, existed as the bearer of their tools and at the center of their technical worlds. He continues that as factories and other processes separated the two, working parallel to one another, such experiences became unavailable (131–32). While we may not fabricate bicycles from raw material, we do enter its mechanical arrangements as performing bicyclists, writing its narrative in relation to our own. The bicycle object is part of our technical world, and in its use it becomes an extension of us. In riding we meet our collective identity through our manufactured and preconceived surroundings. Consequently, we might also be referred to as the animal that moves with objects. From small tools and the fabrication of dwellings comes the need to move larger forms, prompting some of the earliest human-powered devices. These

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arise in various forms and most often utilize our larger appendages and muscles such as arms, shoulders, and back. This produces power through a series of repetitive motions maintained for a duration of time. Most of these devices call for a complete corporeal engagement. Walking, typing, or simply breathing, for example, incorporates the entire body at some somatic level; however, most early human-powered machines tend to overlook our strongest muscles, the legs. In contrast, the bicycle relies heavily on the legs. If one wishes when riding a bicycle, they may release their grip from the handlebars and relax their shoulders and back while remaining in motion. The bicycle when coasting, if combined with a downhill slope, will never cease moving as the efficiency of its relationship with body, space, and object takes over. Because of the efficiency of the relationship between the bicycle design and the human body, the exercise benefits of running, swimming, and weightlifting often surpass that of bicycle riding. It is because of this, that it can appear so intuitive, memorable, and effortless to operate. Machines before the industrial age included the mechanics of rowing, which incorporated the arms, shoulders, and back; the use of the crank, often with arms and hands; and treadmill-driven pumps, which underutilized the legs and overused the arms and back. The bicycle involves the entire body while utilizing its best attributes, bringing together a unique combination of gestures that work in coordination with the specific mechanics of the bicycle. It emerges from our own efforts of production and fabrication while correlating with our bipedal ways of moving. Working efficiently with our bodies, it further allows our minds to think in differing ways that are afforded by its form of mobility. As it is a human-powered form of transportation, albeit extremely efficient, there are numerous arguments for the contemporary use of the bicycle in terms of its health benefits. Often the bicycle is used as a necessary form of transportation and the health aspects are tertiary. Other than walking, it is one of the only viable options for transportation that is human powered. As industrialization occurs and our notions of modernity are constructed around the ideas of technological progression, the bicycle represents a moment that resonates in particular ways. For example, because it occurs before these ideas and processes take shape, the bicycle is now frequently discussed to address collective environmental and health concerns. In the bicycle we can go back to a premodern moment and harness certain technologies and human abilities in ways that are physiologically and environmentally more sustainable. Despite being less rigorous than other forms of exercise, its benefits are numerous as aerobic activity and outdoor exercise are major ways to remedy physical and mental ailments. While the physical aspects of bicycling are not as grand, they do play a large constitutive role in the ways in which bicycling promotes the shifting of unhealthy routines and practices. When we engage in healthy practices in

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general, such as riding bicycles, this often leads to other healthy routines, such as an overall more active lifestyle and better eating habits (Mapes 14–15). The health benefits of bicycling are undeniable, as are the dangers of an inactive lifestyle, which include increases in coronary heart disease, hypertension, stroke, and cancer. Most bicyclists concentrate on the task of navigating a bicycle through traffic and the joy of the ride itself. Many do not consciously think about the fact that regular bicycle riding is an efficient way to meet the minimum exercise classifications of an active lifestyle. This designation entails “thirty minutes of at least moderate intensity activity five days a week or twenty minutes of vigorous effort at least three days a week” (Mapes 229). Bicycling and other healthy practices are connected, making medical care more affordable, which often leads to a longer life (Heir et al. 5). As more bicyclists appear on the road, these aspects become symbolic of the ways in which entire communities are addressing such issues. As the physical territory of bicycle use expands, so does its discursive space, which often leads to more infrastructure, acceptance, and use. The semantic weight of the symbolic structures grows through presence and articulation as there is a constitutive material impact that is the result of a visceral bicycling rhetoric. The symbol-tool-using animal that pedals. The bicycle object heightens and mimics our upright bodily position, an advent of evolution that separates us from other animals and our most recent ancestors, extending our striding walk into a pedaling ride. In the process we are cooled, which prevents our bodies from overheating. The movement we produce from pedaling creates the circulation of air around us, which we are exposed to, much like the engines of motorcycles. These engines do not require the cooling systems of automobile engines because they are exposed, like the body, to the elements when cycling. This exposure to the elements is an advantage of bicycling and motorcycling mobility. Humans move by way of a unique bipedal striding motion that allows a lofty panoramic perspective. This is often noted as a defining element of our evolution, something that separates us from other animals. In this posture we can see above our immediate terrain, use the top half of our bodies in completely different ways than the bottom, and allow our minds to contemplate reality. The Cartesian split and the emphasis of our minds to produce theoretical thought and learn what our senses forgo are evident in this form of mobility. It is a performance or movement that comes to signify our humanness, depicted and discussed in various ways, including Leonardo di Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (1490), which illustrates the upright individual encased in their own orb or sphere. S. S. Wilson notes, in relation to other members of the animal kingdom, that the mobile human is not nearly as proficient; however, when this striding

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motion is combined with the wheels and mechanics of the bicycle, humans become one of the most efficient. In terms of consumption of energy and distance traveled the bicyclist surpasses the horse or salmon and even machines such as the automobile and jet, making the bicycle the most efficient mode of transportation (90). As the bicycle idea is realized, leading to further technological achievements, it persists as an exemplar of our efficient relationships with objects and nature. These calculations are initially determined by Wilson and famously referenced by Steve Jobs in the 1980s to compare the bicycle-using human to the computer-using one. The connection he makes during an Apple computer presentation is that humans when using tools are capable of more than is humanly possible. He makes an argument for the need and benefits of a personal computer, something that many thought unnecessary at the time, and to do so, he draws upon the proficiency of the bicycle. Years later, just as many own a bicycle when it is introduced in the late 1800s, they also own personal computers at the end of the twentieth century. Both devices are harnessed as forms of communication that enable the traversing and exploration of physical, social, and electronic spaces. They open our minds to new realities allowing us to engage in forms of contemplation that shift our perspective. They also function in part as a form of communication and learning. Through the creation of tools, we realize what we are capable of and further construct our material worlds as a reflection of this potential. The bicycle is a product and producer of the modern age. The mechanics of the bicycle allows for countless humans around the globe to experience space on a scale that is indicative of industrialization. As an object, it is used to move among other objects in its manufactured material, processed parts, and social roles, it is an exemplar of our modern world that entails the projections of modernist concerns. In this, it is also a way of thinking about a host of values, from freedom and independence to identity and social mobility. The pursuit of its mechanical realization paves the way for the industrial revolution and eventually becomes engrained in both the history and fabric of our spatial environments. There is an understanding of our worlds as well as ourselves in the mechanized relationships forged by turning the bicycle idea into a material reality. This continues as we contemplate the role of the bicycle in the hypermodernized world. The pursuit of the bicycle object in many ways encapsulates industrialization and marks a moment when notions of human progress are being formed. It also has much to offer us now in postmodern contexts as we reflect on the destructive aspects of modernization that include both physical and environmental as well as cultural damage (Lyon 91; Appadurai 90). In the garages, shops, and factories, the mechanical ingenuity that goes into its historical development and contemporary production represents a

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global effort. On the roads and paths, the bicycle is visible all over the world as the unmatched transport of the everyday practitioner—an efficient and economical way to move faster than walking and involving less consumption, cost, and regulation than driving automobiles. The bicycle has transformed space, shortened distances, and lengthened time for society while remaining a hallmark of efficiency that continues to be used today much as it had in the late 1800s. It quickly becomes the realization of the horse alternative, separating our reliance on nature and providing us with the ability to further create our worlds. As a symbol of identity and liberation, the bicycle also empowers many to resist cultural norms, gender constructions, and social hierarchies. In the process, it challenges them through individual and collective movement. Its impact on life initially in Europe and North America and then around the world is immense, ushering in new ways of being, based on an increased ability to traverse physical locations and at times societal positionalities. This is true now as it was then as the bicycle is an extremely accessible form of transportation. The relatively simple device and small action of moving in the manner it offers evoke a much larger conceptual, social, and political territory. The notion of social mobility is connected directly to physical mobility. The movement from feudal economies to capitalist societies and the altering of colonial and caste systems with static power distances to more fluid social organizational structures can be challenged through ways of moving. This has long been true, as our basic notions of freedom involve confinement, restriction, and independence from these physical restraints. As the bicycle is overshadowed by the automobile and society moves into postindustrial and postmodern situations, the bicycle continues to be a symbol of liberation, but also of class, station, and age. We can see the industrial developments of mechanization and fabrication such as the ball bearing, crank, chain, and pedal in bicycle componentry. We can also read the impact of its use in the scientific, intellectual, and artistic productions of many, including Albert Einstein, H. G. Wells, Émile Zola, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, and others. At the same time, there are numerous artistic examples from David Byrne, Bas Jan Ader, Umberto Boccioni, and Marcel Duchamp, among others. It has played significant roles in popular cultural artifacts and films such as The Wizard of Oz (1939), The Sound of Music (1965), Breaking Away (1979), E.T. (1982), Pee Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), Quicksilver (1987), and Premium Rush (2012); in television in Monty Python (1972), Portlandia (2011), and Stranger Things (2016); in music such as “Bicycle Race” by Queen (1978) “Bicycle Song” by Red Hot Chili Peppers (2002), and “Biking” by Frank Ocean (2017). In each artifact, the

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bicycle is used as a symbol of shared values, a vehicle to communicate a series of messages, a metaphor for life, and most often, a marker of identity and group belonging. Each instance taps into a way of knowing, presents a series of messages, and establishes a sense of community. It is placed in the context of its receptions, which further frames its nature. All symbolic artifacts are sites of tension over meaning, and the bicycle in its discursive place performs various rhetorical functions. As a physical object it exists, but this existence is the result of a socially constructed contemplation or idea that continues to be elaborated upon. Here in this text, it is situated alongside the memory or metaphor of the horse and the imagination or image of the motorcycle. The bicycle as a form of mobility within the public sphere is a political symbol often indicative of those with less access to power. It can be said to serve, as de Certeau notes, a tactical purpose in the negotiation of more durable strategies of power and place (34–35). It can also be a highly specialized and expensive machinery that requires a host of additional consumer products such as shoes, speedometers, shorts, gloves, bibs, and jerseys that connote wealth, leisure, and privilege. Its use as a form of transportation is generally appreciated by many, but for some throughout history its function becomes a vehicle for social mobility and political change. Susan B. Anthony writes in 1896, during the suffragist movement, that the bicycle at that point had “done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.” While the norms and policies surrounding male domination remained intact and the right to vote for women would not be achieved for over twenty years, the female body when combined with the bicycle for Anthony became “the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood” (Kranish 67–68). For women in this context the bicycle provided a temporary form of resistance. The object brings forth an epistemological and rhetorical quality that is socially conceived as universal and quickly becomes aligned with the user and their contexts in specific ways. The structural norms based on male domination and sex-based segregation are challenged as well as the functionality of women’s attire. The egalitarian aspects of riding bicycles allow riders to slightly breach gender segregation by enabling women to move publicly and independently in bloomers or pants. The relationships to power and the distinctions that divide people are at work here. The concept of gender equality finds a certain degree of materiality in these instances as the nonverbal advocacy of functional fashion-based mobility is highlighted. Still, the struggle for equality between male, female, and intersex riders continues. The bicycle as a form of movement initially might appear to be outside of such political contexts, yet movement itself is a commentary on the structure in which it moves. Subsequently, it is a form of writing, responding to its context with actions that are symbolic. The two are connected if not the same.

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Just as movement entails time, bicycling, a form of movement, becomes reflective of its time while altering it. This is true of all movement as we cannot consider it outside of its conditions. Because of this, bicycle riding is a moving rhetoric that inherently comments on the context of its journey. Women systematically denied access to the public sphere are restricted from riding in ways that men are not, but by doing so, they break down and challenge this inequality. In the process, the right to move intersects with the social constructions of gender and attire. The ideas of human identity, technological progress, citizenry, production, and gender equality to name a few are all part of the idea of the bicycle. For centuries, before the bicycle is invented, it exists only in conceptual form, propelling our search for the horse alternative while ushering in the industrial age. THE BICYCLE IDEA The search for a human-powered alternative that does not require the cost and care of the maintenance-heavy horse results in the creation of the bicycle object. The largest volcanic eruption in recorded history, Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa in modern day Indonesia, prompts the killing of crops and horses, among other impacts in Europe and North America in 1815. Often referred to as the year without a summer in 1816, the need for human-powered transportation is heightened due to the loss of horses. This worldwide crisis sets the stage for the transition from their use to the bicycle, prompting von Drais to invent a seemingly practical device, the running machine. Despite the need, the device is not received favorably. Its reception as a peculiarity is interesting as the device seems practical and has a long precedent. It is also a sentiment that will be applied in similar fashion to other forms of moving in the future. The form it replaces, the inspiration, and the basis for its design is the horse. It utilizes the natural gait of human locomotion while perched upon the seat of a wooden horse-like apparatus with wheels. The invention comes to be known as the draisienne or velocipede, Latin for fast foot, materializing the initial step to realizing the bicycle idea (Herlihy 21). The device that emerges from this idea employs wheels from the wagon and chariot while utilizing the riding posturing established in horse riding. The introduction of pedaling is essential, but before this our natural walking motion is utilized in the striding motion incorporated by the velocipede. The desire to move continuously while utilizing our striding motions enables the user to experience two essential aspects of bicycling: the ability to balance in motion without much effort or coasting and steering the front wheel of a two-wheeled vehicle. However, the breakthrough development of direct drive

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pedals that arises later lingers due to the expense, technology, and negative reception of this device. This sentiment is seen today concerning street skateboarding and other alternative forms of movement including modern road, commuting, and freestyle bicycling on public roads. Because they appear out of the norm of everyday movement that caters to safety, rationality, and ease, they are often shunned as viable forms of transportation. Just as quickly as this early cycle emerges on paths trodden by pedestrians, the horse, and carriages, disputes arise between each, based on movement, territory, and expectations. It is perhaps because of the rhetorical nature of bicycling, and all movement for that matter, that tensions ensue over the use of space itself and its symbolic meaning. All symbols refer to a territory of interpretation and are sites of dispute over the meaning of these sites, the values contained, and the perspectives entailed. From the velocipede, the bicycle idea lingers as a possibility, due in many ways to its social dismissal. This nonverbal enunciation of striding and cruising along paths previously walked and rode on horses will further alter the directions of spatial discourse. The velocipede flourished momentarily in Europe as early races attracted many, but soon after, around 1818, the stigma surrounding the velocipede “overshadowed its genuine recreational possibilities” (Herlihy 30). Similar associations are attached to road bicycling today as it is often depicted as an upper-class pursuit of privileged leisure. Sidelining its transportation merits, road bicycling is often placed within athletic and leisurely frameworks, which stems from the dismissal of this early device. There were numerous prints in England and France that depicted the velocipede unflatteringly (Herlihy 80–82). As a result of this reception, the bicycle idea lingered for over fifty years. The technological innovations that created the bicycle are substantial and at the core of industrialization; however, the relative simplicity of the design aspects that move us from the velocipede to the highwheel and then to the safety bicycle make the long wait telling of its early receptions. It is received as dangerous and therefore involving unnecessary risk, yet the draisienne is less dangerous than horse riding. In relation to automobility a similar reception of bicycling as unnecessarily dangerous is attributed but not necessarily substantiated. The cost when compared to the maintenance of a horse does not equate, which also makes elitist associations unfair. The reception associated with dandyism and excess entails a reading of a cycling identity that is also connected to fashion. The posh attitude of riding an expensive object that is at the forefront of technical progress entails a style of dress and demeanor that matches. The rider becomes a technical and creative symbol of identity within the context of society. The bicycle, like the automobile after and the horse before, functions at times as an accessory, a sign of wealth and status.

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As the idea delayed in the minds of many, riders experienced resistance to the new form of travel. The breakthrough practicality of the running machine, because of ridicule, discouraged its use and development. Ways of moving are not neutral but are affected by their perception and discursive functions. The bicycle remained a concept to be achieved in material form until the 1860s when Pierre Michaux in France attached pedals to the running machine, producing what was first referred to as a bicycle. This early version of a bicycle was revealed to the public at the 1867 International Exposition in Paris. Its newest and innovated features were the crank and pedals. It was made of steel with wooden tires and was a velocipede with pedals attached to its front axle. Aside from lack of chain and rear drive, the machine was clearly an indication of what was to come. Every form of movement is rhetorical as well as epistemological, not only from the practice of operation, but also from the social receptions of one when moving in this manner. The ways in which we perform, gesture, and move in public, and the receptions of those enunciations, are aspects of these conditions. Due to the lack of ability to generate speed while using a crank and pedal directly connected to the front wheel, the bicycle conception shifted to the simple solution to increase the size of the front wheel. Developing into the highwheel bicycle, this device soon received the opposite public sentiment of its predecessor becoming associated with unnecessary risk and danger. Whereas the dandy horse was a pejorative label associated with leisure and laziness, the highwheel was depicted as a dangerous menace. It was perceived as a threat to one’s own safety and that of others. Today we can see a similar reception in freestyle, BMX, mountain, and fixed gear bicycling—often viewed as unnecessarily risky and disruptive of spatial norms and notions of public safety. These receptions speak more to the societal values at work within the context than the nature of the objects themselves; therefore, examining such quotidian forms of movement and materiality are important. In them we come to understand ourselves. In a somewhat contradictory way, the two associations combine in the perceptions of modern lightweight road-bicycling and full-suspension mountain biking as risky and ostentatious. Each of these symbolic associations invalidates to a certain degree the bicycle as a clear-minded, efficient, and sustainable way to travel. Just as new forms of movement are built on the previous, so is public reception and discourse. As segments of the populace come to accept, resist, and celebrate ways of moving, the nature of the movement itself changes. The term penny farthing, for this device, is based on the size of the respective British coins resembling the wheels, begins to be used. Later when inflated rubber tires are invented, the term boneshaker is used to refer to numerous older vehicles with hard rubber tires, such as those on the highwheeler.

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Eugéne Meyer, James Starley (the father of John Kemp Starley), and others are some of the first to produce these types of bicycles. This bicycle was not in use for very long, but its moment was intense and often remembered fondly. Its reception, rapidity, risk, and level of commitment make it identifiable as an early extreme sport. It entailed consequence, like that of riding a horse or open sea travel, but also an intentionally embraced risk for the pursuit of the experience alone rather than for a functional outcome. It was used as a form of expression and creativity, which produced an identity associated with danger and committed group belonging. The ability to perform perilous maneuvers with style included the acceptance of potentially taking a header over the handlebars. This ability to endure and partially perform a controlled accident became an almost necessary skill. This is something I recall doing as a young child. Even the initial ability to mount the highwheeler was a precarious act. The more recent niche trend of dismantling and reassembling bicycles to create tall bicycles or high riders evokes its mobility. These reconstructions typically consist of reworking but maintaining the engineering arrangements of the components while modifying, often by adding an extra frame, to create an elevated bicycle riding experience. Like the highwheeler, these bicycles are precarious to mount and dismount but exhilarating to ride and observe. They often are used in bicycle parades and other performative events. The accident, minimized in public settings, was accepted, and anticipated by these riders. The pursuit of comradery and competition associated with masculinity and athleticism surround the practice as organized clubs and racing events began to occur. The hobby horse was codified as a childish pursuit and reflected the early transition from horse to bicycle. The dandy horse refers to both horse-mounted movement and a type of person—a well-off cosmopolitan gentleman entrenched in a life that revolves around culturally constructed and maintained notions of taste and aesthetic value. This again manifests particularly in the way one looked according to grooming and attire—in this case, when mounted on the device, fully dressed, and in motion. This mobile identity is transferred over to motorcycles and automobiles as people attach aspects of social belonging, individuality, and status to their users. The technical object, discussed by Simondon, has a bevy of social functions that occur at the level of both function and symbolism. The technical is a pursuit of the symbolic mind. The technical and material aspects of our life from procreation to space travel involve symbolic and conceptual frameworks that precede them and predict what they will become. In other words, we contemplate what we will produce and consume, how we will use it, and

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what it will mean for us and others before the thing arrives. This is what motivates us to produce, consume, and use material forms in particular ways. Style, grace, and expression are involved in the discourse and practice of the highwheeler, as well as stamina, achievement, and strength. Long and arduous rides are conducted as well as the development of tricks such as riding on the handlebars, standing on the seat, and wheelieing. The wheelie is a maneuver outside of the rational functionality of moving from point to point and has it its own logic. It is a form of expression and style that entails health and intellectual benefits. By engaging in mental processes involved in mastering complex physical engagements such as juggling and wheelieing, we combine and expand necessary biological and physiological abilities. It is a form of rhetoric that brings attention to discourse yet serves no immediate function other than eloquence and exclamation and was performed initially on the highwheel by Daniel J. Canary, a telegraph messenger. Soon the safety bicycle was used for “fancy riding” and “trick riding” as the functionality of the bicycle was harnessed as an art form, an expressive athleticism based on creative movement and skill. The Chicago Tribune described the wheelie in an 1896 article, titled “Wizards of the wheel” as “the union of strength and agility with perseverance and self-confidence.” The article reads, while doing it one becomes a “contortionist” as “trick riding requires an extraordinary suppleness of body and limb.” The author goes on to state that to perform the task one must have “the patience and perseverance for long and unremitting practice” (Cross 72). This is true today as it was then. The patience and dedication are admirable and unknown to many as the discourse surrounding the performance of tricks and creative maneuvers is indicative of the rhetoric involved in physical movement. It is somewhere between dance, a ritual of symbolic movement, and speaking eloquently. The creation of inventive objects such as the bicycles themselves and the development of innovative maneuvers become and remain an indelible aspect of bicycling. Mark Twain captures the fascination and hesitancy of this new form of mobility and culture, embraced by a small but dedicated segment of the population. Just as he warned that European society will never master the Indigenous art of riding waves or he’e nalu in Hawai’i, which becomes surfing, during the highwheel era, Twain reflects the sentiment of the time concerning the practice of this emerging form of movement. He describes numerous bicycle crashes in detail and warns of the risk while understanding its appeal, urging his readers to acquire a bicycle with a disclaimer. “You will not regret it, if you live” (Kranish 42). The highwheel bicycle, like the description of surfing by Twain, transitions into the more accepted and celebrated sentiment expressed later by Western writers such as Jack London. It is described as dangerous to such a degree that

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the new idea of the bicycle centers around its safety. Widespread acceptance occurs only after the object changes forms from the highwheel or ordinary bicycle to the safety bicycle. Its description is its appeal. Now most are willing and able to access the physicality involved in this groundbreaking form of mobility. The highwheeler, on the other hand, currently epitomizes an early moment in bicycling history, a time when it required a smaller group of more devoted riders. It also represents a willingness to interject into the middle of public life a sense of daring, expression, and thrill. In the late 1870s and early 1880s Harry John Lawson introduced a bicycle with a rear-train-drive, and John Kemp Starley combined this feature with tires of equal size. By the end of the decade Isaac R. Johnson introduced a folding bicycle with the now classic diamond shaped frame. A Black inventor working in an oppressive racial context, his development speaks back to the structural forces that produce social inequality. This feature of the bicycle object, like bloomers years later for women, becomes implicated in the struggles for the social advancement of marginalized communities. Bicycles with lowered top tubes appear around the same time, designed specifically for women. Women played a large role in establishing cycling as an accepted and at times liberating form of movement. The female-specific design furthered sex-based segregation in terms of object, but marked group belonging and encouraged women to ride. Inflatable rubber tires radically shifted the nature of the safety bicycle, making the object more accessible and comfortable. The rubber vulcanization process had been refined by Charles Goodyear in 1839, and it was not until veterinarian John Boyd Dunlop, after numerous experiments, first constructs the pneumatic rubber tire for bicycles. He achieved this out of a desire to replace the solid rubber on his son’s tricycle in 1887. The invention of the pneumatic rubber tire initially produced for bicycles now appears on every automobile, and similarly the combustion engine used to produce the first motorcycles also exists in most automobiles today. From this point, the bicycle is defined by its accessibility and safety. The safety bicycle, in its elegant efficient and long-lasting design, has stayed relatively stable for over 150 years. The construction of the running machine leads to the invention of the highwheel and eventually the safety bicycle. From this, the foundations are laid for the motorcycle and automobile industry as well as the possibility of flight. Henry Ford was an avid bicyclist who used his experiences of how to move on a bicycle as well as bicycle parts to create the quadricycle. He used his knowledge of the bicycle construction process to introduce the first mass produced automobile. Early bicycles consisted of a bevy of frame designs, seating positions, arrangements of wheels, pedals, and crank mechanisms, which in retrospect appear to quickly normalize to a now-familiar form; however,

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in the early era of bicycle designs, other arrangements were simultaneously experimented with and invented. As I discuss later, the motorcycle was invented not independently from the bicycle nor as an extension, but rather alongside it. The same can be said of the automobile and even the airplane. The velocipede can be viewed as a bicycle without pedals or a motorcycle without an engine. In many instances, such as the quadricycle of Ford and the workshop of the Wright Cycle Company, opened in 1892 in Dayton, Ohio, and owned by Orville and Wilbur Wright, the bicycle and the manufacturing space created to produce them directly developed into motorcycles, automobiles, and airplanes (Kranish 40). While inventors and philosophers from antiquity such as Ge Hong, Roger Bacon, and di Vinci contemplated, designed, and created objects for mechanical and human powered flight, the Wright brothers famously build what many consider to be the first airplane, the Wright Flyer, in their small bicycle repair shop in 1903. They used familiar tools and materials as well as bicycles to conduct their first wind tunnel experiments (Herlihy 5–6). The bicycle is the most accessible, efficient, and sustainable mode of transportation in the world, yet in the United States and Europe the bicycle is often associated with leisure, privilege, and athletics. According to statistics, most global bicycle users represent the disenfranchised, marginalized, temporarily dispossessed and/or economically impoverished. The bicycle is based on the dimensions of the human body and transforms us into organic-mechanical subsystems. Its functionality is a global product that comes to be utilized by a large portion of the world’s population. Through dispersed production efforts and widespread, varied, and diverse use, the bicycle stabilized from early periods of creative and divergent designs. The bicycle’s components and fabrication closed in around the familiar elements and arrangements we recognize today. This process of enclosure around the safety bicycle design occurred quickly during the 1880s and 1890s. The way riders, manufacturing facilities, repair shops, competitors, and political organizations began to expect and count on certain norms resulted in a coproduction of the bicycle idea into a normalized and standardized reality (Vivanco 37). This process was descriptive of industrialization, and the concepts that followed are indicative of modernity, encapsulated in normative ways of thinking regarding secularization, individuation, technological progress, cultural differentiation, and a host of other concepts and values. Designs moved from the highwheel to creative artisan batches of bicycle objects to the mass manufacturing of the safety bicycle. Today alternative bicycle designs such as those with more than two wheels placed anywhere outside of the traditional arrangement are hardly recognized as bicycles. One such example is the incumbent bicycle—despite being highly efficient and offering superior ergonomics for back support, it is often dismissed. Other

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alternative frame and seating shapes and arrangements are largely unrecognized; yet, bicycling in its now standardized form is an almost ubiquitous epistemology, one we learn when young and never forget. As Longhurst notes and most can attest, the U.S., European, and global urban space is designed primarily for the automobile. A host of spatial elements cater to its ubiquity, even when not present, such as width, distance, speed, and maneuverability, as well as storage, repair, and manufacturing. These factors are reflected in political policy and social sentiment, adding to a bicycle-averse spatial environment. Meanwhile the bicycle exists on the fringes, often temporarily occupying an undefined space while having relatively little representation and political support (Longhurst 6). Forms of everyday movement are celebrated and suffer from their perception and representation in popular discourse and public policy. Studies show the automobile is the dominant mode of transportation as most individuals look to the automobile to fulfill their transportation needs (Cooper and Leahy 612). Mobility trends and societal contexts can be examined from the perspective of bicycling, which grants us insight into the ways in which bicycling functions in the context of automobility. As the bicycle and the motorcycle are eclipsed by the automobile, the elements of exercise and play are emphasized. As activists support bicycle infrastructure, they often do so from the perspective of bicycling as a form of public transportation, which serves productive ends. They are positive for the economy, promoting the circulation of goods and services necessary for a functioning society. The bicycle messenger is an apt example of the use of the bicycle as a lasting productive use. While the associations and symbolic style of the bike messenger as an alternative or forced vocation speaks to how the bicycle is framed as a symbolic site of countercultural values. Early bicycling advocates are partly responsible for the roads that currently cater to the automobile, arguing initially during the late 1800s for the establishment of a network of paved paths in the good roads movement organized by the League of American Wheelmen. Today bicycle advocates argue for acceptance on these same roads and small portions of the overall space to belong. The pursuit of the bicycle idea establishes the grounds for the automotive industry as the technological procedures of bicycle manufacturing develop into the productions of the motorcycle and automobile. At the same time, public spaces are similarly transformed. Around the turn of the nineteenth century the three industries are closely aligned, and by the twentieth so are its spaces of use (Herlihy 5). The networks of paths that lead to roads and highways becomes an actively conceived space of negotiation containing exchanges of nonverbal information. Each form of movement within speaks to and comments on their surroundings. This discourse is varied, vast, and continual. It unfolds in the daily motions and can be read as protest, support,

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resistance, expression, and survival. The rhetorical displays of various messages always return to the subjectivity and positionality of the rider in context. In the late nineteenth century, the bicycle is utilized like the horse for various ends. In the military it is used to form entire bicycle infantries and for postal workers and messengers in numerous settings. National, state, and municipal parks and beach services utilize the bicycle; police and security forces employ the bicycle; and around the world the bicycle is the workhorse of daily operations. The bicycle has a unique technical ontology—it reminds us of our history in relation to places, things, and others but largely awaits articulation through use. Theorist Roland Barthes, whose work straddles the perspectives of structuralist and poststructuralist approaches, writes about a shared connection between writer of and riders in the Tour de France as he contemplates cycling and the creation of societal values (Augé 45–46). The general understanding of what it means to ride bicycles is shared by the reader, as to ride is to write and to view is to engage in the shared experiences of both. Barthes examines the ways our shared values are established and furthered through narratives and myths in our everyday activities such as watching, wrestling, and drinking wine, for example (Barthes 15–17). The bicycle in popular discourse fits within a spatial structure and a discursive one. There is a communication aspect at the heart of all movement as early messages had to be physically transported from point to point. Augé often examines space from a Lefebvrean perspective, evoking a Cartesian split that equates the act of pedaling with the processes of thought, writing, “I pedal, therefore I am,” while framing the bicycle as “a fundamental existential feat” referencing the freedoms provided by both the mobility of the bicycle and existential theory (91). René Descartes’s “I think therefore I am, or exist” is an extension of Plato’s work at the center of modernist theory, which places knowledge as “entirely distinct from body” (24–25). As a continuation of classic Western philosophical approaches that favor the mind and the noumenal world of abstract thinking, bicycling is being or more aptly becoming. As Plato sought out ideal forms of objective thought, many allude to a universality embedded in the modern bicycle, which rests on numerous machined constructions. The geometry exhalated by Plato exists throughout the bicycle object, a combination of almost perfect geometrical parts working together as machinery with the human body. The geometric concentric circles at the heart of the wheel, hub, tubes, and rotors; the ideal straight lines with zero curvature of the diamond frame; and the near-perfect efficiency of its movement. The thinking produced from its operation involves a series of epistemological underpinnings: movement sustains balance, leaning influences turning, consistency leads to longevity. Yet in these known mechanical

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and engineering achievements there is a scientific mystery related to the exact reasons bicycle mobility functions the way it does. The seemingly impossible feat of maintaining balance without assistance due to the gyroscopic spinning of the front wheel and trailing access point of the steering mechanisms, for example, baffles scientists. Almost any bicycle will remain balanced without a rider if in motion as the object’s mobility seems to climb up Plato’s chain theory toward perfection, another retroactive element of modernist forms of philosophical thought. The truth behind the mechanics of the bicycle even for empirical scientific thought elude articulation. In tests even when the gyroscopic and trail effect are eliminated, the test bicycle will remain balanced while in motion, which goes against conventional theory (Steele 17). This mystery is carried through bicycling discourse, the thing you learn and mentally forgo, but the body remembers. An individual with the capacity to transgress material reality and validate existence through independent and detached thought, for many, marks the end of such thinking and is at the epicenter of existentialist theory. Jean-Paul Sartre and de Beauvoir both mention the bicycle as existentialists and cyclists, writing about the shared connections between bicycling freedom and an existentialist subjectivity. From an existentialist perspective we might ask who we will become while bicycling. The anguish indicative of existentialist freedom can be associated with the responsibility of pedaling. Such an authentic existence arises from acknowledging this responsibility at every moment. It manifests itself in fixed gear riding, a form of riding that has a long history in track racing from the late 1800s and has more recently emerged in urban contexts. In this form of riding a single-speed fixed-gear bicycle or fixy must be pedaled continuously with no freewheel hub and no brakes. The reemergence of this way of bicycling provides a return to a lost ethos of cycling, prior to the developments of gears and various brake configurations. It calls for dedication and commitment by a rider, offering an uninterrupted trajectory. The frequent starting and stopping in congested urban settings make the fixedgear bicycle an ideal form of bicycling for this environment. Direct access to a gear beneficial for both starting and riding at a decent pace creates an optimal riding performance compared to gears that need to be worked up or down over a longer stretch. When riding a fixed-gear bicycle, the necessity to keep moving and plan specific routes ahead of time overrides the desire to stop at specific points or destinations as planned. When approaching an intended right turn on a fixed-gear bicycle, for example, one might peddle left, around an intersection or an entire block, following an available path, rather than stopping to wait and turn right, as initially intended. Existentialism remains a late modernist theory that returns us to an absolute freedom that is more a mirage of unrealistic potential; yet the bicycle

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continues to be defined by its conditions as well as by the ways in which it has been used and read in the past. It has paved the way for modernity and now has come to challenge its tenets, representing its more reflexive postmodern forms. Bicycles move according to the desires of their riders, which, like existentialist theory, appears to be wholly autonomous, but this is so only in so far as the structure allows, both physically and symbolically. The joy of the automobile exists in the open road, off road excursions, racing, and customization cultures. In bicycling this aspect is engrained even further into the ethos of riding. The commute when conducted on a bicycle or motorcycle is also exercise, a daily ride, and a pleasurable act. Much like the act of taking a drive versus driving to work, the joy is defined less by the productive outcome and context and more for elements of play that are associated with the mode of mobility. A ride on the side of the highway to work is still a bike ride. There is an ontology to riding, like all forms of movement, that is distinct. So, bicycling exists between commuting and strolling, exploring and returning, dancing and running. This is part of the situational experience of bicycling, it is part of the ritual of physical movement within symbolic environments. For those watching it is akin to listening to a speech, and when combined with other forms of transportation, it becomes a dialog that can be joined, read, and interpreted. The ways in which people move through collective spaces are normalized according to policies, regulations, and receptions. At the same time, the desire to move in unique, challenging, and expressive ways is also an aspect of nonverbal communication. There is an emphasis of expression in the bicycle that propels its production as much as its function. The bicycle becomes a sport, a form of expression, an artful skill that many but certainly not all can experience. Electronic assisted designs can accommodate differing physical abilities, but the bicycle remains an embodied performance and requires dexterity and a certain skill that can often be slightly outside of the norm in terms of transportation expectations. The beauty of the bicycle is that it is efficient and accessible as well as potentially risky, daring, and intense. Durable downhill-specific mountain bikes with front and rear long-travel suspension are used to traverse down augmented ski slopes. Everyday mountain bike trails around the world often require full suspension, lightweight frames, wide tires, and disc brakes. Road bicyclists ride over a hundred miles in day-long races such as the Tour de Palm Springs, which I recently completed, and grand tours such as the famous Tour de France, stretching speed and endurance over several days on daily roads. This race stretches back to some of the earliest days of bicycling and has changed surprisingly little after over a hundred years. The first wheelies, road races, and cyclocross events are as old as the bicycle itself and in general are practiced in some form even before the advent of the safety bicycle.

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The bicycle today is often framed as a technologically less advanced form of transportation. Yet it also persists to exist just ahead of our own modernist notions of progress due to its efficiency as a more sustainable human-powered form of transportation. The environmental movement has a long history but finds strength in the iconic Earthrise photo taken from space during the NASA Apollo 8 mission in 1968. Alone the blue and green planet sits in suspended fragility. Down within its contours, the image of the human-powered emissions-free bicycle emerges as a symbol of the environmental movement and the first Earth Day in 1970. In a turn toward the desire for more economic fuel consumption, resulting from an oil embargo and its geopolitical factors, health consciousness, exercise practices, and environment friendly alternatives, the bicycle becomes a sign for a more reflexive and sustainable modernity. Antimodernization and experimental tactics by numerous communities, resistance movements, and avant-garde art and political acts played major roles in establishing our notions of modernity. Modernization entailed the violent suppression and overriding of ways of operating that seemed to challenge the tenets of modernity, which are now framed as postmodern perspectives (Lyon 69). In this landscape, technology is both the problem and the solution, and the bicycle represents a mixture of both. Fifty years later, due to exacerbations of the same environmental issues and health concerns as well as a global pandemic that encourages social distancing and individual outdoor activity, the bicycle once again is celebrated for its ability to look back as well as forward for possible solutions. The mobility offered by bicycling has not changed much, yet society continues to revisit and change around its use. In the bicycle object we still have much to learn, as we are still developing the idea of the bicycle. CONCLUSION Just as communication and the art of rhetoric can be harnessed to cultivate unity or produce divisions, the bicycle is similarly a tool that can be used for various ends. It is both a measure of our intentions and a way to interpret the productions of others. For many, the bicycle is an introduction to individual transportation and a sense of freedom, particularly for the youth and disenfranchised who are restricted from moving by other means. For countless around the world, the bicycle is the champion of self-sustained cost-effective transportation. Early in its history its use comes to represent social, economic, and cultural mobility, which often marked structural inequality. The bicycle in its early societal functions enables individuals to find better employment and relocate themselves, their goods, and their families. The successful use of the bicycle for migrant and refugee populations such as

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those along the U.S.-Mexico border and other international lines exemplifies its use to transgress structural forms of confinement (Taylor 78–79). The bicycle becomes a symbolic form of transgression for women in a patriarchal system, which is exemplified in the functional and more egalitarian attire of bloomers. For African Americans in the United States during an intense era of segregation when Jim Crow laws restrict use of certain public transportation systems, the bicycle allowed a small moment of resistance and respite (Kranish 35). During this time, Taylor, an African American professional cyclist—half a century prior to Jackie Robinson breaking the racial barrier in baseball—challenged such divisions to become a global celebrity. Before automobiles and airplanes, the fastest way to individually travel was the bicycle. The symbolic achievement of an African American becoming the fastest cyclist gained international recognition of Black achievement, which offered a public refutation of white supremacy. Bicycling takes place for the most part publicly and is, in this regard, rhetorical, capable of marking and resisting histories and contexts of racial and sex-based discrimination. Its invention, mass fabrication, and depiction propelled mainstream culture in particular directions and continues to do so. The use of the bicycle comments on the social and physical space in which it moves. It is an utterance that travels along with other forms of nonverbal articulation, taking on various connotations regarding what it means to ride. In everyday spaces, messages are formed out of and with material that becomes symbolic. In various settings, ranging from the mundane to the urgent, the bicycle is harnessed for its capacity to transport humans, small groups, and even entire families along with personal belongings, provisions, or a complete inventory of goods. It can be used to carry one to freedom, provide a better life, police others, or usher in new ways of thinking, inhabiting, and exercising. At times, it is placed alone on the side of the road, painted white, in honor of a separation between object, human, and life, or underneath the world’s fastest rider regardless of race. In all these cycling moments the larger contexts of society are at work. The values involved in these settings become more visible as we pay attention to the roles the bicycle serves. The bicycle can be harnessed as a leveling capacity. It can bring individuals of various positionalities together in shared spatial settings. The more we come to understand and even appreciate the bicycle for what it has represented in the past, the more likely we will be to use it in beneficial ways in the future. In the next chapter, I continue to examine the physical and conceptual renderings of the bicycle and its evocation as a form of nostalgia.

Chapter 4

The Bicycle and Nostalgia

The ways we move through spaces is a political and often necessary aspect of social life. The colloquial phrase that one never forgets how to ride a bicycle, reminds us that bicycling is an epistemological foundation of our spatial knowledge. It functions like those everyday phrases that reference the ubiquitous presence of the horse. This common statement marks the bicycle as an early form of bodily understanding and orientation that is almost biological like that of breathing, walking, and chewing. It is also a celebration and a dismissal of a lost youthfulness, simultaneously embraced, sought after, and discarded. As wheels replace the legs of the wooden hobby horse and the safety bicycle is invented, society moves toward motorized transport and there remains in bicycle discourse an element of nostalgia. In this shared understanding of forms of human mobility that involve objects, there exists an awareness of nonverbal forms of knowing, yet because they often go unwritten, they often remain unexamined as knowledge. Evoking childhood, this phrase marks the lasting knowledge of a procedural act as well as a bodily epistemic; even if one never learns how to ride a horse or a bicycle, its understanding is widespread and described as intuitive. The bicycle is a product of industrialization, and like the horse it relates to individual mobility and societal expansion. It also represents a shift toward modernity and the technological standardization of daily life and public space discussed in chapter 1. The safety bicycle that emerges around the 1860s slowly solidifies, by the end of the century, into the strikingly similar design of today, which includes the diamond frame, linearly aligned wheels of equal size, chain powered direct rear wheel drive, and inflatable pneumatic rubber tires (Herlihy 6). The scattered pursuit of this design emerges as a collective idea based on a shared way of moving with the historical precedents of walking and horse riding. Its corporeal impact on ways to approach physical space is a shared epistemology. The functionality of its design and use comes to symbolize a new but not entirely unfamiliar, due to the horse, way to inhabit 75

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and move through space. Our spatial subjectivity becomes and remains highly connected to our technical and material interactions, and the bicycle takes a huge step in bringing humans and machines closer together. Norcliffe notes that besides the gun, the bicycle “most comprehensively captures the economic and social geographies of the modern age.” He lists a series of reasons for this assertion. Its origins precede the industrial revolution; starting out as an artisan craft, it shifts from batch to mass production. As an early industrial product, it paves the way for the global production and consumer networks that follow (1–2). It is used in highly specialized services such as the military and mail delivery, while becoming a private good integrated into everyday public life. Its technological development for the everyday consumer is often propelled by its design for the affluent and racing professional. The professional sport of bicycling plays a large role in many aspects of bicycle culture and industry and has a major impact on media and spectator sports. Bicycling is held in every modern Olympics, and for over a hundred years European countries hold famous multiple day races such as the grand tours of the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France, and the Vuelta a España. The use of the bicycle tests our strength, agility, and endurance, remaining a testament to the enduring nature of our past technological innovations. Watching individuals move in groups such as those in the large peloton or small teams that break away during days of cycling in these professional grand tours feels familiar as they do so through everyday spaces and on decidedly obtainable objects. The regulations of the professional sport by the UCI assures that the bicycles used are potentially available to the everyday bicyclist or enthusiast. Because the Tour de France occurs within the everyday and features common environments as much as bicycling, it is often cited as the sport the most fans that are not fans of the featured sport watch. The multiple-stage and -day races follow teams of cyclists through circuits that are both a commentary on individual and team athleticism as well as our collective arrangements and negotiations of place. Just as the physical demands of our bodies are tested daily to perform small and grand tasks, our daily movements within the everyday are often taken for granted or overlooked. For example, commutes are often overshadowed as an extension of work within frameworks that typically emphasize destinations rather than journeys. Such constructions of place frames time accordingly, either to time spent on the job or time spent at home (Evans et al. 523). In this spatial and mobile concept, the journey is reduced to as little time as possible and space as an obstacle. Studies suggest that commutes produce a sense of frustration, due to the overrationalization of their structural movement (Highmore 310; Van Rooy 627). Such a perspective often permeates

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many of our daily transportation habits and what is lost is a sense of play, risk, and spontaneity. The Situationists devised theories and practices to intervene into such aspects of daily life. The bicycle is an unprecedentedly accessible mode of transportation for those without the resources, status, and ability to use other forms. It is also largely discussed within the contexts of leisure and sport, which overshadows this use. In popular discourse and policy, notably in the United States and Europe, the privileged, athletic, and committed cyclist tends to dominate bicycling discourse and blurs the need for affordable, efficient, and less regulated forms of transportation, which the bicycle offers. Even when bicycling is used for daily commuting, it is often discussed as an alternative one makes for health, well-being, or environmental concerns rather than out of necessity. Bicycle mobility occurs primarily in public space and has always been symbolic of larger issues and values. Paying particular attention to the varied rhetorical outcomes and intentions of movement on two wheels, one might ask if bicycling should be considered a right. I believe the same question can be asked of mobility and public transportation in general, which in this context the bicycle becomes a part of. In a society that demands movement for survival, the bicycle at some point often becomes a must. In its early history, the bicycle for many was clearly a vehicle to achieve social mobility. Since its inception it has been used to find, obtain, and maintain economic subsistence often based on individual forms of mobility. This sentiment is portrayed in the 1948 Italian film Bicycle Thieves (1949), directed by Vittorio De Sica. Woman, Indigenous, Black, People of Color, immigrants, refugees, and other systemically marginalized groups have utilized the bicycle in ways that have allowed individuals and collectives to slightly breach the confines of their structural marginalization. At the same time, a heterosexual middle-class male stepping out into an environment dominated by the automobile assumes a temporary position of spatial subordination. In a context of automobility, bicyclists experience spatial marginalization, although not to the degree that they cannot dismount and resume societal positional status. In these regards, the bicycle, as a form of public movement, is an act of communication that performs socially and politically in United States, global, urban, and rural contexts. The question of transportation and movement is at the heart of our formation of a cycling rhetoric, and whether riding for leisure, assistance, competition, or subsistence, its form of movement is political and for many a necessity. Postmodernism grows out of the awareness of the destructive capacities on which ideas of modernity are based. In this orientation of a reflexive return there is an extension of these same ideas, framed as a critique. The bicycle is an object that emerges from many of these processes of industrialized modernization. It is forged from material extracted from earth and

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manipulated into the mechanics of fabricated human worlds. An assembled product, the bicycle has around one thousand components. Its invention and industrialization advances assembly-line technologies, borrowing from and passing them along to other activities, notably the motorcycle, automobile, forklift, snowmobile, and tractor (Norcliffe 1–2). The machinery required to fabricate every material aspect of the bicycle is so large very few companies entirely produce a bicycle in one location. As a global product, the bicycle requires a network of manufacturers and a team of individuals to correlate, communicate, and assemble those sources that make differing parts necessary to produce a single bicycle. It is an analog device that is only recently, and to a minimal degree, becoming more electronic. In this regard it reminds us of the technological context of modernity while being pushed in new technical ways. The bicycle, in this regard, is symbolic of a return to and marked by an ersatz nostalgia. A longing for a moment that might not have ever existed. Celebrated projections and utopian returns are the hallmarks of modernist thinking, and it is exemplified in our thinking about the bicycle. Many modernist texts envision an ideal moment in the past and often project this idealism into the future. This can be seen in texts such as McLuhan’s Global Village (1964), Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943), and Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1848), which revolve around essentialized projections of subjectivity and reality that are envisioned in the future and the past. The bicycle in many ways is longed for, like that of childhood, while simultaneously being dismissed for more mature forms of movement such as the automobile, like that of the transition into adulthood. It has, since the 1970s, been associated with the collective movement toward a more sustainable way of interacting socially and environmentally. Both constructions consist of modernist tropes of future returns peppered with idealism according to metanarratives. Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1991) provides an apt description of the ways in which grand narratives become rigid constructions at the center of modernist thinking (27–31). He continues this concept, central to postmodern thinking, in The Postmodern Explained (1992) noting that such “metanarratives” function like myths yet seek legitimization as natural or indelibly true (18). In their rigidity, such narratives override other ways of thinking, being, and operating. The bicycle develops during an era of intense industrialization. It is a product of both modernization and the reorganizations of history, notions of truth, and other metanarratives surrounding modernity. Each is not without its pitfalls in predetermining the spaces and objects as well as their receptions that follow. Conceptions such as the freedom from natural superiors’ and secularization as well as cultural differentiation, bureaucratization, and urbanization manifest themselves in the consumption of ideas as much as objects. Each facet of life implies another as modernism is centered around

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new technologies, transportation, and communication systems (Best and Kellner 3). Best and Kellner continue to note that the reflexive outcome of these projects is a postmodern perspective concerning the ways in such notions of progress entailed religious, cultural, and ethnic domination of peoples and land among countless others that do not fit the rigid constructions instituted from such perspectives. Ranging from “the exclusion of women from the public sphere to the genocide of imperialist colonization.” In addition, the “modernization” project that was placed on the shoulders of colonial spaces reflects a series of “disciplinary institutions, practices, and discourses which legitimate its modes of domination and control” (3). The bicycle is preconceived to fulfill a purpose and is perceived in various ways based on its use and social setting. The ways in which we discuss the object and its use reflect each of these aspects while altering slightly the nature of each context through processes of physical communication. Today U.S. cities are becoming increasingly more bicycle friendly, ushering in conceptual shifts that create a space of shared road between motorists and bicyclists while establishing specific bicycle-only zones. Longhurst in Bike Battles: A History of Sharing the American Road (2015) notes that while the use and influence of the bicycle is undeniable and profound, most modern U.S. cities are inadequately prepared to handle bicyclists (5–9). In this regard, bicycles represent both an older form of technology and a newer form of transportation infrastructure. Urban space is still adjusting to its effectiveness in solving future problems, such as automobile congestion, individual health, and quality of spatial interaction. Longhurst states that there are contentious debates between U.S. bicyclists, motorists, and pedestrians over the ancient concept of shared space and road (10–12). Through a postmodern lens the bicycle object is a product of modernity as well as a contemporary critique of it. Texts such as Mapes’s Pedaling Revolution (2009) provide a historical account of the bicycling movement. The bicycle has been relegated to the sidelines of everyday space in favor for automobility resulting in various responses by cyclists in the form of social activism. Social movements, mobility, and mobilization all reference collective movement of some sort and entail communication and social advocacy. The ways in which the mobilization of a form of mobility is already at work are a foundation of bicycling physical and symbolic discourse. Its practice alone is an argument for its right to exist in public space and is often considered a form of protest simply through its everyday use. As a subject of inquiry, it constitutes a large territory of nonverbal communication. It is often underappreciated in this regard, perhaps because its use and discussion are inherent critiques of the number of resources and attention the automobile receives. Nevertheless, the bicycle occupies a sanctioned place in many urban and suburban situations.

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It represents a level of acceptance and success that other alternative modes of transportation can look up to. Within this constellation, to simply ride a bicycle is to engage in a series of public displays that entail the advocacy of a host of social values, which communicate individual choice as well as a level of solidarity with others that make similar mobility decisions. The design is fundamentally the same as it was one hundred years ago, yet our discussion of it continues to change, and in these symbolic shifts, the nature of the object also shifts. Luis A. Vivanco, in Reconsidering the Bicycle: An Anthropological Perspective on a New (Old) Thing (2013), examines the development of the bicycle as an object of culture. The author frames the discussion as a revisiting. From this perspective the bicycle is something that is both timeless and moored in the past and thus necessary of re-examination. In this regard, the bicycle is situated within the context of nostalgia. As this text examines the contemporary object of the bicycle, it does so through the lens of a partially forgotten past. As we observe its function today, we also examine the historical contexts in which it emerges and develops, something that cannot necessarily be said of other objects and forms of transportation, such as the automobile. When a bicycle arrives on the road and comes to life through use by riders, it is already the product of many people, organizations, and political entities. As it moves through the same landscape in which it is produced, it touches even more aspects of societal infrastructure. Glen Norcliffe, in Critical Geographies of Cycling: History, Political Economy, and Culture (2016), examines the transportation infrastructure that surrounds the bicycle. Less concerned with bicycle movement specifically, the author discusses the critical intersections of bicycle production and transportation politics. Norcliffe examines the many ways bicycle uses reflect larger forces of industrial and commercial production. The bicycle from this perspective is a global product that reflects the cultural and social forces of a dispersed network of production centers. By the time the lifespan of a bicycle object is complete, it has been involved in countless social situations. Other texts on bicycles cover its mass production as well as its very specific uses. Bicycling Science (1982), by Frank Rowland Whitt and David Gordon Wilson, provides a general history of the development of the bicycle and the science behind its engineering elements, while Kevin Wehr’s Hermes on Two Wheels: The Sociology of Bicycle Messengers (2009) examines the role the bicycle messenger plays in fulfilling a niche role in urban economic production while establishing a counterculture. Because the congested centers of urban areas are difficult to navigate through quickly, the bicycle continues to serve an important role in transporting physical messages and small goods throughout them. From this economic need, the specific bicycle, at times a fixed gear, is modified in certain ways, which also produces a culture

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that surrounds it. The culture itself is part of a lifestyle that entails an identity many gravitate toward. In Bicycle: The History (2006), David V. Herlihy provides a thorough text on the general cultural history of the bicycle and discusses most of the key moments within its history; while the author of It’s All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels (2012), Robert Penn, describes his experiences assembling a single road bicycle, becoming intimately aware of the history of each part in the process. Other texts such as The Coyote’s Bicycle: The Untold Story of Seven Thousand Bicycles and the Rise of a Borderland Empire (2016), by Kimball Taylor, explores the way bicycles are used and discarded and then reused to cross national borders. The author embarks on a journey to locate a series of bicycles involved in the crossing of the U.S.-Mexico border. Other books, from a sports framework, cover road bicycling grand tours, particularly the Tour de France, such as The First Tour de France: Sixty Cyclists and Nineteen Days of Daring on the Road to Paris (2017), Etape: The Untold Stories of the Tour de France’s Defining Stages (2014), and Corsa Rosa: A History of the Giro D’Italia (2017). Some are less about bicycles and more about the architectural forms that surround them such as Velo City: Architecture for Bikes (2104) and Cycle Infrastructure (2013). Each of these works reflects the ways in which the bicycle functions in context and often notes aspects of competition that are involved in bicycling along shared roads. Articles within numerous fields from economics, sociology, performance, architecture, and urban space discuss and use the bicycle as a point of analysis. The bicycle is discussed for its engineering performance in “How Do Bicycles Balance Themselves? New Research Picks up the Momentum,” by Bill Steele, and from a feminist perspective in Wheels of Change: How Women Rode the Bicycle to Freedom (With a Few Flat Tires along the Way) (2011), by Sue Macy. Bicycle infrastructure and advocacy are also an important transdisciplinary subject with articles such as “Cyclotopia in the Sticks: Bicycle Advocacy beyond the city Limits,” by Jai Cooper and Terry Leahy, and “Cycle Highways: A New Concept of Infrastructure,” by Dias et al., among many others. Numerous books and articles cover bicyclist behavior, perspectives, and safety. Many of these works draw similar thematic conclusions—that bicycling infrastructure encourages bicycling use, which reduces automobile traffic, improves bicyclist safety, and promotes healthy practices. When these aspects of bicycling expand, environmental impacts are lessened. Alternatively, some of the other noted texts examine the bicycle in specific contexts where they are used to breach social boundaries or within sportscentric frameworks that celebrate the athletic achievements of a few. Still, we always return to the bicycle as an everyday product of consumption that is used to produce a variety of outcomes. Such works are spread over various

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fields framing bicycling scholarship as an interdisciplinary subfield of inquiry and analysis. The bicycle is an unparalleled form of accessible movement available to people around the world, including those typically without access to dominant forms of power: the disenfranchised, youth, impoverished, and noncitizen, for example. The pursuit of the bicycle brings the industrial age into existence and its continued use presents a sustained reflection of previous ways of thinking. As the automobile comes to dominate most cities and public space in general, the mobility of bicycles is neglected for centuries; however, more recently the bicycle is being used to considerably alter public urban spaces and roads. This is notably evident in well-known “cyclotopias” such as Amsterdam, Netherlands; Bogotá, Columbia; Portland, Oregon; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Canberra, Australia (Cooper and Leahy 622–23). Public bicycle share programs are now available in many European and U.S. cities and towns moving bicycles, along with infrastructure such as bicycle lanes, into the realm of public transportation. A “cyclotopia” is a bicycle friendly city with obvious infrastructure that caters to and promotes the use of bicycles, which leads to an increased population of bicycle riders. This concept stems from Thomas Moore’s work of 1516, Utopia, and Foucault’s notions of heterotopias to connote an ideal and therefore partially imagined space of a more bicycle-centric city (Cooper and Leahy 622–23). These sites serve as examples of how to incorporate bicycle infrastructure into automobile-dominated cities; however even in “cyclotopias” most resources and space are handed over to automobility. The discourse concerning the bicycle reminds us of the past contexts in which it has been situated and as its current uses in cities around the world continues to grow, the bicycle represents both the past and the future underlined with an aura of reflexivity. It emerges out of the context of a budding movement toward industrialization and now reflects the ways in which we might move toward more sustainable social and physical environments. Because of these elements, in this chapter, I discuss the bicycle in terms of its symbolic associations with memory, longing, and nostalgia. BICYCLING NOSTALGIA The development of the road as a shared public space coincides with the notion of a participatory society, and in this space, all movements, and practices are potentially influential. Because of the semantic weight applied to our public forms of deliberation almost everything we do in public becomes political. The public sphere is a physical and symbolic realm in which our collective consciousness unfolds. It is a democratic presence that goes beyond the classification of individuals according to status or even citizenry. The polis is

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a public space of influence, and the Sophists, because they make their mark in this arena and remain noncitizens, are examples of how it is also an open dialectical territory where many can add to public discourse. The ways people move is an apt terrain to encounter and examine this physical aspect of the contemporary public sphere. The visiting Sophists from outside Athens, and often Greece, impacted this space through their oration, presence, and the formulation of rhetorical theory. The Athenian philosophers represented a sanctioned position and, while they had more political power, were nevertheless in fierce competition with the collective voice of the Sophists. The bicycle, likewise, is a visitor moving within the seams of the polis to influence its construction. Many attest that, despite their subject positionality and status, when riding within a space dominated by automobility, they feel like second class citizens. At the same time, for those that are disenfranchised and disempowered in various ways, the bicycle can be a liberating representation of social mobility and movement. The bicycle is an outsider that makes an impact through presence and comes to perform roles of influence based on its symbolic associations. In this regard, there are parallels between a bicycling rhetoric and the themes presented in sophistic rhetorical theory. The road as a “commons” stems from the Greek notion of the polis and the Roman law of viae publicae. This reflects the shared notions of public space as a site of possibility where lively public deliberation through numerous communicative practices unfolds (Longhurst 10–12). From the Byzantine empire in the sixth century to European civil codes through the seventeenth century, the “Kings High-way or common-road” is protected by law according to the policy of shared use. This grants unhindered access “for all the Kings subjects to go, return, pass, and repass, on foot and on horseback, and with their cattle, carts, and carriages, every year, at all times of the year” (Longhurst 10). Jürgen Habermas notes that while the political and symbolic notions of the public sphere and public space have altered, they are both handed down from Hellenic conceptions and reiterations during the renaissance and after. This space both excludes individuals as noncitizens and includes those that have a right to be present. The author notes that this is a classic example of “normative power,” a seemingly open system that is substantially closed (4). By the eighteenth century the concept of eundo et redeundo or free passage is associated with the constructions of roads and thoroughfares as a means to arrive at a location. In this emptied space, the public can traverse and return, which is subsequently ingrained in U.S. courts. Based on English common law, the roads become synonymous with the collective identity of a city, municipality, or society, which guarantees all practitioners passage and usage (Longhurst 10–11). What unfolds is a site of dialog and tension concerning the conception of how the road should be used.

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City streets prior to the invention of the bicycle, and later the motorcycle and automobile, consisted of numerous ways of moving at a slower pace. Walking and gathering were common and less regulated. Today numerous spaces exist around the world that have small paths and organic configurations developed before their advents. Walk streets in older neighborhoods in Africa, China, India, and Europe, where the automobile cannot access because of the size of paths, streets, and alleys. Sites such as those in Varansi, India; Marrakesh, Morocco; Venice, Italy; and many island and mountainous locations around the world allow people to experience communal life outside of the spatial domination of the automobile. As mechanical forms of movement started to appear, numerous ways of moving mingled. At a bodily level, people congregated, played, and bartered. Public space was a transformational arena in which people moved through in various manners: aboard trolleys, bicycles, horses, motorcycles, and early automobiles. Because speed was not established in the ways it is now, variety was greater. As speed increased, accepted ways of moving decreased. Recently we are experiencing a broadening of ways to move through public space, and the bicycle is often at the forefront of such change. Shared bicycle programs and bicycle lanes often result in an increase in the use of other forms of mobility such as skateboards, roller skates, inline skates, electronic scooters, and unicycles. The efficacy and possibilities for the use of new ways of moving, such as some of these mentioned, open our conceptions of mobility and are a spatial discourse that brings a host of associations. Walk and slow streets, marked by signage, are now present all over the country. On these, street signage and small barricades encourage automobiles to use other streets or drive slower. Simply making motorists aware of the possibility of varied use can produce an environment in which numerous ways of human-powered and electric movement coexist. Examples exist throughout Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Portland, and Seattle. As Longhurst notes, movement is a defining function, and when rapid transportation becomes paramount, it overrides the previous uses of public space as a “marketplace, stockyard, playground, and public gathering place.” Yet the street as “commons” and the road as a public good for use by all still exist at the heart of public space, a dynamic intersection of public, government, and corporate interests (11). Roads are often understood merely in service of the more specialized functions of the specific locations they connect. Nevertheless, unimpeded transport is a form of public communication, and the negotiations that take place within these routes are an important function of public participation and deliberation. Speed, independence, and maneuverability, in these regards are not just solely functions of traversal but meaningful, interactive, and expressive acts. These actions, pedaling down streets and turning around corners to

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encounter more straightaways, coasting down hills and grinding up them, cutting between street furniture and parked automobiles, while glancing around for obstacles in constantly shifting and static environments, are a noteworthy aspect of daily human life. Durability and ephemerality meet in the dialog between practitioner and physical space. Speed, independence, and maneuverability are necessary functions as well as rebuttals to a host of nonverbal messages: directions, designations, and the movements of others. The space between lanes, the rhythms of patterned signals, and the ebb and flow of the movements of many entail a rich dialog that the bicycle engage in directly. When Thomas Jefferson commissions a national network of roads to expand the nation west, horse, carriage, and bicycle use leads to the constructions of roads, defining them by the movement along them (Kranish 40). The bicycle and roads play a large role in the settlement of Indigenous land, bringing along with these forms of movement new social and political forms. This occurs throughout the colonial world from South America to Australia as the exploratory voyages of European settlers turn to overlanding practices of terrestrial domination. Now in eras of decolonialization and postcolonialization the bicycle and these same roads play differing and oscillating roles depending on the performances within. At times roads are shut down as new spatial uses are made available, and at others, constructed forms are cleared, making way for highways and roads; often we are performers of these tasks, using the routes created by others, furthering their function, and heading off on our own to invent or reestablish future paths. Bicycle parades and Critical Mass events and practices bring attention to local issues and global concerns while revolving around the bicycle itself. The bicycle is marked in these instances as a secondary spatial identity within the current transportation structures of automobility. Bicycle advocates continue the movement for representation and justice through such events. All over the world, the bicycle is harnessed by the disenfranchised to move beyond the confines of oppressive situations, surviving through the mobility it provides and marking the ways in which mobility itself establishes levels of representation and presence. It is a symbol of human independence and gives protestors of various ilk the ability to quickly gather in unison, and disperse individually. Black Lives Matter protestors in Portland, a city with a strong bicycle infrastructure and culture, have used the bicycle to maintain a mobile and durable presence in public space, which marks instances of police brutality that disproportionally affect predominantly Black and People of Color communities. The bicycle is a symbol of local culture in this “cyclotopia” or bicycle friendly atmosphere and is used to bring people together concerning various issues. They are quiet, potentially covert, and able to jump scale quickly between forms of urban mobility. The bicycle is

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harnessed to comment on a host of social issues such as environmentalism, economic disparity, gender inequality, homelessness, and spatial segregation, to name a few. Bicycle usage creates a poetic and practical spatial discourse that I connect here with sophistic rhetorical theory. Public rides are epideictic rhetorical displays that comment on a series of values. Bicycling is akin to public speaking. The Sophists saw oration as a physical act and often taught it, along with rhetorical theory, alongside athletic training such as boxing and gymnastics. The two are performed side by side in gymnasiums as physical training and intellectual education occurred together. The performance of rhetoric required physical engagement and public presence, which becomes infused with poetic expression and delivery. The competitive and performative aspects of public deliberation aligned oration with athletic competition and displays of excellence. All these aspects exist in the daily trajectories of cyclists that simultaneously exhibit athleticism, public deliberation, competitiveness, and expression. In Western education and rhetorical theory after the Sophists, these elements are divided in a context that favors the mind over the body. In athletic and leisurely realms, the body is almost solely emphasized while other potentially intellectual or political aspects are deferred. A bicycling rhetoric reunites these physical, symbolic, and conceptual aspects. Democratic presence and public deliberation and influence are grounded in the idea of free and accessible roads, access to points of interest such as squares, markets, and parks, as well as private residences, commercial properties, and businesses. As Habermas notes, the public sphere, in its modern conception, is “the sphere of public authority.” It is a narrower view of state-sanctioned public life attached to notions of “civil society.” Ultimately our notion of the public sphere is “the sphere of private people” that come together in and as a public (18–20). In this highly regulated yet long developing space from Greek, Roman, renaissance, feudal, and capitalist formations to European, North American, and global locations, public space is a political arena that the spatial subject is conditioned by and enters. However, the New York or San Francisco bicyclist and motorist are socialized much differently than the Dutch or Danish, for example; and the pedestrians of Portland enter a much different situation than those in Los Angeles regarding space, policy, and expectations. For example, there is a shared sense of the road in Dutch cities that anticipate a bicycling presence. Motorists are socialized to be aware of their presence in cities such as Amsterdam, where bicyclists account for more than 50 percent of overall travel, whereas most U.S. motorists are socialized to be unaware of and, at times, hostile to other ways of moving on roads, particularly bicycles. Within U.S. cities the presence of bicycle lanes and expectations vary; in Portland and Minnesota there are large swaths of

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spaces dedicated to the bicycle, while Los Angeles and San Diego are only recently starting to expand these networks. The expectations of the road are met with the lived experiences of those within, often based solely on how they move. Just as street skateboarders receive a negative public reception primarily for their reordering of spatial use and expectations, cyclists, while much more accounted for and less demonized, are continually at a disadvantage as well. This is due primarily to their reception by motorists and the infrastructure that encourages this oftendismissive orientation. Because so much public space, resources, and policy favor their use, automobile motorists often perceive that it is solely their right to use roads. Bicycle lanes and dedicated bicycle spaces are positive aspects that expand our spatial dialog to be more inclusive of various forms of movement and offer safe routes for many. Bicycle lanes are important sites offering a temporary respite from the danger of the automobile-dominated road, and their presence is a visible reminder for motorists that bicyclists exist. A bicycle lane reminds us that bicyclists also have power as it a form of spatial representation and therefore political. Yet, at some point motorists and bicyclists must share the public space of the road. Ultimately, all spatial practitioners compete for spatial resources just as citizens compete for material resources and political representation. Altercations between motorists are common, and tensions over rights of way are disputes over temporary territorial ownership and identity. These tensions reflect longstanding debates over the use of public space and the larger implications of the public sphere. Cities are slowly returning to some of the central aspects of the road for common or shared use by acknowledging that space can be used in various ways. This can be seen in signage, parking and storage facilities, and lanes. At the same time, the notion of public space as a highly regulated sphere that represents the interest of private citizens, discussed by Habermas, is increasingly more hostile to the everyday practitioner than ever before. People are often criminalized and policed for minor transgressions of spatial norms and policy that range from relieving themselves in public to minor trespassing, sleeping, sitting, or dwelling practices in public areas. The movement of individuals is more regulated, surveilled, and controlled than ever, and the dominance of roads primarily for automobile use shows little sign of serious change. In this context the rhetorical movement of individuals is still capable of speaking intentionally to the ways in which we intermingle. Mapes notes that bicycling is “a political act,” and the tensions that play out between motorists and cyclists today are evidence of this aspect. Motorists commonly express a perplexed anger toward cyclists as they are begrudgingly forced to negotiate their presence; while bicyclists respond with anger toward inattentive drivers

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that completely disregard their safety and endanger them (8). It should be remembered that roads even when divided must at some point be shared. Lefebvre’s triad of conceived, perceived, and lived space illustrates how, despite the conception of spaces to encourage certain perceptions, they will nevertheless be actualized through lived experiences (Production 38–39). Divided roads and the practitioners within at some point must converge, and as practitioners meet, they become aware of each other and are reintroduced to one another. As the bicycle object transforms public space, the identity of a rider transforms accordingly. Space and bicyclist coproduce what it means to ride and to be a bicyclist. The bicycle throughout its history has represented an ability to transgress social confines and mark the structural inequalities that make such breaches necessary. In the bicycle object we are reminded of this history as various marginalized groups have and continue to use the bicycle in ways that mark these conditions. For those in developing nations the bicycle is a way to achieve mainstream success and is not necessarily tainted with the assumptions of spatial subordination. In these instances, we observe how the bicycle is used to move through rigid systems of power. The bicycle allows individuals to temporarily become another identity through mobility, while allowing entire groups to move into new realms, establishing more cosmopolitan territories in the process. The development of the safety bicycle, as it comes to be known, is most visible in the modern road bike, which is a direct evolution of the ten-geared steel bicycle or ten speed. This bicycle throughout the ages is most recognizable as a bike. It typically has thin rubber tires and gears intended for use on the road. It entails drop handlebars perched on a thin steel diamond shaped frame. It is functional and sleek in contrast to other iterations such as beach and balloon-style cruisers that were created initially to resemble automobiles. The popular ten speed represents both the standard bicycle object and the technological apex of road bicycle racing. Contemporary forms of this bicycle are used in the grand tours across Europe and one-day races such as the World Championship. These events and circuits are governed by the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), founded in Paris in 1900, which continues to regulate the material standards of the road bicycle. The road bicycles used and sold across the world follow strict bicycle standards, which are the major reasons the bicycle has remained in such a recognizable form for over a hundred years. There is long history of bicycle use for off-road environments, as generally, early bicycle inventions took place on dirt paths, as cobblestone, gravel, and later paved roads become the norm. In military use, the bicycle often traversed off-road terrain. The 25th Infantry Bicycle Corps regiment, commonly referred to as the “buffalo soldiers,” is employed by Congress to fight

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U.S. battles with Indigenous peoples known as the “Indian wars.” This is the first African American peace time infantry and the first infantry unit to be outfitted specifically with bicycles around 1897. Cyclocross, a largely European form of cycling and running through tough terrain, becomes a sport in the 1940s and is a clear precursor to what becomes mountain bicycling. It is also reemerging in the form of gravel bicycles; however, the first bicycle to be distinctly designed for off-path environments is the mountain bike of the 1980s. This bicycle is the result of using reinforced cruisers and balloon tire bicycles of the 1930s to 1960s to explore uncharted bicycle territory around locations such as Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County, California; Crested Butte, Colorado; and the English countryside. The mountain bike spurs a culture that institutes its own bicycle boom, making the bicycle more accessible and more enjoyable to millions. The bicycle market becomes dominated by the mountain bike, even when most use it on paved roads. Many developments in bicycling are extensions of previous uses in relation to the changing spaces, technology, and interests of individuals and communities. The continued dominance of the bicycleracing governing organization, the UCI, to dictate the consumer road bicycle market, in line with high-end professional racing, maintains rigid design specifications. This adherence to the original features of the safety bicycle is another indicator of nostalgia in bicycling discourse and is a testament to the timelessness of the design. Because of this, the bicycle object has remained relatively the same for over 120 years. Some might view this as a hindrance to creative development and innovation, while others view it as a celebration of essence. Yet, it is not a single organization that has maintained the bicycle object so familiar today as it was in the 1890s. It is a network of bicycle and manufacturing interests that hold bicycle lines and determine new ones. The few changes in road bicycle designs partially sparks a turn toward the invention of the mountain bike and has allowed this bicycle, over the past twenty years, to develop. In the process the lightweight road bicycle conforming to elite race specifications is a more niche object than the widely varying mountain bike ridden by most cyclists. Innovations in frame designs, longtravel full suspension, dropper seat posts, radical geometry shifts, and wider tires, to name a few changes, not experienced on road bicycles. Meanwhile the road bicycle has remained relatively the same and has become more of a specialized cultural pursuit than merely riding an entry-level mountain bike on public roads or paths. Some advancements such as disc brakes, frame material, clip on pedals, tubeless tires, and electronic shifting are developed for mountain bicycles and used on both types. The global network of producers of bicycles—even with the consolidation by large manufacturers such as Giant, Trek, and Specialized as well as gearset producers Shimano, Campagnolo, and SRAM—has challenged older

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companies such as Schwinn and Bianchi. The customization of bicycles by various communities is an indication of the cultures that arise surrounding the bicycle product ad infinitum. Lowrider bicycle culture, for example, creatively reworks the consumer product of the U.S.-made bicycle often called the Chicago Schwinn. The bicycles produced are a mixture of Mexican American cultural forms and the U.S. automotive industry. Their standing and uses mimic that of lowrider car culture as the slow and low ride of the vehicles is part of a lowrider presence. The cultural practices of recombination that produce skateboards, in roller skates and boards, hip-hop, in sampled beats, space, movement, and lyrics, and punk culture, in fashion reuse, are harnessed through consumer goods and mobility. Lowrider bicycle culture, as well, emerges from such détournements of existing artifacts. Lowrider bicycles go beyond established consumer aesthetics and bicycling culture itself to produce artifacts of cultural expression (Chappell 64–65). Bicycle parades, scraper bicycles, elevated bicycles, and everyday groups of road and mountain bicycle riders, even more so than modified car culture, publicly present mobile identities through body-objects. Lowrider bicycles are conceptions of objects and bodies that engage in a mobile presence indicative of cycling practices in general and establish a “material presence to be reckoned with” according to Ben Chappell (106). Being seen and present in public space is a display of identity, and in doing so, practitioners create a space based on presence. The representation of identity in public etches out of daily life a physical and discursive space. When there is a lack of representation of communities, this becomes particularly important as a form of representation. In this case it revolves around the bicycle, a mainstream consumer product, and its modification by a specific community. As bicycling collectives all around the world organize small group rides and large neighborhood ride-outs, a rhetoric of presence is sustained through everyday bicycling mobility, and in these they comment on their collective situation. Cargo, folding, and electric bicycles, as well as the merging of many other forms of bicycling, indicate that the rhetoric of bicycling does not consist of a singular perspective but a network of bicycling iterations. These are aspects of global, transnational, and multicultural pursuits that reflect the differing situations and histories of each context; however, the commonality that each share is the object and the mobility pertinent to bicycling. Cargo bicycles were used originally in various settings and for commercial and industrial purposes, while folding bicycles were invented around the same time as the safety bicycle. Cargo bicycles allow individuals to move with their children, pets, and belongings. Folding bicycles were also invented early in bicycle history and are now a burgeoning market. They make travelling on public transportation and going indoors with bicycles, upon arrival, more accessible.

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These also allow bicyclists to travel long distances via train or airplane with their bicycles, which are typically not allowed or require hefty baggage fees. Electric bicycles are power assisted vehicles that were similarly constructed during the inceptions of bicycles and motorcycles. Assisted power bicycles are pushing bicycling past human-powered mobility while remaining connected to the ethos of bicycling as a human-powered form of movement. In the beginning every motorcycle had pedals and was effectively a bicycle when the engine was not running. Today, most electric bicycles merely assist pedaling behavior rather than completely take over. They have been important in making bicycling more accessible for differing bodily capabilities. This terrain pushes bicycling toward that of motorcycling but not completely into its realm. The bicycle in these instances maintains its core human-powered functionality, spatial approach, and aesthetic. This leads to a physical and gestural sense of nostalgia that persists in our thinking concerning bicycling. What it means to move today says much about our own relations with space, each other, and our shared past. Many international cities such as Amsterdam, Munster, Antwerp, Copenhagen, and Beijing have substantial bicyclist populations that make bicycling a ubiquitous presence. The daily functions of these cities are dependent on the quiet, emissions-less, nimble, and fluid use of the bicycle. Due to weather, theft, and use-value, unique, high-end, fragile, and expensive bicycles often do not suit well in these settings. Here, you will more likely find a heavier, sturdier, and more resilient bicycle object that is intended to fit in rather than stand out. At the same time, bicycle rentals and shared city bicycle programs convert a singular practice into a form of mass transportation. At times these bicycles can be picked up and docked at specific locations in cities such as San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, and New York, and in others they can be dropped off anywhere using a locking and unlocking mechanism built into the docking portal of the bicycle such as those in Dallas and Minneapolis. Many of these designs are not new, as folding and cargo bicycles have been around since bicycles were invented, and internal locking mechanisms are relatively simple and have been around for a hundred years. The rehashing of these older devices and mechanisms in more contemporary and electronic forms is an example of the elements of nostalgia attached to the bicycle. The bicycle has long been used for sole individual transport and for carrying goods and labor production, and at a certain point these functions merge in the life-work worlds of daily production. All our movements are implicated in the systems of social and economic production in which they function. As touched on briefly concerning the blurred economic lines of the commute, such an awareness can be applied to bicycling, whether across town on a shared city bike or overseas on a cycling-centric trip.

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The more ways we can interject healthy, economic, and environmentally friendly forms of transportation into this global system of movement, the better the entire system will be. At the same time the bicycle is considered by many as more than a functional form of transportation. For countless it is an object of expression capable of producing an equally functional sense of jouissance situated at the heart of necessary and productive collective life. The goal of the Situationist International was to break through the banality or spectacle of the everyday. The Situationists also sought to interject in daily life a sustained critique of many forms of social relations, which entailed taking the components of daily life or the spectacle and reordering them (3). The bicycle reorganizes our movements through daily life and brings the blurred distant image of it, placed at a distance by the productions of the spectacle, into one’s presence. In this manner, the bicycle is an intervention. The bicycle is a simple mechanical device with a long history, but some of the technological advancements that go into these designs and infrastructure are completely new. This brings the bicycle and these elements to more people, situations, and contexts. The advancement of accessories such as LED lights, lightweight and comfortable safety gear, and freely attaching and adjustable bags are making an impact on how and where bicycles are used. These accessories are making commuting, transportation, and bicycle touring and bike-packing more common and enjoyable. Large racks for panniers and front baskets are being replaced by performance seat-tube packs, slim frame packs, and rolled-up handlebar bags; while outdoor and camping gear is also becoming lighter, more compact, and durable. In these advancements costs of equipment are higher and more activity specific. These advents have been marketed and turned into entire industries that serve bicycle and adventure markets produced for consumer ends. In them they take away from some of the egalitarian and environmental aspects associated with the bicycle. The bicycle is now caught in postmodern frameworks where directional paths are unclear, nevertheless the bicycle encourages us to revisit previous ways of moving, producing, and interacting. Debord writes that the “construction of situations begins on the ruins of the modern spectacle” as bicycling constructs new physical and social spaces out of previous situations (Knabb 25). The spaces not entirely explored through the various available movement types continue to be explored through the introduction of new bicycle devices. Most are reintroductions that mirror the developments of bicycle history. In this reflexive nostalgia, bicycle types are revived and revamped. For example, fixed gear bikes previously introduced in track racing early in cycling history now entail an entire genre of bicycles. This type of bicycle offers a unique style of riding and like all bicycles, enables the exploration of life at a different pace and orientation. By merely removing brakes, one

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changes their entire approach to riding a bicycle. From a postmodern perspective this can be progressive as we learn about what we lose in the name of critiquing notions of linear technological progress. Fixed gear crits or circuit racing are reviving multiple-day track races on single speed bicycles without brakes. This reminds us of the races that occurred in the United States and Europe when bicycling was the second most popular sport and large stadiums existed, which brought thousands of spectators. Similarly, the revival of cyclocross in gravel and bike-packing races and rides is another example. In our desire to invent the most technologically advanced off-road bicycle, we found the urge to move back to more road-like bicycles and their use off roads. These revivals are spawning new bicycling cultures that are reworking our ways of orientating toward space, time, and others. Each is based on the bicycle and grounded in its previous uses. Within the technological urban space, the bicycle offers a way to move at a more human pace producing possibly a more humane environment. At the same time, as is the case with the use of bicycle messengers in tight urban locales, it is simply the quickest option and therefore profitable. The introduction of oversize tire bikes over a decade ago has moved from a niche activity and object to be incorporated into downhill and trail mountain bikes as tire width has increased substantially. Bicycles that were relegated to the fat tire category are now excellent options for rough terrain bike-packing trips with a lot of gear, as well as snow, sand, and soft dirt surfaces. Meanwhile typical trail bicycles will often use tires over three inches wide, what was once considered an oversize tire. Mountain bikes may have around a 2.5 inches wide tire while road, touring, and gravel bikes may have wider slick tires below 2.0. inches wide. Bike-packing combines bicycling, camping, and hiking, enabling the traversing of long distances completely outdoors and unassisted on a bicycle. The paths of these touring cyclists can be seen along highways, streets, and trails. Such a presence prompts outdoor use and the preservation of seminatural environments while generating more human-friendly road spaces. This presence is not without risk, however, as cycling deaths due to automobiles are widespread throughout the country and the world and justice for these bicyclists is often unserved. Touring bicycles competing with traffic on large thoroughfares force automobiles to be aware of the precarious bodies that ride on the margins at a slower speed. If modernization has produced a destructive march forward that has left its very foundation of the indelible human body behind, then the presence of the bicycle-riding human reminds us of both a moment in history before such appropriations as well as a possible future that awaits through the revisiting of its development. This industrialized march is fueled by the metaphysical conceptions of modernity, and as we continue to think about the bicycle, we are reminded of the ways in which these concepts lead us both

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toward and from the truth. This is already underway and is perhaps a necessary response, in physical form, to modernist notions of progress. A cycling rhetoric informs us of this history and functions as its theoretical counterpart in physical form. It stands to reason then that we can usher in new realities according to the ways of thinking and communicating offered by differing bicycling practices. Long-distance bicycle riding traverses across paths, roads, and trails, often left unnoticed and seldom used by bicycles. The advent of the gravel bicycle is developed mostly in the United States like that of mountain biking, although early mountain bike culture also aroise in England around the same time as the United States. Unlike Europe, the United States has multiple fire roads that are well established and maintained but unpaved and relatively empty, which creates the opportunity for an ideal hybrid bicycling experience. A bicycle for this purpose fits somewhere between the full suspension mountain bike and the lightweight road bicycle. Shimano, the leading component maker, now offers a groupset of components specifically designed with short travel derailleurs, clutch mechanisms, and increased durability, for gravel bicycling. Many bicycle manufacturers now offer a specific gravel option. Simultaneously, the creation of new and interchangeable accessories, components, and materials has expanded from steel, aluminum, and carbon fiber. The desire to combine new forms with older ones is breaking down past and even emerging lines between bicycling progress, genres, and styles. Road bicycles with lightweight features and a tight turning radius are now used for freestyle purposes, previously most familiar to mountain and BMX biking maneuvers. Durable downhill-specific mountain bikes, with front and rear long-travel suspension around 50mm, are used to pull off groundbreaking aerial maneuvers down large sections of trails. This can be seen in the Redbull Rampage competition and others that fuse BMX and mountain biking. Downhill mountain bicycles are specifically designed to only go downhill on either extremely rough or groomed dirt tracks such as those on ski slopes converted for riding. These experiences have become unique, as a typical trail mountain bicycle could not endure the punishment of going downhill on a steep ski resort trail, while the heavy downhill mountain bicycle would be almost impossible to ride up a steep trail. These specializations entail slight and large shifts in human orientations toward the bicycle object and space. The markets that arise in support of each pursuit result in safety gear and functional attire that further transform the identity of the practitioner and the nature of the practice. As bicycling continues to create its own spaces and communicate a host of messages through the nonverbal language of bicycling mobility, the audiences and populations of the public sphere continue to engage in another level of discursive deliberation constructing the rhetoric of bicycling. What

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do these shifts in bicycling mean for societies around the globe and what will cities of the future look like as these new forms, along with bicycling populations, expand? In the middle of yet another boom in bicycle sales as well as a global demand and shortage of bicycles in 2022, societal values and spaces continue to shift alongside these bicycling communities, as will our thinking on and through the subject of bicycling. CONCLUSION The bicycle has been in existence for over two hundred years, and its development as a form of spatial interaction has unfolded along with society. The velocipede lingered for over fifty years, but in the late 1800s it quickly became a material reality in the safety bicycle, and soon this object enclosed into a standardized form emblematic of industrialization, independence, and modernity. Many of the shared conceptions and expectations surrounding the bicycle object and its form of movement today are evident in the earliest moments of its history. In addition, many of these aspects and devices are being revisited and reharnessed to produce not entirely new ways of bicycling. Peppered with notions of longing, the bicycle object is a representation of not only its but our past. In the beginning it represented the future of technological modernization, and today it continues to represent efficient notions of progress in postmodern contexts. A sense of nostalgia and a vision of the future surround the bicycle. It represents an almost perfect blending of human power and mechanical precision. This interface is changing but continues to revolve around its central design, over one hundred years old. Despite it becoming equipped with electronic systems such as navigational devices, electronic shifting, and power assistance, the human body is still the indelible and defining aspect of the bicycle. Unlike a car, it cannot drive itself and will not even remain upright if left alone. Like a standing body, if it is not engaged in a series of slight shifts orchestrated by a conscious operator or held upright, it will collapse. The future of the human body in posthuman contexts mirrors these trends of the bicycle—as the bicycle is equipped with artificial intelligence, so is the body. Numerous bodily devices such as smart phones and personal fitness tracking devices as well as the bicycle itself allow us to move in step with technology and the history of our own bodily role. The two represent a reciprocal convergence that brings an awareness of the ways in which machines and bodies are dependent on one another. In this chapter, I have examined cycling mobility, developing our understanding of the horse metaphor, and building our ideas concerning the bicycle as an emblematic of a way of thinking about humanity. The bicycle in this

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regard, remains an idea, like modernity and humanism, which is retroactively understood as an unfolding project of how we can live up to or recognize the ways in which these ideals have become problematic. The bicycle continues to represent an ideal way of thinking, situated in the middle of the everyday while pushed to its sidelines. It continues to evolve as a commodity of increasing technological advancement while remaining relatively the same all over the world. As millions embark on journeys, they make nonverbal statements concerning what it means to be a cyclist, human, and citizen. The bicycle sits at a precipice of spatial interaction and technological progression, when natural and human-powered forms of movement have yet to be eclipsed by steam, gas, and electric forms. Physical power, as it is conceived by bicyclists, is relatable and understandable in relation to our individual attributes. It makes sense that wherever we see the bicycle we see an appropriate declaration of human power, strength, and identity. By the time the bicycle idea becomes a reality, collective spaces have already been constructed by the various types of movement within, from the horse, chariot, and carriage. The bicycle represents a transition into humanpowered movement. Before we have names for either device, at some of its earliest moments an engine is added to become a motorcycle. The pursuit of the bicycle is very near, if not inseparable, from the pursuit of the motorcycle, as each informs the other. Meanwhile our collective notions of public space and expected movements within develop accordingly. Each becomes involved in a shared discourse which represents its physical territories: road, rider, object, and so on. As bicycles turn into motorcycles, shops to garages, and riders to motorists, humans continue to write the narrative of what it means to ride. Like the bicycle, the motorcycle allows for an immense number of humans around the globe to move efficiently while offering an unparalleled achievement in individual speed, maneuverability, and intensity. For the practitioner of horse riding, the riding of a bicycle becomes oddly familiar yet more accessible, as is true of the motorcycle, which I now discuss in the next two chapters.

Chapter 5

The Motorcycle and Conflict

Without the horse-mounted rider as a foundation of how to approach objects and space, the safety bicycle might not exist. Similarly, the addition of pedals and wheels to propel individuals forward becomes the basis for future types of transportation such as the motorcycle. Just as early bicycle concepts and designs such as the velocipede were based on the horse as a form of motility, the first motorcycles were essentially bicycles with engines; and some of the first automobiles and even airplanes were pedal powered. The spatial and mobile expectations created by the development of these ways of moving constitute substantial portions of daily life. As they unfold, the road and its conception as a lively diverse space in terms of mobility is largely turned over to the domination of the automobile. In service of this automobility large swaths of our physical environment are congested or empty, awaiting use. The bicycle and the motorized bike or motorcycle remind us of the origins of these developments existing at its margins. On public roads, the bicycle and the motorcycle move within the liminal spaces of an automobile-centric space. In this context, they each emerge at their own pace, distinctly unique in relation to this shared space. In terms of scale, speed, efficiency, and maneuverability, these devices have a mobility, ontology, and rhetoric all their own. In this chapter, I examine the last of the triadic arrangements regarding cycling, the motorcycle. The motorcycle encapsulates both the modernist notions of human progress and independence while furthering this movement in ways that mark its limitations. Street motorcycles exist in the spaces available on roads and highway systems that are simultaneously overlooked and ever present within the automobile-centric designs of most cities. The motorcycle can move at the raw speeds necessary to survive in these spaces while possessing the acceleration, stopping power, and maneuverability of a much smaller, lighter, and technologically compact vehicle. Texts on motorcycling tend to emphasize the technical object itself such as Early Motorcycles: Construction, Operation and Repair (1924), by Victor W. Pagé; The Art of the Racing Motorcycle: 97

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100 Years of Designing for Speed (2011), by Phillip Tooth; Motorcycle Panorama: A Pictorial Review of Design and Development (1975), by Bob Holliday; and From Motorcycle to Superbike: The History of the Motorbike (1986), by Eric Thompson and Laurie Caddell. Whereas the bicycle is peppered with notions of nostalgia that frame its identity in symbolic instances of memory and longing, the motorcycle is continually associated with the future. Even as we look back at the development of the motorcycle object as these texts do, we tend to do so in a way that marvels at the technologies involved. In this manner, the motorcycle is often discussed as a technological projection into the future. Armand Ensanian’s Discovering the Motorcycle: The History, The Culture, The Machines (2016) frames an historical account of motorcycling in terms of a series of moments that are still in need of discovery. The motorcycle captures our imagination in ways that feel just ahead of our own reality, even if they occurred in the past. The Upper Half of Rider and Machine (2019), by Bernt Spiegel, is a rare text that attempts to uncover a scientific but almost mysterious relationship between rider and motorcycle. We often discuss automobility as a chore, serving only more exciting, economic, or necessary ends. The motorcycle, however, while even more economical and efficient is often discussed in terms of joy, daring, and fulfillment. Its riding is exciting. In daily rides across the United States, Europe, and the globe, the destination concept often becomes secondary to the ride itself. This aspect goes against dominant constructions surrounding transportation, which tend to position space as an obstacle to overcome in the pursuit of travelling to a specific destination. Meanwhile throughout the developing world the motorcycle and motorbike are indelible aspects of social survival and mobility. They often provide economical and reliable rapid transport that is practical and necessary for survival. In South Asia and Southeast Asia, for example, notably Thailand, Vietnam, and India, the motorbike functions like a motorcycle and a bicycle. It is powerful enough to keep pace with automobiles, yet nimble enough to merge into crowded pedestrian-filled spaces. Just at bicyclists in major cities advocate through daily rides the creation and maintenance of bicycle awareness, the motorcyclist makes motorists cognizant of an equally rapid alternative that also lessens congestion. As opposed to bicyclists, they exist in the same space as the automobile and almost never occupy a lane or space designated for their own, outside of parking. Because of this there is often a respect granted to motorcyclists by motorists that is not present in their treatment of bicyclists. Both forms of cycling communicate messages based on a moving presence, slowing down to avoid slower pedestrians in the case of bicycling, and speeding up to make a traffic light in front of automobiles in motorcycling. Such ways of moving are nonverbal reflections of a system, and the motorcycle, which begins as

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a bicycle with a motor attached, functions similarly. Where one exists at a slower pace and often relies on visibility, the other survives because of speed and maneuverability. The motorcycle can compete with the rapidity of almost any other form of land-based transportation. It is a marvel of individual speed and maneuverability that brings with it a slew of new renderings, readings, and implications. Because of its prowess within a road infrastructure that emphasizes safety, in the United States and Europe, the motorcycle was sensationalized and demonized according to an ethos of fear portrayed in popular films starting in the 1950s and 1960s. As an alternative to the safety of bicycling and the comfort of the automobile, the outlaw image of riding itself is still a large part of motorcycling culture. The thrill and escape from the mundanity of modern life is another transgressive sentiment attached to the motorcycle; however, in the last few decades corporate and cultural forces have sought to change this image. The turn toward making the motorcycle a more friendly form of movement highlights “more general changes in cultural politics, citizenship and governing through culture” (Packer and Coffey 641). The most widely successful motorcycle model in history, the Honda Cub or Honda 50, a small 50 CC motorcycle, entered the U.S. market through such an appeal. The well-known advertising slogan, “You Meet the Nicest People on a Honda” changed the public perception of the motorcycle, emphasizing its more practical and potentially widespread appeal (Gingerelli). The ads in 1962 pictured people of various personalities performing daily tasks that required transportation such as shopping, dining, and playing sports. The Honda advertising slogan that accompanied the ad continued, the “World’s Biggest Seller” of “America’s largest selling 2nd car.” The motorcycle was sold as a vehicle that was comparable in terms of acceptance and comfort to the automobile in these ads. As Jeremy Packer and Mary K. Coffey note, the tensions over the meaning of texts are “struggles over not just representation, but the activation of modes of thought, conduct and citizenship” (641). The motorcycle materiality and its image will continue to play out as an example of how objects become associated with symbols used to describe them, which further conditions what it means for the rider to use them. The invention of the motorcycle represents a moment in time when our abilities to create our own worlds come into question. In our desire to go faster, and in turn create symbolic associations of what this means for our individual and collective identity to do so, we created an object that supersedes our own expectations. Because of the raw speed some of the earliest motorcycles are capable of, we encounter the ways in which our conceptual understandings of reality take their own forms. I argue that this results in a proto-postmodern moment, an envisioning of a future in which our own intentions are left behind and ideas such as technological progress take material

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forms. As the mechanized bicycle becomes strengthened to sustain the forces produced by engines, to become the motorized cycle, it jumps scale and riders become extraphysical. In this regard, the motorcyclist is posthuman, a cyborg of technology and flesh that can look back at itself left standing, running, or bicycling at a slower pace. Devised in the mid-nineteenth century alongside the bicycle, the motorcycle becomes its own unique form of individual mobility that alters one’s identity. It continues to remain a type of movement and experience in a class of its own. By the late twentieth century, Haraway writes that we have become “theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism,” and a cycling identity is an ontology and a politics of this type (292). The theoretical movement of human subjectivity is contained in the ways we move, relating to ourselves, each other, and space. As we come to push our abilities with machines further, we also question these directions, reinvigorating another return. Braidotti notes that posthuman frameworks go beyond the concepts of human exceptionalism, challenging the history of our modernist and humanist conceptions in the process (31). The desire to push our own abilities forward is at the heart of linear modernist logic, but as we move beyond these abilities, this gives us the opportunity to challenge our previously held assumptions. In doing so, we can recognize the ways in which modernist values and processes of modernization also produced damage, loss, and pain. Such an awareness is peppered throughout the development of modernity and is part of what makes the process of modernity noteworthy, that it succeeded in silencing so many perspectives and coalescing so many social constructions around a veil of legitimacy. Today we engage in a series of retroactive critiques indicative of most theoretical posts. I argue that the motorcycle represents a moment within the development of modernity that can be considered critical of its own formation. Arising around the same time as the bicycle, the motorcycle quickly became a marker of our abilities as humans to move forward (in general, motorcycles do not have reverse) fast—at times, and very quickly in its history, too fast. The designers of sportbikes today still struggle with harnessing and controlling engine power capabilities. This often involves advancements in steering, braking, and aerodynamics, which negotiate the amount of engine power that can be generated. Capable of such efficiency and destruction, I position the motorcycle as a postmodern moment within the development of modernism. The ability to quickly reach and breach our human potential with the motorcycle makes it a potential site of reflexivity regarding technological progression. Today, it continues to be reconciled with as a technology just beyond our ability to control it; the motorcycle moves so fast and with such grace and so little effort, we are required to become aware of its and our potential for rupture.

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The actual controlling of a motorcycle is an individual act that becomes a public statement of identity. While remaining anonymous, when wearing a full helmet for the most part, motorcyclists declare themselves through movement. In this process, a way of moving becomes associated with a lifestyle, an outlook, and a mobile response to various social, economic, and political conditions. The riding of motorcycles has been socialized accordingly, creating a motorcycling image. This image is a mirage, a concept associated with an object, an ersatz portrayal of a territory, like the previous notion of bicycling nostalgia, that may not exist. Before I discuss this concept of the motorcycle as image in the next chapter, I first discuss the motorcycle object. I then attend to the ways in which the motorcycle has been influenced and partially produced through conflict. Part of the reflexive nature of postmodernity is brought about due to the realizations of how modernist values led to global conflict. Along with war, the motorcycle also develops within the related contexts of competition and consumerism, which I also discuss in this chapter. I now turn to the materiality of the motorcycle in its various contexts. THE MOTORCYCLE OBJECT Years before the first motorcycle appeared with a combustion gasoline engine and even before the safety bicycle is introduced, Sylvester H. Roper introduced a steam-powered velocipede to fairs and circuses in the United States around 1869. This forward-thinking vehicle relied on a steam engine and utilized the then familiar walking machine. It featured elements such as a twisting throttle handlebar, and because the velocipede had yet to attach pedals, it resembled a modern motorcycle. This motorcycle-like object actually predates the safety bicycle. As the bicycle stabilizes through the inventions of the chain, crank, pedals, and pneumatic rubber tire, among others, the history of the motorcycle becomes aligned with the bicycle; yet there exist before this time objects such as the highwheel and wooden-tired versions of motorcycle-like vehicles. A motorcycle is not simply created from a bicycle by adding a motor and strengthening the components but more so develops alongside the bicycle as its own vehicle. The development of industrial technology in the production of tools, shops, and knowledge pertaining to bicycle technology in the early 1900s gradually germinates the inspirations, designs, and inventions of motorized versions. As Vivanco notes, the lines between the two types of cycles remained vague for years as internal combustion engines began appearing on bicycles in the 1890s. The two forms of transportation often appeared alongside one another as motorized bicycles became common pace setting vehicles for bicycle races (37). Later motorcycle races would begin to take place on the same tracks that

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were used for bicycle racing. Indeed, they continue to occupy the same roads of everyday space today and often compete for territory on narrower paths and off-road trails. For years major manufacturers, such as Singer, Humber, Rober, Triumph, and Peugeot, produced bicycles as well as various types of motorized cycles. Ultimately, human-powered cycling machines took many forms, including three- and four-wheeled versions as well as vehicles with recumbent seating that directly led to motorcycling and automobility (Vivanco 37). In Germany in 1885 one of the first gas-powered combustion engines is combined with a cycle by Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach, now both more associated with Mercedes-Benz and luxury automobiles. In 1894 Hinrich and Wilhelm Hildebrand and Alois Wolfüller introduced the first production motorcycle. The development of cycling as a form of mobility exists in most wheeled vehicles today and just as the bicycle developed alongside motorcycles, they both formed the foundations for the automotive industry. Bicycling, motorcycling, and automobility became distinct forms of transportation, creating unique body-object-spaces out of ways of moving. As noted, they share a developmental and contemporary territory as extensions of equestrian riding. The act of riding a bicycle is something most learn when young, providing an almost universal epistemological experience, especially for those in urban and suburban contexts, and driving an automobile is almost a rite of passage; many can earn a license for around the age of sixteen or younger. Both ways of moving put the similarly designed, operated, and regulated motorcycle within the realm of the general experience. However, the motorcycle exists slightly outside of these experiences. Even though each of these practices entails a savvy practitioner in-tune with the surrounding environment both physically and mentally, navigating a bevy of social and physical constraints, cultural expectations, and symbolic associations, the motorcycle entails an element of risk and coordination that is more pronounced. Early motorcycles entail an engagement with a series of analog procedures that involve pulling levers, often the left-hand clutch, twisting bars, often the right-hand throttle, and pushing and lifting, often the left foot shifting gears, while braking, often with the right hand and the right foot, while steering with both arms and balancing with the entire body. Like the horse and bicycle, we can come to understand a particular way of viewing and commenting on reality through the riding, observing, and reading of motorcycles in contextual action. Bodies, as material, identify with material objects, and in contemporary contexts, this often involves consumerist practices of consumption. In these everyday products we find and create meaning. This meaning is part of our own identity, and at times we use them to move through space. Tuan notes that “spatial skill is what we accomplish with our body” and it is linked to

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our freedoms from what ties us to place (75). Presence itself is based on the relationships between objects and self. The automobile plays an indelible role in this process as a symbol of identity and status as well as one’s ability to communicate through a mobile and fleeting presence; yet the bicycle and the motorcycle go even further to establish their own body-object subjectivities. They function as an extension of the body rather than a complete housing. Nonverbal elements of communication—such as proxemics (the use of space to communicate), kinesics (the use of movement to communicate), chronemics (the use of time to communicate), and artifacts (the use of adornments to communicate)—are all present in the ways bicycles and motorcycles communicate to larger audiences (Warren and Fassett 110–113; Moore et al. 15–17). Altering the spatial distance between locations, performing bodily gestures of meaning, and altering pace based on a close relationship with an object that involves touch. Motorcycles are communication devices, mediums that allow us to correspond directly through these configurations. A rider becomes one with a vehicle, which produces an extended body epistemology; we not only comment through our bodily gestures but also learn from these postures and movements. By moving quickly, we communicate immediacy and by moving closer we de-distance space, establishing presence through kinesic messages that are both sites of embodied knowledge and discursive tension. Tuan notes that the body is the part of the material world we are most familiar with as it is not simply how we experience reality but an object we can observe (89). Customization of material objects and the customization of self, using objects, create lived spaces based on the performance of a temporary corporeal presence and the use of artifacts to deliver messages. These artifacts are already signified in particular ways as well. As Lefebvre notes, lived spaces represent a considered presence and all space is imbued with social values. To use objects to move is to alter bodies and create meaningful spaces in the process. Along with the wearing of clothes that communicate a host of personal messages about who we are and the contexts in which they were developed, we also adorn ourselves with products that communicate nonverbally. Similarly, we put decals on and choose the color, type, make, and model of our vehicles. At times we add patches, pins, and additions to our clothing and bodies, customize our spaces, and perform aesthetic gestures in public. These expressions help form and communicate our identity. These symbolic negotiations of matter, time, and space are not simply individual choices. They are not fully autonomous nor simple material renderings; rather, they are indicative of much larger structural forces that communicate a host of relational messages. This includes the body and its ensemble performances with motorcycles. The identifications we create with material objects made

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by others are social, and their perceived status is an aspect of our own. The technical object is built as a component of daily life, which serves various symbolic and material functions such as mobility. Bicycle mobility is often established during childhood, and the motorcycle often signals a development into young adulthood, expanding one’s sense of independence and territory. Simondon notes that there is a technical knowledge that arises from the relationship with the object that during the first encounters is “implicit, non-reflective, and habitual” but later turns into a more reflexive and self-aware understanding of the way the body and the mind function with objects (103). In other words, one becomes aware of not only a bodily epistemology but also a way of thinking about the self in relation to manipulating technical objects. As the intuitive knowledge based on use is funneled through rational and scientific knowledge, one moves through two distinct ways of operating, illustrated by the theorist as that of the apprentice and the engineer (Simondon 103). The bicycle entails a bodily understanding, and like language and walking as well as many other cultural practices that have become normalized, we learn them when young. The motorcycle is regulated in completely different ways than the bicycle, as to drive a motorcycle on shared roads one often needs a license, and to get a license one must meet certain qualifications. Although, this is certainly not true of any off-road use of motorcycles, which one can use to ride off roads for long distances without the need of a particular license. Nevertheless, the regulations associated with the motorcycle, its form of movement, and costs such as insurance, gasoline, and repair, are far less than that of the automobile. Thus, the motorcycle is a material reality that can transgress the capabilities of the bicycle and the social confines associated with the automobile and roads. In this reference to technical knowledge offered by Simondon and the distinctions of their users is the way humans learn about themselves through their relationships with things. The desire to move up in social status and seek the rewards and benefits of social mobility is engrained in the physical aspects of speed, passage, and the material items we use to do so, which only heightens the identifications we have with them. Moving in particular ways communicates a series of messages according to the objects and their use. For example, in the United States and other automobile-centric locations around the world, many pursue the limits of their financial abilities and beyond to drive the best or most expensive automobile possible. The identity established through this consumer practice is ingrained in the rationale for the cost that is often more symbolic than performance based. Others customize less expensive vehicles, spending higher amounts on after-market additions than on the original product. In this, they identify more with the process and the production involved than cost-effectiveness or the quality of the product. Walking down the street wearing a jacket and shoes

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turns into riding a bicycle with one pant leg rolled up or a particular style of motorcycle with a leather jacket and helmet. The acts of cycling are embodied performances that entail epistemological underpinnings concerning how we come to know our physical surroundings and ourselves as social products. Thus, we use and customize industrial and consumer goods to communicate our identity to others, forming relationships with things, space, and people in the process. The technical operations of daily life and our varied uses of mechanical objects since antiquity have largely been ignored as though “they were operations that correspond to servile occupations” (Simondon 104). Excluded from the realm of discourse, Simondon notes that only the Sophist made the attempt to bring everyday technical operations such as “agriculture, hunting, war, and the art of navigation” into the realm of “noble thought.” There is in this movement a further distinction between major and minor techniques as each era recognizes certain aspects of a technical world while rejecting others (104). The original teachers and practitioners of rhetoric, the Sophists, elevated the body and its movement to the realm of thought. For the Sophist, public deliberation was a bodily activity that required mental and physical training. Because of this correlation, teaching effective public address often occurred in gymnasiums alongside athletic conditioning. The motorcycle has the potential to be seen in similar ways, capable of communicating messages while being involved in the capacity to foster mental capacity and awareness. From this perspective, the motorcycle makes banal tasks such as the daily commute or the ubiquitous errand more meaningful. This meaning is quotidian, but it is also a life-sustaining act of presence that communicates identity. Aside from transportation, what does it mean to ride motorcycles? Simondon notes that individuals have become technical beings conditioned within an era that the “technical object creates around itself and that conditions it” (59). The motorcycle is an object that, when combined with a rider, becomes an image of our identity. It reflects how we have moved from where we have been and predicts how we will head to where we are going. The modernist elements of technology continue in the motorcycle in relation to themes of competition and war, but after each conflict and contest, motorcycle culture shifts. These turns produce divergent perspectives as a motorcycling ethos continues to resist its own significations and configurations within a larger network of societal mythos. By 1896 bicycling represents one of the largest industries as three hundred companies in the United States alone produce more than a million bicycles. The first motorized two-wheelers emerge from the construction of bicycles, and slowly this industrial infrastructure shifts toward motorcycle production. This transition is evident in many ways, such as early bicycle head badges that later establish the aesthetic logos for motorcycle brands like

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Harley-Davidson and Indian (Herlihy 5). These aesthetic markers can also be seen in automobile manufactures that often draw from similar imagery such as the horse. Bicyclists ride in public spaces as a form of transportation, and their initial presence is negotiated by carts, horses, pedestrians, and the budding developments of motorcycles. All use the same roads, paths, and trails. The Good Roads Movement arises as bicyclists demand the development of dirt, cobblestone, and then paved roads. This movement results, years later, in the U.S. national network of highways. At times such networks connect locales, and at others they intersect neighborhoods and divide local cultural community spaces in favor for large thoroughfares. This dividing of places is done largely in service of automobility. Today motorcyclists argue for laws and infrastructure that protect their presence, while bicyclists demand spaces on the road to exist. While the bicycle is deemed a slower human-powered form of transportation, the motorcycle is in competition with and, at times, surpasses the speed and acceleration of the automobile. It provides essentially a motorized version of bicycle mobility making its presence and performance on daily roads unparalleled and exceptional. It is not until the 1970s that the off-road motorcycle or dirt bike and bicycle or mountain bike are developed specifically for off-road terrain. Just as motorcycle construction and repair, fueling stations, and workshops pave the way for the development of automobiles, the techniques used to assemble bicycles are adapted to motorcycle production. The reality and experience of swift mechanical movement under one’s own power initiated by the bicycle object develop into their motorized version in the motorcycle. Perhaps the iron horse of the motorcycle is the more apt realization of the horse alternative, as like the horse, it does not require human power. It only requires the harnessing and control of actual and metaphorical horsepower. For these reasons, the motorcycle is typically not viewed as a form of exercise; however, it is remarkably physically and mentally taxing to operate. The space in the middle of the diamond frame of what becomes the standardized safety bicycle design is an ideal place for an engine or motor. This is the central location of the bicycle and motorcycle, existing directly underneath the rider. The crank, chain, and pedals that are propelled by the legs and feet of the rider predominantly occur in this location and they are replaced by the new source of power. This space is pre-established by the bicycle design, but as the necessity to move the legs through this area are removed, the motorcycle engine is increasingly designed to fit this space. The torso, seat, and legs of the body can now relax as other motor functions become primary and a rider shifts from bicycle to motorcycle riding. The iconic V-twin of Harley-Davidson, the in-line four cylinder of Honda and other sportbikes, and the recognizable horizontal twin of BMW

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motorcycles develop after years of working within the parameters of this space within the bicycle diamond frame. It conveniently sits right below the rider between the two rotating wheels acting as an ideal balancing point for the weight of the rider and object. It references the natural girth of the horsemounted rider and the horse. The remainder of the cycle is outfitted to sustain motorized travel. Auxiliary parts such as forks, rims, and tires are adjusted considerably in relation to a typical safety bicycle, but only slightly in general design aspects. Some of the very first motorized versions of bicycles consist of an internal combustion engine added to a bicycle frame, a belt drive, and a handlebar throttle. Power was applied by twisting the grip one way and the braking occurred by twisting the throttle the other way. This early motorcycle constructed in Europe, resembled the steam version in the United States twenty years earlier. As combustion engines and manufacturing technology quickly developed, these central features of reinforced-steel diamond-shaped frame, belt drive train, and twisting handlebar throttle became almost standard designs. The first production motorcycle featured a two-cylinder horizontal design; yet the relative ease of attaching a motor and the popularity of both riding and producing them enabled motorcycle construction to grow exponentially (Pagé 19–23). As in the early designs of bicycles, motorcycle construction consisted of various versions of a similar system. There are many early examples that play with the arrangements of wheels, frame, and engine. At times placing the engine in the rear or toward the front along with various configurations of wheels, braking mechanisms, seating arrangements, and rider ergonomics. For example, English bicycle maker Royal Enfield introduced its first motorcycle in 1901 with a 239 CC engine mounted up front. Others produced motorcycles with the engine fastened to the rear. Excelsior Motor Company in Warwickshire, England, in 1896 began production of their first motorcycle, and two years later the first production motorcycle in the United States was built by Charles Mats in Massachusetts. All these designs developed based on our understandings and creations of the previous forms of mobility discussed in this text, the horse and bicycle. Triumph introduced their first motorcycles in 1902 to compete with Royal Enfield, and in the same year George M. Handy started the Indian Company with a single 1.75 horsepower machine. All these devices contained pedals reflecting the shared lineage of bicycling and motorcycling. Indian was one of the first to remove them. This changed the ergonomics of the riding position substantially as the pedaling bicyclist became a more reclined, elongated, or leaned motorcyclist. Because the seat could be dropped, the sitting position became more comfortable and aerodynamic, which effectively increased power and speed in the process. As an automobile, the motorcycle is more like a bicycle, yet as a bicycle, the motorcycle is more like an

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automobile. Its assurance and power put it clearly in one category, and its maneuverability and use place it distinctly in another. Just as the bicycle and motorcycle objects developed alongside one another, so did their use on the road and track, for economic function, and for athletic competition. With the transition from bicycle competition to motorcycle races there is a movement from human-powered athletic competition to motorsports. What is competing is not only human strength and endurance but also motorcycle manufacturing and industry tethered to the economies of nations. This becomes a hallmark of motorsports, remaining highly attached to economic investment, technological development, conflict, and public use. Tuan notes that ways of dividing space vary greatly in intricate and sophisticated forms as do ways of measuring and judging them. Referencing the sophistic dictum of Protagoras, as humans as measure, he notes that the fundamental principles of spatial organization can be found in the body, an object in space (34). Motorcycle competition entails a human-machine athlete, a technological exemplar of excellence, which includes the most reliable and efficient collective industrial processes as well as individual human physicality and mental acuity. Some of the earliest motorcycle races are on bicycle tracks, as motorcycles have already been used to set the pace in bicycle races. As the motorcycle object is created, it is instantly out of place on the road and on the track. On the track, barely adjusted from bicycle racing, the motorcycle’s potential is hindered. On the road, they often followed rough dirt horse and carriage trails making accidents often as their pace, like that of the motorcycle on the bicycle track, is too fast for the road itself. The repurposed bicycle tracks were too small, containing inadequate straightaways and overly tight turns along with ruts and holes for almost suspension-less motorcycles. Some races occurred against bicycles just as early bicycle races at times occurred against horses as competition between modes of mobility continued. Racing, for both vehicles throughout their history directs development in particular ways. This continues today as motorcycles focused on lightweight and relatively highpower output are successful, both on the track and in sales. In the United States, William Harley and Arthur Davidson, after initially resisting racing due to safety concerns, entered competition, mainly with Indian Motorcycles. The sport of board-track racing then dominated by Indian  was soon challenged by Harley-Davidson. They started an official racing department and soon became equally as successful due to the performances of racers such as Ralph Hepburn, “Shrimp” Burns, Walker Leslie, Joe Walters, and Ray Wise. In the process, they popularized the HarleyDavidson nickname “hog,” in reference to the team’s mascot, a small pig, which they often carried around on victory laps. Racing was and still is a way for the public to witness the motorcycle’s durability and reliability.

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Harley-Davidson introduced a 405 CC engine fixed to a loop frame. To this day, they are the only U.S. company to continually produce motorcycles. It placed fourth in a 1904 race in Milwaukee, which utilized a repurposed horse-racing oval. This marked the beginnings of flat-track racing in the United States, one of the few motorcycling events to originate in the United States. In Brooklyn, a concrete racetrack opened in 1907 creating a bumpy and dangerous ride. A few years later, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is constructed consisting of packed soil covered by wood. Motorcycle track racing became a popular spectator sport for the same reasons that bicycle racing was—mainly because the events centered around the new and quickly developing inventions of the bicycle and motorcycle. This raised the thrill and intensity of bicycle racing, which at one point had over thirty tracks around the country, including Madison Square Garden in New York that held thousands of people (Kranish 183). The sport enabled spectators to be close to the action and centered around raw mechanical speed, human strength and endurance, and the ability to operate technical objects. In the United States, the construction of these raceways or motor domes was often dangerous. There were frequent crashes that at times involved spectators. The motorcycles used for track racing were fast and light, reaching ninety miles per hour on a wooden track with only seven horsepower. Motorcycles were modified for track racing by lowering them, adding chains on the back wheel for more traction, and increasing speed by reducing weight. Removing brakes made the sport decidedly dangerous, and in 1912 between four and six spectators were killed along with Eddie Hasha and another rider in Newark, New Jersey, which led to the moniker of murder domes. These early motorcycle track races and motorcycles are the precursors to contemporary supersport motorcycles and Moto GP (Grand Prix Motorcycle Racing) track racing. The development of these motorcycles for speed and maneuverability continues the trend of increasing engine power, reducing weight, and harnessing stopping ability in the name of speed and control. The supersport motorcycles that are sold today are capable of well over 150 miles an hour and are direct results of this history. In 1909 the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy was first held. It continues to be the most famous and notorious motorcycle road race. Unlike track racing, the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy takes places on everyday roads and uses motorcycles of the highest caliber. Accidents and deaths by riders and spectators alike occur almost every year the race is held. The race initially moved to the island to elude laws that outlawed motorcycle racing on roads in mainland Britain. The race has become the cultural center of British and global motorcycle racing.

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To this day, the track is held on a thirty-seven-mile circuit of everyday roads and features the latest race technology that eventually finds its way back into commercial motorcycles. Many assume that riding Moto GP race motorcycles on tracks, reaching the highest speeds possible, is extremely dangerous, and while it is, everyday riding in traffic and on public roads on similar technology is potentially more dangerous due to the design of everyday roads. When the two are combined as they are in the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy, the risks rise exponentially. The track covers a variety of terrains, pavements, hills, flats, and mountains that moves across the countryside and through towns. Riders generally race against the clock but must maneuver, at times, around slower riders and negotiate everyday spaces, much like bicycle road racers in grand tours. Drain covers, stone walls, gutters, curbs, and hedges line the track. These elements and the scenery shift constantly while riders contend with the pace set by others. Over the years the roads have stayed relatively the same, though the motorcycles have changed significantly. Races have always been a testing ground for companies to prove their motorcycles were reliable and fast. In the 1930s, motorcycles regularly reached one hundred miles per hour, and today they reach 180 miles per hour on similar roads. Riders have increased training and skill while maintaining a level of toughness and concentration. Suspension braking, power steering, and horsepower have developed from the early era of little braking power, uncomfortable saddles, no suspension, and push starts. In the early days of racing, the push start entailed pushing the motorcycle while holding the clutch. Once on the saddle, the rider let the clutch out to start the engine. A skilled maneuver, like the start of bobsledding, teams would often know how many steps to take before jumping onto the motorcycle. Today a push start or a kick start is still often employed. On many dirt bikes a kick start is desirable as mechanical simplicity, achieved by forgoing the electric starter, often results in reliability while reducing clutter and weight on motorcycles. Like the bicycle, the motorcycle remains a cutting-edge technological tool as well as a reference to a previous era of technology. The motorcycle object remains closely associated with symbolic and material forms of competition. Competing in races for sponsorship leads to sales and pushes the technology of the object. Supersport motorcycles are made lighter and with more power and control, and motorcycles on the street reflect these track-based developments. Meanwhile, local motorcycle culture establishes demand, which directs production efforts in certain track-related directions. Naked sportsbikes that resemble café racers are growing in popularity as well as road dirt bikes or motards because of consumer interests. Many of these growing markets and the objects they center around are based on previous motorcycle technologies. The technological and capitalist aspects of competition are surpassed perhaps only by the effect of state-sanctioned

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conflict and war. Global conflict has a major impact on many levels of industrial development and civilian culture postwar; the motorcycle is one example. Technological advancement of motorcycles based on achievements in racing are part of the history of motorcycles, and these elements are furthered through contexts of war, which I discuss in the next section. The Motorcycle and War When war breaks out in 1914, many motorcycle companies shift from racing and commercial to military production. Competition for athletic achievement that resulted in economic and commercial success is then geared toward national and political conflict. From its earliest stages there are numerous instances and connections between competition and war in motorcycle production and culture. References and reminders of competition and conflict are seen in technological progress as well as the receptions and societal roles the motorcycle plays post conflict. In the early 1900s notions of modernity are also being defined partly by a series of political artistic avant-garde groups. These groups created radical and experimental forms of aesthetic and social statements that both questioned and established the directions of these ideals. Futurism is one of the first groups considered in a series of avant-garde movements that continue afterward, from Surrealism to Situationism. The Futurists celebrated speed, technology, machinery, and war, and in this constellation is the motorcycle. The creative expressions and rhetoric of the group exhibited a violent romanticism. While they seemed to endorse domination and fascism, they also produced works of art and manifestos that recognized the destructive aspects of modernization. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti outlined most of the main tenets of Futurism. He first published “Le Futurisme” in the French publication Le Figaro in 1909, which was later translated to the “Manifesto of Futurism.” The Futurist Manifesto is a declaration of all things futuristic, powerful, and rapid. It denied the past and was in distinction to the dominant manifesto of the time, The Communist Manifesto. By combining the power of the political manifesto with the creativity of artistic and poetic expression, the manifesto established the avant-garde issuing a new era of art and politics. The manifesto itself afterward becomes a defining aspect of the movement, which fused social, cultural, and political critique with artistic, performative, and creative expressions geared toward bringing about social change through discourse. Puchner states that the avant-garde, with this document, extends from politics to art through its primary art form, the manifesto itself. He notes that in the manifesto, the avant-garde had “the proper instrument to articulate its state of being advanced, its break with the past and affinity to the future, and only

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then did it speak succinctly and aggressively with a single collective voice” (Puchner 78). Around the same time the bicycle and motorcycle became widely used, the group embraced their speed, violence, and mechanization as a symbolic means of expression. In his Futurist Manifesto, Marrinetti described the initial Futurist moment as a personal story involving an automobile accident. In it, he rushes outside, gets in an automobile, and speeds down the road. Suddenly he swerves to avoid two bicyclists and upon crashing into a ditch subsequently reflects upon the beauty, pain, and risk of modern industrial carnage. This becomes the impetus for his thesis, that the violence involved in mechanical processes can produce beauty. As this march toward speed and industrialization occurs, its attendant forms of devastation and chaos can be cleansing, beautiful, and aesthetically informative. The engine, its noise, and its pollution were exhalated in this anecdote as “a roaring motor car, which seems to race on like machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace” (Marinetti 5). The opening to its founding manifesto states that in these mechanized combustions you will witness more beauty than contained in traditional notions of classic art and literature. Italian Futurism exalts the “dynamism of machines and the hygiene of violence,” acknowledging the “motorcycle’s place within a trajectory of vanguard art” while marking its potential for rupture (Packer and Coffey 649). The motorcycle at the time of Futurist writing was the future of society, and their writing celebrated its loud potentially dangerous aspects. For the group, it represented the artistic forms imbued in the daily objects of industrial production. Because of this, they celebrated its ability to exist primarily outside of museums and libraries, which Marinetti framed as “cemeteries” of dead ideas (Marinetti 6). Ironically much of their art, and the motorcycle object itself, would find their way into museums and galleries and be viewed as symbolic works of artistic expression. Futurist works such as Giacomo Balla’s 1913 “Forme Rumore di Motocicletta” or “forms of motorcycle” interprets the speed and sound of a motorcycle; Fortunato Depero’s 1914 “Futurist Motorcycle” resembles a modern rendering of a stylized motorcycle and rider merging as one human-machine; and Mario Sironi’s 1918, “Uomo Nuvo” or “new man,” depicts a cubist rendition of a human on a speeding motorcycle. These examples of motorcycle art are more than subject matter. They are a fusing of the rhetoric contained in the movement of the motorcycle, a comment on the ways in which society is changing, and the destruction involved in the process. The destructive and potentially damaging aspects of industrialized processes which are at the center of the motorcycle object are embraced by the group as inspiration. More recently the motorcycle object has been celebrated and reelevated to the status of art object in museums and galleries. The 2008

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Guggenheim exhibition, based solely on the development of the motorcycle throughout its history, is the most successful in the gallery’s history (Packer and Coffey 642). Similarly, today whenever we see a motorcycle represented in art and text, we are encountering a segment of social values that are supported or challenged through the mobility it offers. The chaotic sound of the motorcycle resonated with Futurist concepts and their visions of art and politics. Early avant-garde groups often saw no difference between the two. The loud impactful sounds of the motorcycle are still beloved and sought after today with after-market exhaust systems that heighten stock sounds of assembly-line motorcycles. The group drew from these new sounds to produce guttural sound poetry that is symbolic of the meaning associated with industrialization. Many of these aspects are carried over into Dadaism, Surrealism, and future avant-garde group formations. Conceived to break through the linguistic barriers of discursive meaning, this tactic emphasized both the power and the limits of language; this has rhetorical and semantic implications as words are examined for their impact as well as their ascribed meaning. Surrealist poetry that reads “Zang, Tumb, Tumb” is intended to capture the impactful force of language, cutting through symbolic structures and the logos of words. The movement of the motorcycle is intertwined with its sound. As it moves, unlike the relatively silent bicycle, the motorcycle declares its presence, exemplifying this guttural impact. We might look at jazz scatting by Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, and others as well as hip-hop ad libs and vocalizations by Notorious B.I.G., Juvenile, and others as artistic examples of similar artistic paralinguistics. Marinetti exclaimed in The Futurist Manifesto that “poetry must be violent,” and in a desire to “glorify war” he writes that militarism is “the only cure for the world” (Marinetti 5). Technology, destruction, and speed are hallmarks of modernist industrialization, and these exclamations rendered in political art forms are an apt portrayal of a world being conquered by the destructive aspects of modernization along with the lofty rhetoric of modernity. Marinetti writes that the Futurist world consisted of “great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of airplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds” (7). The group embraced the destructive, oppressive, and violent aspects of modernity in physical and conceptual forms. As colonialism, imperialism, and intense economic competition materialize modernist ideals, many experience the pain, but few acknowledged these aspects. Many modernist texts frame vicious hierarchies between cultures, sex, and nationality but often do so in a veil of objectivity. In this search for legitimization, such narratives often upheld notions of superiority as natural. While colonial and imperial expansion destroyed and obliterated people and land, they often did so in the guise of

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religious salvation and civilizing endeavors rather than exhibiting an awareness of the destruction of modernization. The Futurists,  on the other hand, acknowledged the “beautiful ideas that kill” rather than disguising them as natural or liberatory. The world they saw developing catered to luxuries and passivity, and they problematically attacked gender, encouraging men to embrace danger and seemingly emphasizing a “contempt for women” and “all utilitarian cowardice.” Because passivity was associated with femininity—a construct of patriarchy—they condemned women along with many others. The group also produced a Manifesto of Futurist Women (1912) by Valentine de Saint-Point. In her Futurist manifesto she states that “no revolution will be without her” but at the same time “no to feminism,” complicating the group’s message. This also has sematic implications as notions of identity, labels, and group affinity are complicated by Futurist rhetoric. The group produced numerous manifestos, poetry, performances, and artworks that often came into conflict with one another (Saint-Point 30). Was this discursive contempt for women based on the actuality of marginalization or a more symbolic contempt for what the label “women” had come to connote within a patriarchal setting? And if society was going to move forward swiftly in particular directions as modernity sought, were the wants of the overall population ever an actual concern? The Futurists, partially through the perspective of the motorcycle, raised these concerns. The motorcycle moves faster than conceived public space or even a specifically designed track allows. It represents a moment of potential rupture within modernist thinking and is for the group an apt metaphor for competition and war. Today a motorcyclist, particularly in the United States, whether male, female, or intersex, is symbolized as masculine, hurling forward along paths that dominate nature and destroy wildlife. In the demilitarized zone of the road, we move quickly toward our destinations in the name of modernist progress; nevertheless, in the seams of this automobile-centric space is a beautiful art form, a mobile poetic forged out of destructive processes. As technological progress and industrialization lead to expansion and national conflict, most if not all forms of mobility become implicated in war, and just as the Futurists celebrated destruction and technological advancement, their ideas came to reality in the first world war. The bicycle, already used in major conflicts, and the motorcycle, harnessed on both sides, become products influenced heavily by their use in war. The motorcycle also becomes signified heavily according to its postwar associations. Military patch riders on motorcycles carry messages and perform reconnaissance, replacing previous messengers on horses and bicycles. Considered by many to be the first modern motorcycle, the Triumph Type H was manufactured for military dispatch riders serving purposes of communication

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in 1915. This motorcycle featured a 550 CC side valve four-stroke engine with a three-speed gearbox and full transmission. Many soldiers saw and used their first motorcycle on this vehicle during the war. Harley-Davidson Motorcycles were first used for military purposes by the United States in the Pancho Villa expedition, in retaliation for Villa’s attack on Columbus, Texas, during the Mexican Revolution. General John Pershing unsuccessfully used the motorcycle to pursue Villa, known for his horse-mounted prowess, out of the United States and through northern Mexico during U.S. involvement in the Mexican Revolution. Ultimately, Villa and his horse-mounted ability to avoid well-equipped military forces featuring the motorcycle is successful. Shortly after, Harley-Davidson produced the J-Series motorcycle with three speeds, a hand shift transmission, and fifteen horsepower. The company made thousands of this motorcycle for the war and provided training schools and mechanics for the military, which still exist today. The production efforts continued during World War II, becoming more prominent in everyday life after each conflict. During the first world war, BMW made aircraft engines and afterward switched to making motorcycle motors. They produced their first motorcycle, the BMW R 32 in 1923. The Futurist Manifesto had a lasting impact on the avant-garde tradition that entailed experimental attitudes toward society and aesthetics. Afterward, avant-garde groups emphasized a more peaceful attitude toward the societal realities of war, imperialism, and the daily oppressions of capitalist systems. Dadaism, for example, rejected the rationality and technological domination of nature that modern industrial and capitalist society brought about in the first world war. This international avant-garde was comprised by an international cast of artistic exiles congregated in neutral Zurich, Switzerland. The exclamatory and creative uses of sound are maintained from the Futurists and continued in the Surrealists, Letterist International, Situationist International, Fluxus, and Stridentist movements, to name a few. The motorcycle, like many forms of technology, is linked with industrial production efforts and economic mobilizations of nations for war efforts, finding strength in World War I and extending through World War II, the Vietnam War, and into current global conflicts. Throughout history, the horse and its mobility become synonymous with societal conflict, national expansion, and revolution, including the operations of Alexander the Great, Marco Polo, Pizzaro and the Spanish conquistadors, the north and south armies of the Mexican Revolution, and Genghis Khan’s Mongol empire, to name a few examples. The bicycle and the motorcycle were first used in U.S. imperial expansion and conflicts to conquer the western region of North America. The bicycle was used by descendants of slaves and marginalized African Americans to combat Indigenous people in the “American-Indian Wars.”

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After each conflict—particularly World Wars I and II and the Vietnam War— returning soldiers took up motorcycling. The motorcycle and war become inextricably linked. During the First World War, Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence, an archeologist and writer for the British army, participated in military campaigns against the Ottoman Empire. His writings concerning his wartime experiences and interpretations of Arab culture notably the Seven Pillars of Wisdom became sensationalized in the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia. His quirkiness in relation to British sensibility and his prowess on the horse are exaggerated in the film. In the film, he represents a colonial other or an appropriation of otherness in the heart of the British army, a lasting example of Orientalist discourse. The fact that T. E. Lawrence’s own life is a lived example of Orientalism is only emblematic of its strength to depict entire regions and cultures in ways that promote ethnocentric and colonial discourse (Said 12). Upon returning from war, he became well known as an avid motorcyclist particularly associated with owning and riding many models of the Brough Superior motorcycle. For soldiers returning to civilian life, especially for those such as Lawrence who forged a larger-than-life symbolic identity associated with risk, cultural transgression, and mobility, the motorcycle provided similar forms of escape. The Brough Superior was the pinnacle of motorcycle machinery at the time. Its design lines are generally recognized as just as aesthetically pleasing today as they were then. The SS100 harnessed technological capabilities previously unknown and utilized often only for war. It was a modern-day example of a superbike with a 1000 CC engine and fifty horsepower capable of reaching one hundred miles an hour. While it cost substantially more than most could afford, in 1925 this experience was unknown and situated within an everyday context not yet ready for its ability. The motorcycle once again was informing of what was to come after. Roads, safety gear, regulations, and other elements of society were not prepared for this type of rapidity. In 1935 while riding without a helmet, as almost everybody did at the time, Lawrence crashed to avoid two boys on bicycles. This moment reminds us of Marinetti’s Futurist tale, ending in destruction and in this case progress, for motorcycle safety. His death, due to head injuries, prompted the doctor who attended to him to research crash helmets and later led to their fabrication, widespread use, and helmet law policies. The period between world wars saw an increasing advancement in riders, productions, and racing. Each can be traced in some respect to war. As the production of motorcycles for war purposes enabled large companies to develop technology and harness national contracts, racing resumed with increased performance. The mechanics, education, tools, and cultures that are established during the first world war around the motorcycle are also

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reinscribed in everyday life and competition. Reliability remained the hallmark of success and the defining obstacle of the motorcycle object. The rigorous Isle of Man TT races resumed on the rough everyday roads as a proving ground for motorcycle development. For the period between world wars as well as immediately after World War II, the Norton was the most dominant on the track. The Norton motorcycle company was founded originally in 1898 by James Norton, who produced motorcycles for the war and introduced three models during the interwar period. The company began racing in the Isle of Man TT and won ten times between 1920 and 1939 as well as six consecutive times after 1947. Again, due to war, many now familiar companies, such as Norton in 1939, withdrew from international racing but increased motorcycle production to prepare for war. Around the same time, the German government and the Nazi party took control of German motorsports and invested heavily in racing technology, increasing the performance of BMW motorcycling. A source of pride, the German culture of motorcycling invention and progression was connected to national politics and war. BMW enters the Isle of Man TT and wins in 1939, the last event before the war cancels competition between 1940 and 1946. George Mayer, riding a BMW shaft drive, surpassed Norton’s belt drive vehicle to win the race; the German team competed in attire similar to the Nazi uniform. Early motorcycle racing gear and clothes in general were refurbished military uniforms. The connections between conflict and national power are marked through the technical object of the motorcycle, the symbol of its rider, and the economic and political structure behind the racing efforts. As World War II begins, Britain dominates racing and motorcycle culture, visible in the use of the motorcycle during the second World War. Throughout the conflict, Britain used 400,000 motorcycles, more than any other country. The link between successful motorcycle production, international competitions such the Isle of Man TT, sales, and national conflict is evident. Along with Triumph and Norton from England, Harley-Davidson and Indian from the United States produced almost as many. Afterward both countries were exposed to motorcycles in increasing ways. The clothing and the machines that had been made for the army will have a lasting impact on how the public views and uses motorcycles. After each conflict, the motorcycle industry and culture change as soldiers become citizens, form army clubs, and the military contracts production lines for markets. Just as the horse was used for societal spread throughout Eurasia along the Silk Road, Middle East, Persia, and across the Gobi Desert and the bicycle is used in colonial projects of expansion across Australia and the North American West, global conflicts and technological forms of mobility utilized in war expose many to the motorcycle. Clubs began to be formed to keep loyal customers, and through the excitement offered by the motorcycle, veterans of war and others found a swiftly

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moving space in which to turn their own nationalist pride into countercultural angst. The motorcycle spread to multiple facets of U.S. and worldwide public life due to global conflict. Many military members were exposed to motorcycles during service, and upon returning to civilian life, the motorcycle represented an alternative to armed conflict. Situated within everyday life, veterans experienced a sense of escape and a coping intensity in the motorcycle. They were also reliable and functional forms of mobility within civilian life that in some places, such as Japan, were devastated by war. Soon after, secondhand motorcycles used in combat reached the public, and as military motorcycles were converted back to civilian, they were repainted from khaki and green to black and outfitted with street-legal modifications. There was a proliferation of motorcycles from the 1920s and 1930s as the secondhand market grew, becoming more available during the 1940s. In World Wars I and II, soldiers learned to ride and maintain the motorcycle, and afterward these populations expanded the numbers and knowledge base of civilian motorcyclists. From these populations various motorcycling cultures formed, pushing motorcycle development in certain directions. For example, British youth stripped down these old heavy military motorcycles, making them lighter and faster. The number of motorcycles available post conflict made them more affordable and therefore accessible. The ability to ride, maintain, and modify them came to define the culture. One could with relatively little money invest in a used motorcycle, modify it, and sell it for a greater cost, increasing capital. These motorcyclists produced a faster machine to increase social capital by racing them between locations, often cafés. The motorcyclists and the motorcycles they rode and partially produced became known as café racers. This style is resurging in popularity as most major motorcycle manufacturers now offer a café racer inspired stock option, including Royal Enfield’s Continental GT 650, Ducati’s Scrambler Café Racer, Honda’s CB1000R Neo Sports Cafe, and Kawasaki’s Z900RS Cafe. This style of motorcycle like others such as choppers, referred to initially because of the chopping, cutting, or removing of parts, began as a culture of motorcycle customization. These group formations, style of riding, and the motorcycles they produce are now part of mainstream motorcycle culture and production. The motorcycle serves the purpose of war, competition, and consumer capitalism, but it is also used in ways that resist these structures, such as customization, street racing, and countercultural group formations. Motorcycle cultures such as café racers use the motorcycle to create an object-body identity based on mobility and relationships with technical objects. The riders, largely white middle-class citizens, if they could afford one, wore the Schott Perfecto leather jacket, a replica of a military German jacket. In motorcycle culture they often are also customized with

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personalized insignia and patches, which reflect the individuality and affiliation of the rider. This type of customization parallels the status and rank of the soldier in military service. The motorcycling image from daily rider to hyperbolic portrayal as motorcycle club or gang member is often funneled through conflict, war, and countercultural group formations. It also returns in functionality, just as military fatigues became a countercultural and urban choice for style, they were also widely available and affordable. The Schott Perfecto was first made by Irving Schott in 1928 and has been embraced as a symbol of not only the motorcyclist but the character of an image applied to them. In many cases a functional Schott Perfecto evokes a motorcycling ethos separated from its functionality, an image of a copy (Baudrillard 7). As Baudrillard notes a simulacrum is “a simulation on the horizon of the social, or rather on whose horizon the social has already disappeared” (20). The motorcycle’s use in war and its mechanized violence add to an image that becomes its own territory. Mass mediated images present a shadow of the real, according to Baudrillard, that no one can fully represent as the reality of the image has its own purely symbolic truth value. In his study of the first Gulf War, Baudrillard concludes before the war is over that it will be won or lost on television and the outcome will be insignificant to our ability to gauge if a “war” ever occurred (War 18–20). Army uniforms remain popular motorcycling clothing options due to these early contexts in which conflict, industry, and culture become aligned. The leather motorcycle jacket is a ubiquitous part of a motorcycling identity and mainstream fashion references these connections between modernization and war. The image of the leather clad motorcyclist is comprised as a mixture of militaristic, countercultural, and functional themes. Reliability in the motorcycle machine was a defining factor for many manufacturers, racers, and consumers, which continued in postwar contexts and ultimately signaled the end of most European and U.S. companies due to the dependability of Japanese manufactures in the wake of World War II. As motorcycles and motorcycling manufacturing centers shift after the war, so do the receptions of its riders as its image takes on a life of its own, which I will discuss in the next chapter. CONCLUSION In the early 1900s before roads, safety equipment, and social convention could contemplate its ability, the motorcycle could go over one hundred miles an hour. By the mid-century. youth in London with little money were achieving the “ton” or one hundred miles per hour, racing between cafés. Speed, motion, progress, and rapidity are the hallmarks of modernity, but the motorcycle achieves these elements to such a degree that we quickly become

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aware of the dangerous realities of these values. The Futurists harnessed this element of the motorcycle and propelled modernity forward in particular ways. Maneuverability, rapidity, explosiveness, and rupture are outcomes of modernization, but they come at a cost, and the motorcycle makes this apparent. The power to halt progress is not present in these values, and stopping power is still an elusive aspect of motorcycling technology. Only recently have Moto GP and their street-version superbikes, utilizing antilock brakes and electronic systems, been able to produce the stopping power necessary to attempt to control the speeds that are possible. When progress ruptures, splinters, and ends, so does movement, as thinking is confined to the rhythms of physical flows. The ways in which the motorcycle moves have been harnessed for various ends, celebrated, demonized, and displaced throughout history. The motorcycle represents a moment, a way of thinking about the future that is cognizant of both its structural conditions as well as our ability to transgress these limitations. The weight reduction, increased power, and electronic balancing of motorcycle mechanics is making it presumably safer to increase speed to around two hundred miles per hour. Nevertheless, the reality of the environments we move through might never be ready for such rapidity. Physically and mentally this type of practice is outside of our conceptions of ourselves and our worlds. In this regard, the motorcycle presents a version of modernity within its own construction that is unsustainable like many of its attributes such as environmental domination, sexual subjugation, colonial expansion, and racial exclusion to name a few. Numerous cultural forms surround the motorcycle including stunt, drag, cruising, custom, and café, which all turn mobility into an aesthetic writing. Ride-outs, sustained wheelies, and freestyle dirt biking are motorcycle cultures and practices within motorcycling that have as much to do with street skateboarding and BMX biking as they do mainstream motorcycle culture. The history of the motorcycle, like the history of street skateboarding and surfing, at a certain point becomes inseparable as the developments of motorcycling and bicycling occur simultaneously. Just as riding waves at sea becomes surfing on land or skateboarding by adding wheels and trucks to a board, bicycling becomes motorcycling by adding an engine to the familiar bicycle design, discussed in the previous chapter. In the early years of motorcycling, pedals are used to propel them initially, effectively existing as a bicycle when the engine is not running. Motorcycles are often classified generally as two-stroke and four-stroke cycles under 1800 CCs, although the U.S. market is exceeding this mark with the ever-increasing desire to move long, powerful motorcycles down wide, straight highways. They usually entail spark ignition engines, although this too is changing drastically, albeit slowly, with electronic models, mounted on a frame derivative of bicycles

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and cooled through air. The smallest of motorcycles, mopeds, referring to a motor and pedal, still reflect the developmental transition from bicycles to motorcycles. They move at a slower more accessible speed and achieve unparalleled gas mileage, at times around one hundred miles per gallon. With little experience and minimal dexterity, one can harness the technology of the bicycle for more horse, stopping, and steering power than anything else on or off road. As one rides on the streets and highways with automobiles, the loud pipes of motorcycles declare a presence that surpasses the use of the horn or headlights. In this auditory presence, the motorcycle can be heard almost as fast as it has passed physically. Durational races such as the Baja 500, group and individual long-distance rides, intense track days, and the pinnacle of motorcycle performance, the Isle of Man TT and other Moto GP events, all share the common thread of a motorcycling mobility and add to the rhetoric involved in motorcycling. The character of the motorcycle endures as the sensation of the practice itself is fleeting. Riding a motorcycle is a loud—outside of electric motorcycles— intense, and physically demanding practice that requires strength, effort, and concentration. The mental awareness required for operating a motorcycle at even moderate speeds through varied social and physical environments is tiring. The feeling is experienced long after a ride and often longed for, once off the motorcycle, but necessary for recovery and recuperation from the riding experience. The horse metaphor, bicycle idea, and finally the motorcycle image represent indelible parts of our physical and symbolic history, stretching back thousands of years; however, the motorcycle like the automobile is a more recent development. The creation of motorcycles initially takes place in bicycle shops, having already established major developments in riding ergonomics, mechanical construction, and spaces, as workshops turn into garages. Just as the bicycle makes humans the most efficiently roaming animal on the planet, the adding of a motor increases power and speed to become the most accessible form of motorized transportation (Pagé 17). Like the bicycle, the motorcycle allows for countless humans around the globe to move efficiently throughout the social and material spaces of contemporary and historical environments. This movement offers riders an unparalleled experience and achievement in individual speed, maneuverability, and intensity. The motorcycle is a modernizing force all its own, a territorializing technical object that brings with its rider a global history of technological development, which becomes implicated in the values of competition and war. The use of tools and the technologizing of the war machine permeate the everyday spaces of global societies in which the motorcycle is firmly entrenched. The horse exists as a metaphor and the bicycle a concrete reminder of where we have been and to where we might possibly return. The motorcycle arises as a

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moment of transgression and is continually depicted as a material representation of future worlds. In this regard, I associate the motorcycle with transgression and postmodernity. In the motorcycle there is a concept of a reality, a notion of human potential that moves so quickly it can hardly be grasped. In the next chapter, I note how it is used to compose an image.

Chapter 6

Motorcycle Image

The motorcycle must move quicker than the bicycle to navigate through traffic and maintain a higher speed to remain upright. In competition with larger vehicles for the same road space, it must go even faster to survive. What it lacks in protection and visibility it makes up for in agility, acceleration, and stopping power. Like the bicycle, it is not only a marvel of efficient design but also an economic and accessible form of mobility. Because of this, it is a remarkable opportunity for many to experience a sensation and level of mobility they might not otherwise, whether due to physical and economic limitations or access to power in other spheres of society. For those in need of spatial maneuverability, raw speed, social competition, societal escape, renewed intensity, or mental projections of future worlds, the motorcycle serves a transgressive purpose. This becomes evident in the ways in which the motorcycle is discussed and portrayed, which reflects its use during war and its receptions in postwar contexts. I argue that the motorcycle represents a moment of reflexivity present within the early formations of modernity. Its continued connections to war and its use in postwar countercultures add to its symbolic portrayal. These aspects of war, competition, culture, and image add to the development and popularization of the motorcycle that are evident today. Motorcycling comments on the social contexts in which it emerges. Vastly affected by the war, BMW motorcycles becomes one of the longest-lasting companies and moves the industry, along with automobiles, into luxury consumer vehicles. More impactful on the global industry is Japanese motorcycle manufacturing, beginning with the Honda Motorcycle Company and leading to the creation of the big four, including Yamaha, Kawasaki, and Suzuki. The Honda Motorcycle Company comes to dominate motorcycle industry manufacturing, sales, and racing victories, leading to the now vast industry of Japanese Domestic Manufacturing (JDM), a global leader in the motorcycle and automobile market. What started out as a need for efficient affordable motorized 123

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bicycles, mopeds, and small motorcycles turns into a production and scale that far surpasses the need and use of motorcycles in postwar Japan. Ichiro Honda is the first to recognize and react to the need for reliable transportation, converting his company to motorcycle production. The decimated landscape and economy of postwar Japan and the dismantling of a national war machine created the context for Japanese production to change the world in terms of motorcycling and automotive manufacturing. Honda revolutionized reliability, creating a new standard that few could match. In stark contrast to themes of competition and speed that reflected professional racing and café racer culture, as well as war and the outlaw image that permeated motorcycling culture, Honda began by producing small, reliable, and affordable motorcycles. The company entered the U.S. market with a motorcycle that comes to lead sales around the world. The most widely sold motorcycle in history, the Honda Cub most adequately encapsulates the needs of most global users. The efficient machine is used around the world today as a reliable transport in areas that are not adequately constructed for the automobile and for those that cannot afford the automobile or its accompanying costs, including insurance, which tend to be much higher for an automobile. Today the motorcycle exists as the unmatched mode of affordable transportation for the world, and the widest selling machine, the Honda Cub, when first introduced was able to get an incredible two hundred miles per hour. After attending to the needs of the country, the company entered racing, a realm of motorcycling at the time led by European companies, and quickly became a force. The Suzuki Motorcycle Company started out making textile loom machines. and after a cotton crisis in Japan, the company switched to making motorcycles. Their first motorcycle, the Power Free, is an excellent example of both the peacetime need for affordable transit and the transition from the bicycle to the motorcycle. It was essentially a motorized bicycle or moped rather than a motorcycle. If one wanted to, they could ride and pedal it like a bicycle if the engine was turned off or perform a combination of pedaling and motorized mobility. This was achieved by switching a lever on the vehicle. This is reflected today in pedal-assisted electronic bicycles and light electronic motorbikes designed to move at slower, more pedestrian-friendly speeds. Once again, with the motorcycle and the bicycle we are returning to these mechanical moments in their shared history to move the culture and productions of cycles forward. In the process, new collective spaces and ways of inhabiting spaces are created. The three tuning forks of the Yamaha Motorcycle Company logo reflect their past as a large piano company and their design approach of kando or harmony reflects this history. They produced even more stylized motorcycles and continue to propel manufacturing development with futuristic aesthetics,

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which can be seen in the ways they transformed the 1000 CC supersport class with R1 designs in the early 2000s. In the 1960s the company began making dirt bikes, opening motorcycling to more off-road spaces and a burgeoning U.S. market. Honda and Suzuki entered dirt bike production, as motorcycling blazed its own trail, creating new spaces and markets just as the mountain bike did for bicycles. Perhaps the largest contribution of Yamaha is the turn toward the four-stroke engine, which completely transforms motorcycling, making the need to mix oil and gas of two-strokes unnecessary. Their SX 650 Twin in the 1970s opened motorcycling to everyday roads and freed the motorcyclist of the stigma of the messy process while helping improve its acceptability in terms of sound, gasoline use, and environmental concerns. Honda along with Suzuki, Yamaha, and Kawaski go on to control not only the domestic need of its own nation and most others but also the pinnacle of motorcycle technology in Moto GP racing. Their racing motorcycles and street versions in supersport or sportbike motorcycles set the tone for overall motorcycle performance advancement and continue to do so. These motorcycles today are at the cutting edge of motorcycle technical innovation. Motorcycles with 600 and 1000 CC engines, full fairings, and six speeds, can produce around 150 horsepower while weighing less than 500 pounds. Kawasaki’s Ninja is a breakthrough superbike that vastly increased the popularity of the genre. The name Ninja is created by the U.S. marketing team and embraced by the company in Japan. It captured the Japanese spirit in stereotypical discourse for non-Japanese consumers and is an example of intercultural communication centered around the motorcycle object. The Ninja becomes iconic of the sportbike revolution, which is based on previous British café racers and TT racing motorcycles. Along with the Ninja, the GSXR of Suzuki, R1 and R6 of Yamaha, and CBR of Honda starting in 1987 become the standard and are seen in Moto GP motorcycle designs. The components, elements, and styles of these motorcycles are still only being refined today. Naked motorcycles are a fairing-less and slightly altered ergonomic example of this motorcycle and café racers are customized turns toward this genre’s past. This trend returns us to the simple appreciation and aesthetic value of the motorcycle object in its previous forms as the machinery is visible rather than covered by fairings. Nevertheless, the fairings are a component of speed and are necessary elements for maximum performance. In this regard, fairing-less naked motorcycles and the café racing return are mostly aesthetic forms of nostalgia. Some of the major changes to occur on progressive sportbikes on the track are the designs of fairings that entail spoiler-like additions capable of reducing drag and stabilizing the motorcycle at high speeds. Placed along the sides of the motorcycles these are small and often go unnoticed but result in major changes at high speeds.

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In the United States longer and larger style Harley-Davidson, Indian, and British motorcycles such as Triumph were sought after and at times modified and stretched out to produce choppers and bobbers. These motorcycles were intended for comfort, style, and longer-distance travel on straight roads. These customization cultures, predominantly in the United States, pursued an entirely different aesthetic and functional path than the British, European, and Japanese scenes. They also are based on the remixing of manufactured motorcycles in relation to public space, group formations, and social contexts. What these motorcycles gain in comfort and duration, they lose in speed and maneuverability. This development is in stark contrast to the British customization motorcycle culture that emphasized the lighter, stripped down, and shorter wheelbases. These features were intended to produce acceleration and speed while improving cornering ability in tight urban spaces. Once again, space and society dictated the directions of these cultures. Customization cultures around the United States reworked the designs of machines intended for military use and consumer markets to cater to a more open and larger spatial environment. Today, around the world, the global appeal of reworking motorcycles according to the history of conflict, national manufacturing, and distribution centers is constantly evolving, creating some of the most vibrant aspect of motorcycling culture. One of the most iconic motorcycles, specifically regarding U.S. countercultural ethos, is the American Flag chopper rode in the film Easy Rider (1969) by Peter Fonda’s character. The actual custom motorcycle, along with the other chopper featured in the film that was ridden alongside it by Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson, was a product of U.S. motorcycle customization counterculture. The motorcycles, now widely heralded, were created by African American motorcycle builder Ben Hardy in Los Angeles. He along with other Black motorcycle builders in the area used the motorcycle as a consumer product to produce their own group formation and identity, while leaving a lasting imprint on motorcycle and U.S. culture (Dreisbach; Wood). Initially the film producers sought to use a custom motorcycle made by Harley-Davidson, but after being denied by the company, the film used a more authentic creation produced by a local scene of largely disenfranchised motorcyclists and builders. The mainstream attention in the United States of motorcycling as a white biker aesthetic identity, exemplified by films, media, and large rallies such as the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in Sturgis, South Dakota, is disrupted by the popularity of this machine. It is arguably the most iconic motorcycle in U.S. history, featured in countless magazine and museum exhibitions, and it is a product of African American motorcycle culture (Dreisbach; Wood). This fact is rarely noted, which is an example of how African American contribution to U.S. popular culture is more often left unmarked, or Black erasure. It also illustrates how the motorcycle can

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be used and examined to comment on larger societal issues. The motorcycle object is a consumer product designed for competitive and military purposes. As these products are used on roads, urban space, and off-roads, the identity of the rider reflects the motorcycle object, which is constantly in a state of becoming based on the relationships between human, machine, and society. Because the motorcycle can be used in so many differing environments, producers of motorcycles cannot keep pace with the various ways motorcycles are used and modified. The cultures that surround them not only consume but also often actively produce new versions of them. This can be seen in stunt motorcycle culture, which typically consists of turning sportbikes into stunt motorcycles. Consumer motorcycle cultures are vast, varied, and constantly changing based on use. Motorcycles are a product of modernity, indicative of the ways in which industrialized society moves through time with objects. In postmodern contexts they can reveal and challenge societal expectations of individuality, group belonging, and consumer practices. The relationships we establish with things and how they affect our relationships with each other are reflective of this motorcycling ontology. The industrialization of our daily environments produces the necessity to move in ways that go beyond our human capacity and our relationships and receptions of the motorcycle based on conflict, competition, and identity. Like all social products and practices, they are revealing of our shared values. Just as the two world wars greatly increased production of the motorcycle and influenced societal use after each conflict, the long-lasting and unpopular U.S. Vietnam War added to the social and mechanical developments of the motorcycle. After the Vietnam War, the economic, social, and physical landscape of Vietnam was also decimated, and the country turned to the motorcycle for affordable reliable transport. Today over 45 billion motorcycles are used throughout the country with about twice that amount in people. In the United States the struggles of returning soldiers to cope with civilian life post combat that is experienced by many during the first world wars is exacerbated after the Vietnam War. The failure to provide adequate programs to help returning veterans and systemic social issues ranging from structural racism to lack of social services created the space in which those suffering sought temporary solace and rebellion. The connections with masculinity and militarization as revealed in motorcycle use were further solidified in post-Vietnam United States. The countercultural panic established and furthered through films and media portrayal became connected to the larger countercultural values of the 1960s. As Julia Kristeva notes, myths and then science function to justify the symbolic order of discursive structures but can never fully enclose the jouissance or play of the signifier (80). In other words, when individuals are socialized according to a label, they will not necessarily only uphold

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the discursive meanings attached to the label but reinvent and embody it in dynamic ways. The antiwar movement, Black Power, hippy movement, Brown Pride, and feminist movements indicative of a general resistance of U.S. dominant culture come into tension with a countercultural biker ethos. The motorcycle object and culture are linked to militarization and the modernist conceptions that bring such conflicts into reality; however, its image interestingly becomes a shared meeting point for numerous countercultural stances. The Hells Angels image, for example, is inflamed by over forty Hollywood films in the motorcycle gang genre with titles that allude to the group with “Hells” or “Angels” in them. The group is codified as generally countercultural but also used to police various counterculture protest events such as Black Power meetings in Oakland; antiwar protests in Berkeley, California; and the music festival Woodstock in New York. As many veterans suffered from addiction, unemployment, mental health issues, and ostracization, the motorcycle, and motorcycling clubs, helped those readjust to, cope with, or escape from civilian life. The commodification of symbols and cultural capitol associated with motorcyclists reflects the ways in which we come to understand ways of moving through symbolic representation. The Hells Angles and the Mongols, for example, were involved in numerous court cases revolving around representation of club membership and autonomy as an MC (motorcycle club). These involved battles for the right to associate, criminal convictions, and court trials of various felonies and conspiring charges. There were also copyright and trademark lawsuits that either condemned the groups or were issued by the groups challenging the use of their symbols for profit and defamation. The Hells Angels MC have filed lawsuits against various companies for using their image such as couture fashion designer Alexander McQueen. On the other side, the U.S. FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) has unsuccessfully tried for years to seize the trademark logo of the Mongols MC to break up the group’s ability to associate with one another (Alexander; Barbash and Flynn). The counterculture group formations surrounding motorcycling mark the ways in which a form of mobility has been masculinized, militarized, scapegoated, and sensationalized. Maya Eichler notes that a militarized masculinity revolves around the dichotomy of feminine pacifism and masculine traits that revolve around toughness, violence, aggression, courage, control, and domination. These elements can be witnessed in the symbolic associations connected to the motorcycle. She adds that there is nothing innate about these traits as such masculinities are plural and occur in various contexts in and outside of war (Eichler 82). The ways in which such identities have been connected to object-bodies applies to both female bodies and nongendered objects such as the motorcycle. Nevertheless, we gender our material worlds and are further

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socialized according to the narratives associated with the object-stories. Such an enculturation occurs within the context of white domination in the United States. This merges with themes of masculinity and heteronormativity as motorcyclists and outlaw culture are largely constructed as a white male heterosexual culture. Whiteness entails an erasure of culture in exchange for positions of power revealed in abstract notions of normalcy. Whiteness is powerful precisely because it is designed to go unmarked. It reveals itself in a less obvious notion of privilege. Whiteness, privilege, and overt racism in motorcycling culture in the United States become salient. In this context, ethnic and racial individuals outside of the social constructions of whiteness, which has changed over time, are otherized, existing as marginalized and largely oppressed identities. As Said notes concerning Orientalism, such a process is marked by “a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is manifestly different (or alternative and novel)” (Said 12). Dipesh Chakrabarty notes that the desire to historicize everything according to the grand narratives of dominant societal values that are furthered through modernist discourse creates the recognition of a subaltern or othered past (112). Such pasts often are as much a part of postmodern discourse as they are outside of modernity. Thoroughly appropriated, the other is a part of contemporary society, it is in our ways of living and thinking. As Cook-Lynn notes, the term postcolonialism, for example, “relies on the status quo or empirical history rather than substantive change in the relationship between colonists and indigenes,” arguing for the examination and empowering of structures of indigeneity (6). The narratives we consume and maintain are connected to the policies and physical territory we move through. The genocidal destruction of Native American people and the continued colonial subjugation of tribal politics due to policy and settler colonial politics are aspects of the everyday. Such structures of the physical world can be observed in the paradigms we encounter when thinking about, inhabiting, and moving through our shared world. The horse, the bicycle, and the motorcycle have been used for various reasons and to many ends. They are almost always in commentary with the spaces and people that are affected, due to the ways in which these forms of mobility communicate and are represented in discourse. Cook-Lynn continues that while postcolonial discourse has its limitations, when combined with indigeneity there can be a further clarification of ongoing colonial conditions (8). As we continue to examine motorcycling mobility, materiality, and discourse, it becomes a nodal point for examining these contexts. Much like the depiction of Lawrence of Arabia in the past, the outlaw biker identity revolves around white masculinity finding traction in an appropriation of otherness. This reveals its fragility. Framed as forms of resistance,

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these otherized constructs remain within the sphere of white privilege. The Mongols, for example, and numerous others draw strength from an embracing of the symbolic other, and in this case, their historical use of the horse. At the same time, there is a pervasive sense of racism and exclusion that is at the heart of outlaw motorcycle culture, which places this counterculture in contradistinction to the previously mentioned countercultural movements. The culture is allowed certain transgressions that if conducted by other marginalized groups would not be possible. The outlaw image is subsequently embraced, challenged, and dismissed; nevertheless, it is ingrained in motorcycling discourse. Many groups, clubs, and associations attempt to resist the outlaw image such as religious-based, social advocacy, and cultural group formations. For example, the Motorcycle Maids, a female riding group, was founded in 1940 and still exists today. Women challenge patriarchal norms simply by becoming riders in public, engaging in an act socialized as masculine. Judith Butler unpacks the problematic “construction of the category of women as a coherent and stable subject” as it is partially a product of masculinity (7). So thoroughly masculinized, an extension of our thinking about the horse-mounted rider, the motorcycle is used to breach such constructions (7). The discourse concerning motorcycling as risky, athletic, and rebellious meshes with mainstream notions of masculinity and virility. From early on in motorcycling history, women motorcyclists challenged such notions through participation. When we shift our lens to the ways in which gender functions as a social construct, we can see how the motorcycle and the bicycle enable certain social transformations. Butler notes that as “gender becomes a free-floating artifice,” masculinity and all of its accouterments might just as well describe women, intersex, or nonbinary individuals (9). Motorcycle communities have been formed around many interests, subject positionalities, and identities that often become public forms of communication and advocacy. When specific motorcycle clubs form surrounding gender and sexuality, they promote intersectional notions of gender and sexual fluidity. This challenges heteronormative structures that are part of dominant forms of masculinity. Foucault notes that sexuality develops around a discursive “scientia sexulais.” This discourse establishes elements of sexuality as essential and are not merely representations or misunderstandings of a distorted ideology; “they correspond to the functional requirements of a discourse that must produce its truth” (History of Sexuality 68). Rather than dismissing or hiding sexuality behind a view of heteronormative behavior and procreational norms, the discourse surrounding sexuality becomes a site of truth. The sexed and gendered body are publicly displayed through acts of riding while providing a small piece of protection through anonymity and

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maneuverability, which can provide cover, presence, and escape. Such cover is experienced in the everyday rides of countless practitioners as well as celebrity enthusiasts such as Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie, Keanu Reeves, Bradley Cooper, David Beckham, Michelle Rodriguez, Jay Leno, Ryan Reynolds, Olivia Munn, Jason Momoa, Lewis Hamilton, and Brad Pitt, who often enjoy the temporary anonymity. Alone, riders move in the seams of the everyday, temporarily obscuring their identity and subject positionality. This is empowering for many as they enter public space as a general practitioner and a motorcyclist. Unlike the bicycle on public roads, which subsumes a secondary status, the motorcycle becomes exceptional. Coming together to enjoy a particular pursuit or pastime creates important collective spaces, but the motorcycle involves a display that possesses an epideictic quality in the public practice of group rides. When temporary groups form, they often do so for the main purpose of riding through public space together. There is a form of rhetoric that is general to the practice of riding in spaces that are dominated by automobiles, a degree of safety in visibility that is obtained when riding in groups. When groups are marginalized or historically silenced within the public sphere, such group rides become akin to marches and direct action. The lines between advocacy, protest, and civil disobedience are often blurred as notions of criminalization also associated with the symbol of the motorcycle and mobility in general become an aspect of what it means to ride in groups. Urban space is a regulated and policed environment in which residents are often segregated economically and forced to live in conditions that offer little mobility. The neighborhood ride-out serves the function of lifesustaining community belonging and individual freedom of movement that also declares presence. The popular off-road vehicles of the dirt bike, quad, and ATV (all-terrain vehicles) are harnessed by riders to move through urban spaces in unison and are simultaneously practiced as forms of expression. This often comes to be associated with criminal activity. Indeed, the main difference is space: done in open natural environments, such motorcycling performances are not out of place, but when such spaces are out of reach, urban locations are used. Such rides highlight the politics of movement and challenge our shared notion of spatial values while declaring presence. The AMA (American Motorcyclist Association) sets certain rules for clubs to follow, and any club outside of its designation is not necessarily a criminal organization. Similarly, city ordinances establish certain policies and permits for sanctioned group rides, but an informal gathering of motorcyclists is not necessarily unlawful. The motorcycle becomes symbolic of group cohesion and is used to establish presence, a form of political representation when combined with rhetorical notions of the public sphere.

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Cultures and industries of production, customization, and countercultural identity, from motorcycle gangs and clubs in the United States, to café racers in Britain, to postwar Japanese production, to the use of the motorbike in Vietnam, turn to a globally sustained network of motorcycle production, culture, and discourse. Wartime contracts become peacetime manufacturing and the need for affordable efficient transport. The Honda motorcycle company and the other three of the Japanese big four—Suzuki, Yamaha, and Kawasaki—greatly change the market as almost every American and British motorcycle company goes out of business. The shift in the industry turns small batch productions of several hundred makers into the centralized factories of only a few. Standardization, reliability, and efficiency improve, but commercial creativity and uniqueness wane as the motorcycle becomes an accessible and dependable form of transportation for millions. Italy, Germany, and Japan, already industrial powerhouses, convert manufacturing efforts to commercial needs. Britain and the United States enjoy the economic boost of wartime manufacturing and postwar geopolitical economics. Today, China and India are producing many motorcycles to serve their own large populations of riders and are competing with other nations. More motorcycle manufacturers are starting to arise as the industry broadens beyond the consolidation of the industry into relatively few manufacturers. Many of the companies are reinstating motorcycle companies that previously went out of business such as Indian and Buell in the United States; Triumph and Norton in Britain; MV Augusta, Aprilla, and Moto Guzzi in Italy, and Royal Enfield in India; as well as new manufacturers in growing industrial centers, such as KTM in the United States, Husqvarna in Sweden, Hyosung in South Korea, and Zongshen in China. This turn toward the traditions of motorcycling culture and industry coupled with emerging markets create both broader global networks and local manifestations and cultures that continue to use and rework the motorcycle. As we look back at the motorcycle object for inspiration for future productions, the image of the motorcycle also affects this history and its various contexts. I now turn to its portrayal in film and examine how the motorcycle image and territory of riding intersect. THE MOTORCYCLE IMAGE The motorcycle and its connections to war within everyday settings challenged some widely accepted values and narratives. In war, it was an aspect of national pride at times required of citizens. While outside of national conflict, it became marked as countercultural and even criminal. This image is sensationalized and exploited as a form of entertainment, which has much to say about the ways in which forms of mobility become rhetorical. As a public

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display of rhetoric in text, image, and on the road, its formation, portrayal, and interpretation are indicative of larger societal values. As the accepted norms are stretched and values breached, the resulting tensions also have much to teach us. The motorcycle image as presented in film reflects and predicts how the physical object, its riders, and form of movement are perceived. When we view images, we respond physically and emotionally to the depictions. The impact of these portrayals is heightened when they depict objects, events, and practices relevant to our specific historical and cultural experiences. Through memory we revisit both the territory of the material world represented and the symbolic representation itself. Affect theory opens the conceptual space to examine the ways in which symbolic renderings reconnect with the material worlds they represent. Brennan notes that just as rhythm transmits energy and in turn affective meaning, so do the social and physical vibrations of images. While they are not tonally produced and exchanged, they do, along with the stories they entail, produce physical responses that are also attached to feelings, emotions, and physical states of comfort or distress. She states that the “immediate point is simply that sights and sounds are physical matters in themselves, carriers of social matters, social in origin but physical in their effects” (71). As I view images of motorcyclists, I can feel the sensations of the wind, and as I hear the passing of a motorcycle, I can see the type of machine in my mind. Many manufacturers have signature sounds, such as the loud thunder of Harley-Davidson and the distinct chain rattling hum of Ducati engines, that allow listeners to identify them by sound alone. When a particular motorcycle passes by or flashes upon the screen such as a Honda CBR929RR, a motorcycle I owned and rode for many years, I am brought back to the context in which this motorcycle functioned for me personally. In this section, I discuss how the motorcycle has been portrayed in film and note how this constructs a certain concept or image of the motorcycle, which impacts how we come to view, approach, and even ride motorcycles. The motorcycle in U.S. cinema is most notably seen in the outlaw biker genre of films. There have been numerous films produced over the years that centered around the sensationalized image of a motorcycling group or gang often led by a rebellious yet charismatic male leader. The genre is based on real-world motorcycling group formations, discussed in the previous chapter, that occurred after World War II in the 1940s. Even the most sensational outlaw biker film in the large genre draws on the reality of motorcycling. They almost always featured actual practitioners and actors riding motorcycles. Along with motorcycles, celebrated by motorcycling culture and industry, as well as actual motorcycling performances, they often featured and depicted real group formations such as the Hells Angels MC. Just as many military members were exposed to motorcycles during combat, actors themselves

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such as Steve McQueen, Marlon Brando, and Keanu Reeves were exposed to motorcycles on sets, and countless more were exposed to motorcycles by viewing these images. As an adult, I cannot even contend with the ways in which, as a child, I came to become familiar with motorcycling due to its depiction on screen, developing the desire to ride in the process. The motorcycle of choice for the actual motorcycling groups and the fictional portrayals on screen was often various versions of the Harley-Davidson hardtail and other early motorcycles such as the Triumph Thunderbird 6T. The motorcycle object and the ways in which their riders embraced its form of mobility to construct an entire countercultural lifestyle were at the heart of the fictional and real-life dramas. At times actual Hells Angels, such as Sonny Berger in Hells Angels on Wheels (1967), starring Jack Nicholson, appear in these films. Films such as The Wild Angels (1966), Angels from Hell (1968), The Hellcats (1968), The Cycle Savages (1969), and Angel Unchained (1970), among others, solidified the genre as a pervasive cinematic theme. They also depicted the context surrounding actual moral panic and furthered it in pervasive ways. The motorcycle image, however, is larger than its sensationalized role in these group formations. It is a facet of everyday life and a reliable form of transportation that entail a wide cultural impact. In 1971 Brown turns his attention as a cultural documentarian from surfing to motorcycling, directing On Any Sunday (1971). This film added to an ongoing discourse that signified motorcycling along with surfing as a form of leisurely rebellion, becoming inscribed in U.S. consciousness as a cool countercultural norm. With the introduction of multiple motorcycles and a global market, practitioners soon numbered in the millions across society. Their depiction in film was part of this growth. The motorcycle in film and television also often features mainstream uses of the motorcycle as an element of social control. Its role in police forces is emphasized in the television show CHiPs (1977), acronym for California Highway Patrol, the remake CHiPs (2017), and the film Electra Glide in Blue (1973). This film featured a motorcycle police officer but also portrayed the fading of U.S. counterculture and domestic resistance to the Vietnam War. The motorcycle plays central roles in many films capturing the multifaceted discourse surrounding the motorcycle such as Silver Dream Racer (1980), The Loveless (1981), Race for Glory (1989), Harley-Davidson and the Marlboro Man (1991), The Crow (1994), Mission Impossible II (2000), Biker Boyz (2003), Torque (2004), Wild Hogs (2007), Ghost Rider (2007), 12 O’Clock Boys (2013), and Burnout (2018), among others. The motorcycle is often used in films, such as The Matrix: Resurrections (2021), to provide an image of what a future where technology has advanced beyond our current reality might look like. The general motorcycle technology is over one hundred years old but still holds the power to capture our attention as futuristic.

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The use of the motorcycle in film almost always references in some way the larger genre of the road film. This is a vast category of narratives that exemplify the journey west as part of U.S. cultural values. Motorcycling in popular film discourse joins the discourse on the road and furthers themes from westerns that portray the horse as a symbol of freedom and individuality. The lone cowboy riding through the wild west exemplifies the colonial perspectives that comes to dominate U.S. national ethos while the Native American cultural use of the horse exemplifies its resistance. Similarly, the motorcycle emerges to represent similar tensions, as in almost every outlaw biker film there is a conflict between dominant societal norms and their disruption. This disruption is sensationalized in many ways in film but is always framed and exemplified by one’s choice of mobility. The motorcycle, like the bicycle and the horse before it, becomes an instrument for national expansion as well as local disruption. Through the images presented on screens, bodies are transformed into signs that are reflective of the historical conditions they are situated within. Images and texts say much about the ways in which worlds are imagined and brought into existence through imagination as well as how they reflect material conditions. The chase, escape, introspection, journey, rebelliousness, desire, difference, independence, and rupture are common themes found in this genre. The motorcycle image injects into many films a high-octane boost of physical and social adrenaline. Just as riding a motorcycle produces a thrill and risk, going against societal norms and conventions does as well. Such sentiments are transferred from the screen to the audience via the emotions, feelings, and thoughts associated with the motorcycle image. The motorcycle in film is a snapshot within everyday life of a countercultural yet available approach to societal structures. Eyerman and Löfgren note that the journey at the heart of the road genre is “a metaphor for life itself" (67). It celebrates modernity and turns U.S. territory into imagined totalities and encountered unities (55). The frontier spirit, technological progress, masculinity, social mobility, industrialization, and freedom are hallmarks of modernity and the American dream. As an extension of these modernist concepts, which become critiqued in postmodernity, elements such as rebelliousness, destruction, and rupture are also aspects. The road genre is prototypical of each of these concepts. U.S. mythology and national identity in relation to mobility play out in the book The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939) and the film Grapes of Wrath (1940) by John Ford. Both depict movement west as a commentary on the failures of social structures. Route 66 serves as the transitional site of territorial expansion and tension. The genre is wrought with cultural and social transitions, as seen in the writings of Allen Ginsburg, William Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac. The road for these beat writers was harnessed for its transformative ability to etch out a legitimate U.S. avant-garde. On the Road

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(1957) by Kerouac “gave literary form to the myth of the road’s liberating potential that reached a new, primarily young mass audience” (Eyerman and Löfgren 58). Like Marco Polo’s The Travels account long before and Brown’s Endless Summer around the same time, numerous practitioners were fueled by the desire to hit the road in similar communal and individually transformative ways. The symbolic blending of a motorcycle group dynamics surrounding war, daily life, superhuman exceptionality, and counterculture ethos is projected in The Wild One (1953), The Great Escape (1963), Easy Rider (1969), and an entire genre of motorcycle exploitation films. Beginning with The Wild One (1953), the motorcycle gang genre emerged. Appearing in the early 1950s, the genre quickly expanded into a cultural phenomenon in the 1960s and 1970s that continues today. As war turned to civilian life, the symbolism of national armies and conflict was resignified in the forms of more domestic tensions. This is indicative of military group formations, which turned, at times, into criminal activity, and gangs. This shift is rare, marked as such in the label “1%.” During the height of moral panic concerning motorcycle gangs, the AMA, formed in 1924, remarked that this identity represented only 1 percent of motorcyclists. When this occurs, clubs and gangs embraced the moniker. This is an example of label theory, a formula that occurs when groups embrace the identities and behaviors ascribed to them by dominant systems of power, particularly when they involve intentionally disparaging qualities. Motorcycle gangs exhibit this often through a host of adopted elements that deliberately run counter to social norms and expectations, such as the number 13, swastikas, the color black, skull and bones, black cats, and the 1% symbol. At the same time, military style jackets, hats, boots, helmets, and insignia due initially because of their functionality in rugged combat use and availability post combat, like the motorcycles themselves, were reappropriated as countercultural. After the Second World War, motorcycles grew in popularity, and riders, particularly those who directly experienced war, added to motorcycle use and its portrayal. Veterans formed clubs around camaraderie, action, and technology. The image of the outlaw motorcyclist overshadowed the functionality of the motorcycle for daily use in the United States, which persists to this day. “The Hollister Riot” in 1947 occurred during a fourth of July weekend of motorcycle races and events called the Gypsy Tour in the town of Hollister, California. These events became a flashpoint that fueled an outlaw image of motorcyclists. An image from the weekend of a biker on a Harley-Davidson with a beer in hand captured, for a nonriding public, an image that adds to this moral panic (Cooke). The Wild One (1953), starring Marlon Brando, draws inspiration from these events and spawns an entire genre of motorcycle gang films that continues today. The motorcycle gang genre presents

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hyperbolic portrayals of lawless motorcycling criminals that terrorize quiet towns, becoming a large segment with hundreds of Hollywood, and globally produced films. Britain bans the film as a relishing of lawlessness while Brando’s character rides a 1950 Triumph Thunderbird 6T in a Schott Perfecto leather jacket, inspiring many to ride in similar fashion. The iconic roles of the Triumph Bonneville 600 and Brando as leader of an actual motorcycle club, the Black Rebels, establishes many of the major themes of the genre: the identity of the rider, the group formation in context of societal tensions, and the motorcycle, which requires riding at some point. Club motorcyclists played extras in the film and influenced dialog in the script. The image of the motorcyclist as hapless rebel is formed. At one point Brando’s character is asked “What are you rebelling against?” To which he replies, “Well, what ya got?” This overt challenge to mainstream values is centered around a dedication to riding motorcycles and an accompanying lifestyle. The motorcycling horde out to disrupt any narrative structure is a pervasive trope in films that feature the motorcycle outside of the genre such as in Mad Max (1979) and many others. At the center of this transgression is a series of dominant values that are upheld by Brando’s portrayal including masculinity, heterosexuality, and gender violence. These are already established as hallmarks of many of Brando’s characters, famously exemplified in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). Ultimately the film establishes the final theme of many motorcycling-centric films, rupture. Because the motorcycle provides the ability to transgress so many elements of human life, most films end in a complete separation of rider from object and life. Brando’s character is arrested only to escape and crash as the film ends—as many others do in the genre—with the police hauling off a mangled motorcycle. Motorcycling and the performance of masculinity become intertwined, adding to and drawing from popular representations of the horse. This is part of the patriarchal and hegemonic discourse concerning masculinity. As Butler and others note, gender is largely a matter of performance that contains several socially constructed norms that are visible (10–12). The way one dresses and talks along with mannerism, gestures, and objects are codified along gendered lines. The motorcycle is thoroughly masculinized accordingly, and its connections to war, rebelliousness, and even public precarity and poverty are aspects that add to the virility associated with the motorcycle itself. The desire to ride for many might not be an autonomous choice but more an urging attached to various levels of social capital and reward. Like the ton-up boys of café racer culture and the outlaw of this genre, the motorcycle image is a sought-after identity partially achieved through an everyday practice. Identity and gender are constructed through the performance of public symbolic displays. The performance of one’s identity varies, “accounting, for

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example, for the observable gender shifts when a man dresses in drag or, more subtly perhaps, when a professional dons black leathers and fires up a motorcycle” (Martin et al. 173). The mounting of a motorcycle and even the desire to do so as a particular act of identity is a product of both object and its image. These themes meshed in this seminal performance of gender and identity. The early sensationalism of motorcycle exploitation films, much like surf culture films, hyperbolize the ethos of a particular type of movement. The motility becomes characterized on screen and is symbolic of a host of often demonized and fearful strategies that revolve around a small, self-recognized, 1 percent of motorcyclists. The real-life inspirations for the genre are evident in the titles: The Wild Angels (1966), The Cycle Savages (1969), Angel Unchained (1970), Angels from Hell (1968), The Hellcats (1968), and Hells Angels on Wheels (1967). Masculinity, toxicity, hyperbole, and fear are central themes of the outlaw motorcycle film genre and continue with Hells Belles (1969), The Girl on a Motorcycle (1968), She Devils on Wheels (1968), Angles’ Wild Women (1972), and Naked Angels (1969). Tropes and constructions of hypermasculinity continue to surround motorcycling. The sensationalized versions of those that ride are often framed as authentic. Examples move from publications such as Outlaw Biker to shows such as Orange County Choppers and Harley-Davidson ads. Hypermasculinity is hegemonic in that it is “a form of male heterosexual attitudes and behaviors rooted in dominance over women and other masculinities (Martin et al. 172). Ultimately the authors of “Claiming the Throttle: Multiple Femininities in a Hyper-Masculine Subculture” note that this portrayal is a disservice for a more diverse range of masculinities. Furthermore, it contextualizes the struggles female riders experience when riding while obscuring feminine aspects of motorcycling. Sharon R. Mazzarella in “Men, Media, and Machines: Fabricating Masculinities in American Chopper” notes that the motorcycle is at the heart of the masculine drama between father and son on the show Orange County Choppers. The author notes that motorcycle building culture sets the backdrop for differing types of masculinity to be on display, which include hegemonic, subordinate/resistant, and complicit forms (Mazzarella 68). These types of masculinity arise wherever the patriarchy needs them, she notes, to solidify its own power structure. It moves, at times, into the space of the feminine, if that is what is necessary (70). The motorcycle represents a masculine backdrop in which the competition between other types of masculinity plays out. Those that watch the show experience more of the drama between these identities than the process of motorcycle building. Nevertheless, the centrality of both the motorcycle and masculinity create an undeniable link.

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Martin notes that there should be more inquiry into the experiences of women motorcyclists. Her findings note that the hypermasculinity and outlaw ethos involved in motorcycling is a force that women riders must contend with. At times they experience solidarity because of it, at others enjoy the fun of its challenge, but ultimately suffer from the fact that they can “never be truly authentic or outgrow/outlast their prescribed status in outlaw culture” (Martin 179). The constructions surrounding gender in the motorcycle are simultaneously supported and resisted by using the motorcycle. It adds to the subjectivity of the practitioner in uncertain ways. Just like the films examined, the object allows the space to be present in particular ways but also reaffirms dominant societal values. The author concludes that women resist some aspects of hypermasculinity, co-opt others, and “use it to frame and redefine their own femininities. This aspect of using hyper-masculine consumption behaviors to enact different or expanded femininities resonates clearly with poststructuralist feminism” (Martin 188). The marginality involved in many countercultural and oppressed group formations including gang culture is breached using the motorcycle. As LGTBQ, female, Indigenous, Black, and People of Color riding clubs form, they gain power from the varied values associated with the motorcycle. The motorcycle allows for the deconstruction of numerous boundaries to be redrawn (Martin 192). The motorcycle gang culture is established as both mainstream with portrayals of hypermasculinity and countercultural subversion with alternative lifestyles with the Hells Angels at the center. In 1966 Hunter S. Thompson published Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1966), a first-person account of the author’s time with the group and on a motorcycle. For the author, the desire to participate and his professional stance toward journalism coalesce in a fitting study of riding with others. This work exemplifies and establishes his “gonzo’ approach to inquiry based on performance. The fieldwork, for Thompson, entails an immersive participation in the culture of outlaw motorcycle clubs. The book covers his entry into the community, acceptance, successful performance, and perhaps most important for the narrative arc of the book, his exit or rupture. The text takes the reader on a journey as if they are living the daily existence of a club member through the lens of Thompson. Along the way one learns of insider knowledge gleaned from the embodied role played by the researching author. The approach is a mixture of forms of qualitative research methods, including participant-observation, interviewing, and unobtrusive measures. In Thompson’s becoming a Hells Angel, he adds to the semiotic weight of the motorcycle image. In 1969 at a Rolling Stones concert, a member of the Hells Angels, working as a bouncer, kills an audience member. The headlines and news attention further induce moral panic surrounding motorcycle clubs, criminal activity,

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and the rebellious connotations of the object. These fears connect with themes of masculinity, fear, and nonconformity already established. From the 1947 incident in Hollister to this one in 1969, there were numerous films produced which sensationalized and exploited group cultures surrounding the motorcycle. In many of these films a countercultural spirit runs through the narratives that link motorcycling club activity with many other group formations such as hippies, antiwar activists, political agitators, Black Panthers, and Latino/a cultures. The motorcycle is used as a vehicle of transportation, but in doing so, it moves through and comments on particular social climates. It becomes much like Thompson’s intentions, a symbolic commentary on the environments in which it moves through. The motorcycle gang genre presents a hyperbolic and simplistic vision of the cultural tensions involved in social order. The interplay between productive citizenry, nonproductive member, rebellion, civil disobedience, and crime is reduced to a binary, citizens and motorcyclists. The genre establishes a predictable script as nihilism and order clash. Hypermasculine tropes and heteronormative performances reify many mainstream values while sensationalizing criminal activity and rebellion. As the scripts play out in similar fashion spanning from The Wild One in the 1953 to Quentin Tarantino’s Hell Ride in 2008 there is some variance to the genre. The mixture of countercultures that are evoked in the genre and the ways in which motorcycle culture is sensationalized allows for other cultural norms to be breached. One example, The Leather Boys (1964), depicts British rocker culture and disrupts notions of heteronormativity and hegemonic masculinity. The overt displays of masculinity present in the outlaw motorcycle genre and in motorcycling discourse have also been harnessed by gay cultural identities. The same visual forms of masculinity celebrated by dominant cis and heteronormative culture and used to demonize gay identity in the past, particularly those surrounding cowboys and bikers, are reappropriated as forms of empowered displays of homosexuality. This film provides a space to explore identity not widely accepted by society. The main character seeks a traditional romance with an opposite-sex partner, only to drift apart. He then explores emotional life through the friendship of a motorcycling rocker. Two 650cc Triumph Bonnevilles and the movement they provide allow the characters to establish a camaraderie and bond that breaches the traditional marriage and heterosexual union that had previously failed. The Wild Angels (1966), released the same year as Thompson’s work, features the first role for Peter Fonda. He plays the leader of a fictitious chapter of the Hells Angels. The film features the common themes of the genre and real members of the Hells Angels and Coffin Cheaters motorcycle clubs. Along with the motorcycle, there is a mixture of countercultural elements that come to be synonymous with the genre: leather jackets, Nazi paraphernalia,

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black military undergarments or skivvies, berets, cigarettes, beer bottles, and a surf music soundtrack. Like Fonda, Nicholson builds on the previous roles of Brando, in Hells Angels on Wheels in 1967. The genre continues with The Born Losers (1967), which featured the character Billy Jack for three films. It follows suit featuring generational divide indicative of countercultural angst, mainstream racism, and the struggle of veterans to cope in civil society. In this film the impact of sexual violence is explored rather than primarily exploitation. The film Devil's Angels (1967) begins with the image of old war airplanes setting the context for real-world and cinematic cultural formations. The Skulls gang rides through an airplane junk yard creating a vision of the motorcycle at war both in the past and its current role in everyday life. The film furthers the visual nonriding tropes of the genre including alcohol, marijuana, harassment, and nihilistic leisure. The leader is once again a heterosexual white male that transgresses these stereotypes slightly through an endearing rebelliousness. In contrast, The Girl on a Motorcycle (1968), based on a novel by French surrealist writer André Pieyre de Mandiargues, depicts a rare female rider. In the film, the motorcycle is a tool of female emancipation as she resists her own domestic confinement through its mobility. The motorcycle is once again, although this time in terms of female empowerment, harnessed to breach societal norms. Ultimately the film ends like others, in rupture, as she suffers for her transgressions. In Angles from Hell (1968), Tom Stern, a veteran, returns from war to create a motorcycle gang with a higher moral code than was present in the U.S. military. In this way, the film can be considered a protest response to the Vietnam War. The clashes in the film are mainly focused on the police but arise everywhere, with the establishment, squares, and rival gangs, but harmony arises with other countercultures, notably hippies and off-the-grid communities. The Bakersfield chapter of the Madcaps motorcycle club and Sonny Berger of the Hells Angels worked on the film. The main character, like many of the others in the genre, is celebrated for his rebelliousness as the audience is invited to identify with many of the perspectives presented; however, the narrative ends predictably, as he gets assailed, released, and eventually gunned down by a police officer. As the body/motorcycle lay mangled once again, in this film a Christian proverb of Isaiah appears on the screen, “reason.” The narratives of the genre typically warn of a countercultural urge, allow the audience to frolic in its space for a period, and then ultimately end in rupture, returning the audience to dominant societal mores. Fonda and Nicholson, already associated with the genre and U.S. counterculture, connect with Dennis Hopper in perhaps the seminal motorcycle genre film, Easy Rider (1969). Wyatt (played by Fonda) and Billy (played by Hopper, who also directs) set out across the country. They encounter many

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types of individuals in their journey via iconic motorcycles in a relishing of feel-good liberation until, like most motorcycle films, it ends in a simultaneous murder-accident-death. The message is clear: stepping outside of social norms yields momentary reward but ultimately tragedy. The rupture is due in part to the social tensions already established, the difference between two types of society. The motorcycle gang genre continues as it moves into the 1970s, often infusing psychedelic, surf, and protest cultural group formations with films such as Angel Unchained (1970). The motorcycle also plays a significant role in Jamaican cinema, notably two films featuring reggae artists and Rastafarian culture, The Harder They Come (1972) and Rockers (1978). In both films the motorcycle initially serves a role like the portrayal of the bicycle in Bicycle Thieves, as a means of social mobility. Then the motorcycle and rider become infused with Rastafarian, reggae, countercultural, and social protest elements. This thematic matrix results in the main character in each film fulfilling a badman archetype. This archetype is peppered throughout Jamaican reggae and dance hall music as well as hip-hop. It is also part of the western film genre and functions similarly as the outlaw motorcyclists in U.S. cinema. The main character in Rockers, a Rastafarian and actual well-known reggae drummer, declares his Rastafarian values of nonviolent resistance in a short speech made directly to the camera. He declares his resiliency and stance of pacifism but willingness to stand up for justice. The criminal, creative, and social aspects play out as the motorcycle, with the Rastafarian Lion of Judah on the side, is central to his societal role and identity. Whereas the themes of consciousness and rebelliousness play out in a Robin Hood story in this film, in The Harder They Come (1972) the badman archetype is fully embraced and escalated to the point of rupture. Reggae artist Jimmy Cliff stars in the film as do many of the then most accomplished reggae artists in Rockers, adding to the authenticity of motorcycle-themed films. Both films feature original soundtracks by the featured artists and are lasting classics within the musical genre. In The Harder They Come, the dream of upward mobility initially involves the bicycle, but as the characters move up economically, they also move through forms of transportation, from the motorcycle to the automobile. After shooting a motorcycle cop, the film ends with their demise. Cliff’s character fixes a bicycle, and when it becomes stolen, he almost murders to defend and get the bicycle back, turning into an outlaw in the process. Acquiring money, clothes, a motorcycle, and a sense of rebelliousness, he comes to embody the outlaw or badman archetype. Brown’s surf documentary film, Endless Summer, emphasized escape and countercultural travel outside of societal boundaries. His motorcycling documentary film, On Any Sunday, received a similar narrative emphasizing an

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embracing of risk not typically encountered in mainstream practices. Both create a safe version of cultural breaching. The risk aspect is overplayed in this film, as was the outsider status of those able to experience a slice of leisure in global beaches. The surfer stoke of returning to nature in search for a lost feeling is exchanged for an amped-up adrenaline of a similar childlike awe. The film begins with slow-motion scenes of kids joyously riding bicycles, mimicking the motions of motorcyclists. The film unfolds as a series of quasi-intense and at times quirky action sequences with Brown’s kitsch narrative. On Any Sunday 2 is a continuation of the original’s themes, just as Endless Summer 2 does for its original. On Any Sunday is a documentary, but the narrative is so heavy that it creates a scriptlike arc of what it means to ride within the structure of the film. While the film introduces many to the practice, it is not necessarily a motorcycling sport video. Several motorcycle cultural videos function in showing the progression of actual riding practices, such as the Crusty Demons of Dirt (1995; 1996; 1997; 1998; 1999; 2000) videos. These sports documentaries are skateboard- and surfboard-style videos focusing primarily on progressive performances of motorcycling. These videos typically circulate among the culture and its practitioners. Similarly, there are motocross racing, Moto GP racing, and motorcycle enduro racing documentary films that cover these practices and their progression. Such covering propels the practice and, in many ways, invents new formations. One example is the development of motocross into freestyle moto, which is viewable in videos covering the X-Games competitions. The early freestyle moto events in the X-Games feature motorcyclists from these videos. Many also feature former motocross riders and draw from the lineage of public motorcycle stunts popularized by Evil Knievel. In The World’s Fastest Indian (2005) a man from New Zealand, played by Anthony Hopkins, portrays the true story of an attempt to set a motorcycle speed record. The theme of social mobility and exceptional merit based on real events plays out in this narrative. The movie revolves around motorcycle racer Burt Munro and his obsession with making an Indian Scout motorcycle, the fastest bike in the world. Themes of authenticity and aspects of reality continue in motorcycle film discourse with the documentary film 12 O’clock Boys (2013). This film covers urban motorcycling and ride-out culture, highlighting marginalized communities of color and the ways in which the motorcycle is harnessed as way to earn cultural capital. It features a personal coming of age story within the real motorcycle culture of street riding on dirt bikes often while performing maneuvers such as extended wheelies, footwork, and stoppies. The child at the center of the film longs to ride in the neighborhood ride-outs. The authentic desire to ride in displays of physical social expression exhibited by the main character and portrayed in

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the documentary are palpable. For the community of riders, the motorcycle in the public streets functions as a means of empowerment in the face of marginalization and stigmatization. Referencing this documentary, Charm City Kings (2020) presents a fictional narrative that starts where the documentary left off. The film also features many skilled riders in the south Philadelphia area, including Meek Mill, a rapper and actor known for his role in urban motorcycling culture. The outlaw motorcycle genre and the hyperbolic image of the motorcycle persists despite more realistic portrayals of motorcycle culture. Willem Dafoe stars in one of his first-ever roles as the motorcycle gang member Vance in The Loveless (1981). In Eye of the Tiger (1986), Gary Busey stars as Buck, a military veteran who comes back home from Vietnam to find that his town is being taken over by a biker gang. Once again, the tensions between two visions of America are furthered in both films. American and European conceptions of motorcycle culture collide in Silver Dream Racer (1980), a British film that features European Moto GP race culture with a U.S. backdrop. This theme continues with Race for Glory (1989), which follows an American who hones his motorcycle skills breaking laws in his small U.S. Midwest hometown. The theme in this film is like North Shore (1987) and many other narratives that contain white savior tropes. The American, Cody, and his mechanic friend earn a contract to race on the European GP Circuit. The final race takes place in France as Cody wins riding a Japanese motorcycle with an American flag emblazoned on the fairings along with the words “American Built.” The motorcycle often makes an appearance in action films, such as Knightriders (1981), Savage Dawn (1985), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), Black Rain (1989), and Beyond the Law (1993). The motorcycle is often used to mark an outsider or exceptional individual. Neo in The Matrix Reloaded (2003) is “the one,” Nicolas Cage in Ghost Rider (2007) is a demon superhero, as is the motorcycle riding superhero in Venom (2019) and Venom 2 (2021), and Pamela Anderson’s character becomes an edgy comic book superhero in Barb Wire (1996). Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in T2 (1991) is a cyborg from the future, an exceptional hybrid being. The Terminator is known throughout the franchise to be both good and bad, and the motorcycle serves as the apt visual metaphor for this dichotomy. In the film, his cyborg abilities are not readily visible as he appears in our everyday world, yet on a motorcycle with a leather jacket his extra human identity somehow becomes clear. Brandon Lee in The Crow (1994) is a half-mythical being, and Tom Cruise’s character in Mission Impossible II (2000), Ethan Hunt, performs a series of exceptional stunts, but the franchise routinely highlights his use of the motorcycle. In these moments the character exhibits a calm coolness in the face of great speed and maneuverability, a necessary

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trait of motorcycling, especially at the highest level of Moto GP racing. Batman and Catwoman become superheroes through gadgetry. This includes the use of the Batcycle and the Catcycle used in The Dark Knight (2008) and Catwoman: Hunted (2022). Similarly, James Bond becomes Agent 007 partially through advanced technology, such as the motorcycle in Skyfall (2012) and other installments of the franchise. The material aspects of the motorcycle as progressive technology are often aspects of its use. The future, at times, in films revolves around the motorcycle. This is seen in films such as Tron (1982) and the seminal Japanese animation film Akira (1998). The future narrative continues with Tron: Legacy (2010), a remake of the original, which still utilizes the imagined motorcycle technology as the prime exemplar of a future computerized landscape. I played with these commercial toys as a kid, and as an adult I still look at these images as representations of a motorcycle-filled future. Biker Boyz (2003) and Torque (2004), which came out around the same time, are mainstream films that centered around sportbike culture. Like the Fast and Furious franchise in relation to cars, which was gaining popularity around the time, these films contemporized the combination of diverse street culture and urban environments that reflected the use of the motorcycle. The film Burnout (2018) is a French film that follows Tony as he aspires to be a professional rider. The pursuit of motorcycling professional goals devolves into the established motorcycling film themes of criminalization and adrenaline. The role of the motorcycle in real rebellion, revolution, and insurgency collide in the cinematic version of Che Guevara’s memoir, The Motorcycle Diaries (1992). The film The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) follows Guevara’s account of riding through south America as a young doctor with a colleague. The two characters begin their journey south riding a 1939 Norton 500 nicknamed “The Mighty One” long before Guevara becomes the rebel leader of the Cuban revolution. Other films add to the motorcycle image and revolve around the road as an open space of growth and possibility, such as My Own Private Idaho (1992), One Week (2008), and Wild Hogs (2007). In each film the motorcycle plays a particularly recuperative role in the recovery of a sense of loss. Wild Hogs (2007) depicts a certain midlife crisis and the fragility of masculinity. The motorcycle here interjects a virility that otherwise escapes the aging male. The motorcycle image is changing, and this film exemplifies the fragility of many themes surrounding the motorcycle image. Hyperdominant modernist tropes and the appeal of countercultural apathy fades, as does the rigidity of what the motorcycle has come to represent through image.

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CONCLUSION The motorcycle is becoming more electronic and technical versus analog; however, an ontological nostalgia associated with the motorcycle as an object at the heart of modernity keeps a certain analog epistemology based on physical relationships with material alive. Unlike the bicycle that represents clean human-powered efficiency at the cost of physical exertion and slower speed, the motorcycle represents both the environmental costs of industrialized products and the ability to harness it efficiently for individual need. The familiarity of the internal combustion engine’s clutch mechanism is a large obstacle for the mass acceptance of the electronic engine. This type of engine is used on most motorcycles and cannot produce power from a standstill. It must be started and then worked through a transition of gears to produce accelerating speeds. It is the hallmark of motorcycling but not necessary, as the moped often uses a similar engine without a manual gearshift, as do electronic motorcycles. Another large challenge to the acceptance and development of the electric motorcycle is sound, a loud guttural poetic of the motorcycling experience. As the motorcycle is started, the sound and vibration is already informing of a motorcycling affect and rhetoric. The rumbling, trembling, staccato that is created by the engines of numerous manufacturers is recognizable to riders, like bird identification, often by sound alone. Ducati’s distinctive chain ringing and Harley-Davidson’s deep loud V-Twin have attempted to be trademarked by the companies, and the high-revving whiz of all the Japanese big four superbikes are distinctive of the technologically advanced production of horsepower and speed. Like the Futurist poetry that was created based on impactful sounds such as “Zang” and “Thumb” intended to cut through the logos of linguistic signifiers, aftermarket slip-on pipes and exhaust systems are some of the most popular modifications to stock motorcycles. They almost always produce a louder, more distinct sound in the process. This auditory signal can be more effective than the horn in letting motorists know that a motorcyclist is present. In this regard, loud engine sounds are not without function as the motorcycle sound and its industrialized machined parts are a constant reminder of how we communicate through material. The electric engine—not without environmental concerns, notably battery pollution—is a necessary future like that of electric and hybrid automobiles. The two-stroke versus four-stroke debate concerning motorcycle engines shifts toward the more sustainable four-stroke engine with increased regulation of gasoline emissions as why we ride is ingrained in what we ride, which in part depends on how they and their riders are portrayed, discussed, and received.

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More motorcycle manufacturers are embracing older, traditional motorcycle designs such as the café racer as well as large manufacturing shifts toward the future such as electric engines. Motorcycling mobility creates its own form of moving rhetoric that continues to unfold and is indicative of both our shared values and the individual voices of consumer-producers. This chapter concludes our triadic treatment of riding cycles from the horse to the bicycle, and lastly motorcycles. The motorcycle image is futuristic and traditional, it signifies transgression and risk. It is both a logical development at the heart of modernist thinking and an early reminder of what will become postmodern critiques. Peppered within its discourse of increasing horsepower, riding masculinities, and a reimagined iron horse are both an industrial return and a desire to move beyond our spatial and social spaces. In the next two chapters, I discuss sophistic rhetorical theory and poststructuralist thought as parts of a shared tradition that might help us further articulate what it means to ride cycles.

Chapter 7

Sophistic Rhetorical Theory and Movement

Rhetoric is the practice of influential public communication and a form of theory that is concerned with the ways in which symbolic systems function as modes of inquiry. Within the societal, national, and collective notion of the public sphere, rhetoric plays a political role. The Sophists are some of the first to illustrate this importance. In doing so, they etch out the foundational persuasive, dialectical, and theoretical elements of a participatory society that is based around communication as influential in establishing, disrupting, and reifying relationships of power. How we speak and communicate is political, but it is also part of the ways in which we think and interact with the material world. Nevertheless, this idea becomes central to the formation of a functioning democracy. The ways in which we discuss reality reflect and predict how we relate to it. In addition, rhetorical theory allows us the space to consider various types of public acts as symbolic. This includes sporting events, funeral processions, parades, and gatherings, along with individual practices such as surfing, street skateboarding, bicycling, and motorcycling. These can be situated as everyday public performances or epideictic displays of communication that comment on social life. These displays are involved specifically in the praise and blame of collective values (Poulakos and Poulakos 61). This could be said of an array of visible public practices such as busking, graffiti, jogging, walking, and driving. Such endeavors are public enunciations entailing messages and meanings that are largely nonverbal. Epideictic rhetoric constitutes forms of persuasive communication that attends to various public issues through displays of communication. These performances are not only social events or cultural rituals but also public acts that reaffirm or challenge accepted values. The associations attached “to the cultural traditions and communal customs celebrated in these festivals” invite audiences to accept or resist shared ideals (Poulakos, and Poulakos 62). By examining cycling alongside rhetorical 149

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theory, we can find out more about how we disseminate and negotiate truth (Poulakos and Poulakos 78). Through the lens of sophistical rhetorical theory, we can ask what values and truths might be available through cycling when viewed as a rhetorical practice. Every communication act and its receptions are subject to the conventions and contexts in which they take place. A U.S. football game and telecast, for example, might include: the game as a celebration of athletic excellence and fairness; the kneeling of a player during the U.S. National Anthem in protest of police brutality; the commercials between plays that communicate a host of values while promoting commodity exchange and consumerism; the mostly female cheerleaders on the sidelines performing displays of gender differentiation, creativity, and support; and the crowd itself implicated in validation of the action on the field. The framework of competition dominates this display as do the other elements of epideictic rhetoric: excess, social values, and spectacle (Poulakos and Poulakos 63–64). The persuasive elements communicated in this example of a rhetorical display can be extended to others, including cycling. The public manifestations of cycling, ranging from everyday acts of riding and purchasing bicycles and motorcycles to small group rides and racing events, can be seen as rhetorical displays. As I participate in sanctioned public bicycle-riding events like the Tour of Guam and the Tour de Palm Springs as well as the Guam Mountain Bike National Championship, I comment on the larger context in which they take place through the rhetoric offered by road and mountain bicycling. Sanctioned rides block off public roads, suspending the daily operations of road regulation and policy, which allows the space for a public statement. The race requires volunteers, employees, sponsors, and audiences who are all engaged in creating and adding to a series of public messages that fall within the competitive spectacle of the race. The event itself fits within the physical and symbolic structures of society. An unsanctioned one such as an organized Critical Mass functions similarly, fitting within a larger structure and finding meaning in relation to other physical and symbolic elements. Displays of competition in ancient Greek rhetoric entailed individual gestures that “were not isolated acts with intrinsic ends but public performances meant to fulfill audience expectations” and communicate “communal ideals” (Poulakos and Poulakos 64). As an individual bicyclist, I engage in a general act conducted in public, and when joining a sanctioned ride, I am involved in a public communal practice. The Tour de Palm Springs covered 102 miles and the Tour of Guam sixty-four miles with a four-thousand-foot elevation change. Both entailed elements of athletic ability and competition relevant to sports frameworks but also excess. They were spectacles situated within everyday spaces that commented on our shared public values.

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Cycling is a text that can be inscribed, read, interpreted, and presented. It is a way of thinking and commentating on spatial realities through public communication and it is, in these regards, like sophistic rhetorical theory. The Sophists entered public life and commented on it. They used their bodies, breath, and voice to articulate a series of messages that influenced society, educating others on the practice and its function. In this, they framed a way of thinking that places the physical practice of oration and the competitive aspect of dialectical deliberation as central. They were public intellectuals as well as private teachers. They toiled in the seams of everyday life and made grand gestures in public, much like those that build, maintain, and ride cycles. The organizers of the two riding events, the GCF (Guam Cycling Federation) and the CVSPIN (Coachella Valley Serving People in Need), used the bicycle and everyday space to create a public event. They make a series of statements ranging from the importance of exercise to the spirit of competition and geographical appreciation. These statements go beyond transportation and personal expression to influence, like the Sophists suggest, our collective consciousness, while the unsanctioned public rides I have participated in, such as bicycle parades in Los Angeles and Oakland, California, and more politically specific rides such as Critical Mass in San Francisco and Arcata, California, function as public deliberations. The Sophists’ primary subject of interest was rhetoric, and the body was the vehicle for its understanding, inquiry, and delivery. The skills and acumen necessary for the negotiation of these movements affect how bodies are socialized and enculturated by the spaces in which they move. In this site where communication and citizens play participatory roles, actions become influential and meaningful. Movements of various types become implicated in our notions of sociopolitical life. In this arena, daily activities such as commutes, casual walks, runs, and rides occur, as do deliberate public acts of resistance and affirmation. Examples of these include marches, protests, boycotts, sit-ins, walk-outs, encampments, as well as casual gatherings, organized rides, picnics, and outdoor functions. Such public performances communicate a host of messages and contribute to elements of societal cohesion. Our understanding of this stems from these ancient teachers of rhetoric, the Sophists. While the term sophist was a general term for an intellectual, the moniker became associated with a dispersed and sustained group of orator-theoristteachers that travelled throughout the Hellenic world of Sicily and southern Greece around the third century BCE. They possessed knowledge of numerous subjects, interests, and perspectives concerning material and conceptual truths (Enos 43–46). Their ideas and ideals have helped shape Western notions of consciousness and the functions of democratic processes now at the heart of contemporary societies around the globe. Through their ideas

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we can locate a cohesive theoretical perspective and further understand how societies develop shared ways of thinking. They attended to the ways in which symbols operated in constructing public opinions concerning the nature of realty. For the Sophists, the body was the vehicle that produced rhetoric, which was simultaneously the practice and the subject of their study, as opposed to the philosophers that primarily concentrated on the mind and its production of ideas. Through this approach, they outlined a theory of rhetoric that functioned in influencing public audiences, establishing a social consciousness that led to determinations of truth. Their perspective was that rhetoric moved toward truth. They emphasized, in this regard, the journey and conceptualized the destination as temporary and shifting. Their ideas seldom settled, resisting the urge to fix any one perspective or material outcome to a universal contextuality. Through the works of others, as in the case with Socrates, as well as their own, we can piece together a cohesive sophistic body of work. It is distinct in many ways to Western philosophy and classic rhetorical theory and makes numerous contributions to contemporary thought. It is innovative in its attention to the ways in which discursive and corporeal practices function in communicating and negotiating various truths. Cycling is a form of rhetoric in its public practice as well as a discourse that functions both symbolically and physically. In this chapter, I draw from early rhetorical theory as presented by the Sophists to better understand cycling as a theoretical approach to everyday physical and social systems. I also draw from my own experiences as a cyclist. In the theories of Protagoras, Isocrates, Gorgias, Thrasymachus, Prodicus, Hippias, Polos, Alcidamas, Antiphon, Diotima, Aspasia, Critias, and others there exists the foundations of the ancient art of rhetoric as well as a contemporary outlook concerning the role symbols play in constructing shared notions of reality. Their unifying elements come to stretch across national boundaries, marking the ways in which dialog in all its forms determines public values. These Sophists furthered the thinking of the pre-Socratic philosophers concerned with nature and provided a link to the metaphorical concerns of Socrates and Plato that arose after. Zbigniew Nerczuk in “Nature, Man and Logos: An Outline of the Anthropology of the Sophists” notes that it is accepted that the Sophists and Socrates “contributed to the humanistic turn in philosophy, shifting the focus from natural to moral philosophy” (44). They establish a break in nature and represent a turn toward the conceptual through the symbolic. The symbol functions as the territory between thought and thing. Protagoras problematizes the notion that anything can simply be (true). The thing, rather, is always in a state of becoming (truth). Notions of truth, set in motion by forces are in constant flux, like all things. Referring to Protagoras’s

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statements on contradiction, Nerczuk notes that this “is why it is possible to predicate contradictory statements in relation to everything” (45). For Protagoras there is no strict relationship between logos and being, as a result there is no universal truth, only “particular, individual ‘discourses,’ which express private, particular, and contradictory affections of individuals” (48). It is not until much later that this link is more thoroughly explored with poststructuralist theory, which I discuss in the next chapter. Along with sanctioned rides, daily commutes, and excursions, I also perform motorcycle and bicycle building and modifying. Three notable projects include the restoration and conversion of a 1970s Chicago Schwinn into a fixed-gear road bicycle, the building of a road bicycle centered around a Cinelli carbon fiber frame, and the modification of a Kawasaki Ninja 636 into a stunt motorcycle. All the processes lead to a way of knowing and interpreting cycles that are eventually brought into public space through riding as well as the public sphere through texts such as this. The restoration of 1970s material and technology are a reperformance that evokes the technology and context of a previous era. Its use in contemporary settings is a remix of material and cultural signifiers. The exposed steel frame ground down to reveal the metal lays upon the original sprocket and crank arm propelled by a new gold chain and rear fixed gear hub offer a reorganization of consumer products. Rather than scrapping the older bicycle technology, the project is a form of restoration and archival. Altering the stock product is indicative of cycling modification and remix culture in general. These are ways to deal with the excess of cultural symbolism and material products. The motorcycle as a product requires basic maintenance that makes customization on small levels such as ergonomic adjustments, replacement of parts, and fluid necessary. This sentiment is summarized in the quasi-scientific and spiritual yet popular text Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), which, like Thompson’s text, is a firsthand account that involves the experiences of riding and maintaining motorcycles. The text follows the relationship between philosophical thought and everyday life, which is harnessed through the experiences of riding and maintaining the motorcycle. One of the parallels drawn in the text is sophistic rhetoric. Thomas Frentz in “Quality, Rhetoric, and Choric Regression: Revisiting Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” links the sophistic attention to quality described by Phaedrus with motorcycle maintenance (293). In this case motorcycling is defined as much by the necessity to repair and maintain the object, often on the road, as it is by riding. This is also true of bicycling. In each of the races previously discussed, a spare tube, pump, tire levers, and multitool were carried on the bicycle throughout. The skill to attend to one’s cycle also requires a level of attention and knowledge, which is fostered when one is not riding.

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The Sophists attended to oration as a physical act, and rhetorical training in gymnasiums reflected this. Riding, once underway, cuts through its own symbolism with nonverbal utterances that are undeniable. Its discourse seems to reflect this sense of embodiment as many texts about cycling are based on the experiences of riding. Because the motorcycle is an industrial product that requires maintenance and will eventually break down completely, it must be attended to in garages, workshops, driveways, and on the sides of roads. Passionate care of motorcycles fuses rider and object, “leading the rider to select and apply proper rational procedures for repair and maintenance (quality)” (Frentz 297). Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance attempts to make us aware of this sensibility. It is a campy encouragement to slow down and respect what goes into what makes our journeys possible. Ultimately the text both sensationalizes Zen metaphysics and distorts rhetorical theory but connects motorcycle riding with mechanical attention. In an increasingly product-oriented culture where mechanical skills are less present, caring for the motorcycle is positioned as caring for self and life. As the motorcycle is used by the author with his son on public roads, it is also a caring for others. Frentz notes that “for Pirsig and the Sophists, rhetoric teaches the art of living well in a changing world, where, as Protagoras knew, humanity and not truth is the measure of all things” (Frentz 297). Whether interested in the motorcycle or not, these subjects and processes become central to its popularity as a text. The sophistic attention to symbolic understandings of material reality emerges out of a pre-Socratic attention to a philosophy of nature. The Sophists were concerned with movements of mind and body to produce perspectives and effect change through public dialog. The minds and bodies of the audience were the nature they approached and studied. In this, they dealt with a corporeal ontology of existence and thinking. As ancient philosophy turned toward the metaphysical construction of ideas and the pure machinations of the mind, the Pre-Socratic perspective was present yet overlooked for centuries. The Sophists represent this past as well as the foundation of what was to arise after. Like many bodies, actions, and voices from the past, we are forced to perform acts of recovery and read the Sophists through the lens of those that have derided and appropriated their thinking; however, unlike many other perspectives obscured by history, we also have a sustained attention to sophistic thinking that enables us to piece together their central tenets. The Sophists discussed a variety of subjects and within their shared themes there are many exceptions, yet there also exists a path to unifying their thinking—perhaps because they are so heavily used by Plato (427–347 BCE) as an oppositional example to his more objectivist philosophical discourse. It is through this skeptical treatment by Plato that we come to understand their ideas. Over time we can balance the hierarchy by reading the Sophists in

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relation to Plato. Foss et al. note that Plato infused a distinct moral notion of human identity (4). The Sophists, on the other hand, viewed identity in a state of becoming, malleable and flexible to changing social and ethical constructions. Their interpretations of popular stances, narratives, and values are often open to further interpretation as the dialog that unfolds concerning reality is more telling than a particular outcome. The popular myths discussed by the Sophists typically leave the outcome open for interpretation, whereas Plato often fixes narratives to a singular outcome. Plato’s famous Dialogues (1986) are written discussions, debates, and conversations between Socrates, and frequently, well-known Sophists that often include lengthy orations by Hellenic thinkers and references to intellectual discourse during the time. In these texts, we are privy to the words of the Sophists, yet we also have the Sophists’ greatest elements of audience, context, and agency removed. Aside from the fact that Plato’s organization of knowledge presents itself as a rigid structure evident in the concept of Platonism, many such discourses have received similar attention. John Poulakos in “Towards a Sophistic Definition of Rhetoric” looks at these itinerant teachers of culture to restore their intellectual integrity and move toward placing them within the history of philosophy and communication studies. He notes that Platonic renderings of the Sophists (a) remove them from the public and place them in private discussions and (b) in this process remove their main form of rhetorical practice, public oration. This removal effectively appropriates their words in short responses to specific questions posed by Socrates. According to Poulakos, Plato turns rhetoricians into dialecticians and Sophists into the role of philosophers, denying them “their own intellectual identity and power” (Sophistical 78). To counter this, we have numerous accounts from other thinkers such as Isocrates who at one point identifies as a Sophist and then distances himself from the label, something others did intermittently, due to its negative connotation. Historians such as Herodotus wrote extensively about the Hellenic world and the Sophist biographers such as Plutarch wrote about prominent Sophists, as did prominent ancient Greek politicians such as Pericles who learned directly from and supported the Sophists. Through these sources we are aware of the teaching, orations, and movements of these itinerant thinkers. In the texts of the writers that transcribed their ideas, we can better discern their social, political, and economic impact. The term sophist moves from a general term for a public intellectual to reference this specific group of thinkers with shared ideas. Their themes and their presence are felt throughout any reading of ancient Greek thought and culture, which provides the foundations for Western knowledge. In this chapter, I first discuss sophistic rhetorical theory as a cohesive body of knowledge concerned with the ways in which language functions as public

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deliberation and metaphysical philosophy. The Sophists introduced the world to rhetoric by outlining not only how the art functions but also how symbols construct our collective consciousness—through the use, manipulation, and understanding of the ways in which reality is transformed by the human mind into a series of symbols, which paves the way for larger notions of a socially constructed reality (Luckmann and Berger 3). They directly dealt with important public moments and influenced outcomes using accepted “mythical commonplaces,” which became the means “of casting innovative views on language and rhetoric in the familiar light of the cultural inheritance of myth” (Poulakos and Poulakos 71). Their attention to material reality through symbol and narrative formally merged the worlds of discourse and things. This theme is continued much later by poststructuralists such as Foucault who notes that the truth of things lies in its discourse, which can be studied as a thing (Order 18). Examining the sophistic notions of rhetorical theory provides a way to further connect bodily movements, public actions, and object relationships within the canon of rhetorical theory. Their encapsulation and thus examination, here, encourages an opening of the rhetorical tradition to include those voices and perspectives that are marginalized due to dominant forms of thinking. Similarly, nationalist, gendered, ethnic, and other normative lenses are only recently being exposed as structures that negate or debase perspectives that do not fit. To this end, I discuss the perspectives and theories of the classic Sophists—primarily Gorgias, Protagoras, Diotima, and Aspasia—to establish a foundation of sophistic rhetorical theory at the heart of rhetorical theory in general. The Sophists can be a path to recuperation and for recognizing the ways in which various rhetorical perspectives function as forms of exclusion. They also can serve as a vehicle for reinterpreting rhetorical theory and practices such as bicycling and motorcycling as theoretical and symbolic. THE SOPHISTIC ROLE As exemplified by Socrates and Plato, philosophers at the time were philo or lovers of wisdom. They attempted to understand and uncover the perfection of the noumenal or universal world articulated by Plato. Socrates and Plato as the quintessential lovers of wisdom associated thought as stemming from universal concepts. Cicero will note during the Roman era that they attempted to call “philosophy down from the heavens.” Plato and Socrates worked to establish the existence of perfect metaphysical truths behind the flawed appearance of our imperfect reality (Nerczuk 44). As knowledge descended from the heavens above, a universal perspective, Plato exhibited a hostility toward any form of thinking that problematized such grand conceptions. He

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celebrated mathematics and geometrical constructions that envisioned perfect forms and saw thought as similarly constructed by unadulterated ideas. Both the Sophists and the philosophers were primarily concerned with the shared root word of each term, sofos or wisdom; however, only the Sophists sought to move closer to this place of wisdom or knowledge through words and concepts. John Poulakos in “Hegel’s Reception of the Sophists” notes that “the differences between the sophist and the philosopher are so minute that it is easy to mistake the one for the other.” He goes on to associate their respective discourses “rhetoric, sophistic, and philosophy” as similar yet distinct in various ways (163). In general, sophistry is philosophy, two sides of a coin that function like differing theories in an intellectual debate, yet only one is presented to us as secondary or subordinate. Thus, we must conduct recuperative work to find out more about how the structure that produces this subordination functions as well as the subject of inquiry itself. The role of orator, the author adds, is even more pronounced in the Sophist. Here, a practitioner’s bodily performances are connected to both thought and action. The major difference between the two similar camps is the outcomes of their theoretical postulations and the steps they proposed to arrive there. This involved communication and an attention to its functions in formulating thought and collective assumptions. John Poulakos notes that many denied being a Sophist, but Protagoras announces proudly that he is one; Gorgias “limits” himself to being a rhetorician; Hippias refers to “himself as a polymath”; and they are all given the label of “image maker” as well as “master of the art of making clever speakers” (“Hegel” 163). Moving toward the truth, rather than owning it, they were skeptical of any position outside of a context that might fix the nature of reality to any one point; if they obtain or own truth in this way, it might not be truthful in another instance. John Poulakos adds that oration and conception are two attributes that distinguish the Sophist from the philosopher (“Hegel” 163). Like the meaning of language, their truth unfolded over time, through use, and in context. The term sophism was used to refer to anyone with expertise in a specific domain of knowledge or craft—a blacksmith, for example, can be referred to as a sophist of his occupation. Over time, Sophist became a label for a dispersed group of itinerant intellectuals who used language to understand how knowledge was formed. The term sophistry was thereafter used to refer to individuals that possessed wisdom and who taught for money. The Sophists embodied their theories as they taught rhetoric through practice. Their central theme was that it was impossible to know absolute truth and that it might not exist at all. Gorgias notes that the logic behind the word or logos functions as a means of communication, which can produce truthful or false perceptions of reality. Truth, whether it exists or not, is highly connected to and even contingent on language. It is the vehicle through which we produce and locate

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truth. Gorgias recognized the limits of human cognition as the reasons why our understandings of reality were so varied. He also recognized the variability of the “linguistic conventions” of the community and sought to tap into these ways as an effective orator and rhetorician (T. Poulakos, “Isocrates” 49). The acceptance of the limitations and the ability to understand the truth in the assessment of others, even when understanding our perspectives might mislead us, is a hallmark of sophistic rhetorical theory. Philosophers such as Plato and Socrates derided the Sophists for exacting large sums of money for their teaching and orations to separate the moral imperative of pursuing wisdom for free. In the process, they negated their perspectives regarding truth, which were highly philosophical endeavors. Nevertheless, as John Poulakos notes, in “Plato, the Sophists are acknowledged for what they do and for who they are; as such, they always stand by their art, making the most of their boldness, presumptuousness, and flamboyance” (“Hegel” 168). Through the hegemonic structure of Platonic, objectivist, and later positive thinking that leads to exclusionary paradigms, we encounter sophistic rhetoric. Yet Western philosophy would not be what it has become if it were not for the oppositional role they played. This construction by Plato enabled him to frame the primacy of his own approach. The Sophists were necessary for Plato to mark the ways in which audiences and entire societies could be swayed by the power of language, argument, and eloquence. Only recently have we begun to pay attention to the ways in which language structures our ideas, shifting cultural norms, and social constructs of reality according to how we use it. Just as the Sophists were necessary for Plato in opposition, they were also vital for Aristotle (384–322 BCE) to appropriate their thinking as a systematized classification of its objective functions (Foss et al. 4). Aristotle merges the rift between the Sophists and Plato but in doing so corners rhetorical theory into a tighter philosophical space. In this regard, Aristotle applies Plato’s rigid structures of an imagined reality to the Sophists’ fluid ideas. He attempts to classify the theoretical movements of the Sophists, which seems to reengage with sophistry but more so segregates rhetorical theory from philosophy and theory in general. Because rhetoric is established firmly within the canon of Western thought, it is difficult to recuperate what is lost due to Aristotle’s treatment, notably its philosophical functions. By connecting poststructuralist and by extension postcolonial frameworks to sophistic rhetorical theory, I can further articulate the ways in which othering processes are informed by dominant readings. Postcolonial frameworks engage in a similar call for the transformation of colonial structures that continue to displace meaning away from Indigenous truths. The fact that rhetoric arises initially in the Greek colonies on Sicily and in southern Italy, and the Sophists are continually marked as noncitizen outsiders, frames their

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subject positionality as an aspect of their treatment as well as their thought. The male domination at work within the Hellenic world is also prevalent in reading the Sophists, as women were barred from most public forms of social, political, and cultural interaction. Despite this, we can locate two female public intellectuals, Aspasia and Diotima, as Sophists whose work and voice are available to us today, despite severe forms of sex-based domination. Such hegemonic structures are revealed in all discourse concerning rhetoric and are also reflective of the material context in which they initially emerge. Today we are capable of writing from the perspectives of our own, while engaging in what we have available, recognizing that it is, in this case, funneled through a gendered and ethnocentric lens. The Sophists developed a unique perspective concerning the importance of oration in terms of public and conceptual influence. In doing so, they also initiate the themes that will be present in poststructuralist paradigms. Each is based on the recognition of a continuation of thinking that arises in the past and persists throughout our current ways of operating. I propose an opening of the rhetorical-philosophical space not only to better understand cycling as a form of thinking and communication but also to find a more inclusive paradigm. Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony notes that when dominant societal values and institutional norms heavily influence cultural habits, individuals and groups often are not forced but willingly consent to their own domination. Said notes that in society “certain cultural forms predominate over others, just as certain ideas are more influential than others” as cultural hegemony gives social constructions and perspectives durability and strength (7). In Black Athena Bernal notes that Afroasiatic thought has been appropriated by Eurocentric paradigms of Western knowledge that champion Greek intellectual production as autochthonous. In other words, Greek thought, as the origins of Western thought, is positioned as a wholly original indigenous invention. This inaccurately positions European culture as not an appropriation or mixture of other cultural forms of thinking, but a pure European invention (Bernal, Athena II 13–17). This validates notions of superiority rather than problematizes them as forms of domination and erasure. They are, rather, influenced by Phoenicians, Egyptians, and others. This is something that many Greek philosophers such as Aristotle understood and professed as they upheld the Egyptian philosophic traditions as the foundations of their own (Bernal, Athena I 117–118). Thus, to discuss sophistic rhetorical theory and its extensions into poststructuralist theory much later is to reference these Afroasiatic intellectual traditions. The cultural loss that occurs directly from colonial and imperial structures is one issue. The other is the intellectual forming of knowledge as solely belonging to one group. The entire Western project of history and philosophy

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is riddled with obfuscations that are more informing of the context in which these paradigms emerged rather than a commentary on the nature of the knowledge itself. These claims of objectivity are refuted wholeheartedly in Bernal’s seminal and exhaustive four-part series Black Athena. The Egyptians and the Phoenicians had a profound impact on Greek thought, which is later separated from all other traditions as the invention of Europeans. Herodotus knew and wrote of these connections that were previously clear. This is exemplified in the “ancient model,” but as it is exchanged for the “Aryan model,” the notion that Greek thought arises alone denies the history of African and Asian cultural and intellectual influence (Bernal, Athena I 42, 67). Just as James Cook knew of the Oceanic migrations from Southeast Asia across the Pacific, Herodotus knew of these Afroasiatic connections to Greek thought, yet both are later denied by mainstream Eurocentric intellectual communities. These obfuscations are not innocent but serve political, cultural, and social ends that are present today. This is telling of the context in which we read Greek thought and a reminder of what is at stake. The Sophists represent a moment that is at the heart of both models. The body of work that we have, much like other problematic constructions such as gender and race, are not without value. In this hegemonic structure, we can find the seeds of alternative ways of thinking and, perhaps more telling, the understanding of why we perceive the world as we do. The foundations of Western and global society are products of this network, and its dismantling entails a close examination of the ways in which it unfolds through history. In ancient Greece, informed by the horse and long before the advent of the bicycle, the polis situates the notion of a citizenry in a physical context. This setting takes shape partially through the public deliberations within. Many agree that Greek culture itself exists as the result of Egyptian and Phoenician influence and possibly colonization by these civilizations (Bernal, Athena I 92). The potential of this historical fact so upends notions of Western cultural autonomy that it is hardly discussed and, as Bernal points out, thoroughly discarded. Nevertheless, as the Greek civilization is solidified around Athens, they start searching for arid land and new trade routes, conducting imperial expansions into parts of Southern Italy. Greek colonists set sail from Delphia, a small island off Athens in Greece, landing in the Gulf of Naples in the sixth millennium BCE. Around the fourth millennium BCE, they set up permanent settlements and cities in Naples and along the coast of southeastern Italy. Later most of Sicily, the largest island in the Mediterranean, becomes a Greek colony (Barrett 14). Years later, half of it will be reoccupied by the Moors during the Islamic Golden Age. Greek philosophy and culture itself are a product of various cultural influences in the region; in this time, the translations, categorizations, and interpretations of Hellenic texts from antiquity will further contribute to the rebirth and appropriation of Greek thought in

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the ways discussed above. What we refer to as solely Greek scholarship, language, and culture is a continued work of hybridity with influences stretching from Africa, the Middle East, India, and Europe. The Indigenous Sicanians were driven from their land or integrated into the Greek populations. During the same time, Phoenicians set up coastal ports to increase trade. Writing from the time describes the Phoenicians as more amicable and less concerned with permanent settlements, while the Greek colonists were described as concerned with owning large areas of the land best suited for growing crops. Moving inland, they came to colonize most of Southern Italy. Within a space of numerous influences and at the doors of what will become the structures of Greek orthodox thinking, a group of scholars influenced by these forces play a vital and disruptive role. In the Sophists we find the teachings and practicing of a rhetorical role that is both at the core of Western thought and its potential outlier. The Sophistic Practice While some debate continues, it is generally agreed that Corax of Syracuse was the first to teach rhetoric during a time of revolution on Sicily around 465 BCE. This colonial situation of oppression became “the catalyst for the formal study of rhetoric” as well as the vehicle for the peaceful dismantling of a dictatorship (Foss et al. 1). Rhetoric developed as a skill set and way of looking at social life as dependent on open dialog. It is the foundation of Greek consciousness and a hallmark of participatory societies today. At times it is a right granted by nations, and for many a given, that through global communication networks, we will engage in meaningful public debate concerning the acceptance or refutation of collective values. In this equation, people can break through formal structures of government to influence the public through acts of communication. This foundational element of society is formalized as a practice, pedagogy, and theory by the Sophists. Corax uses public communication to help establish a more democratic situation on Syracuse and “serves as the foundation for the rhetorical theories of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Gorgias, Isocrates, and Pericles” that come later (Glenn 33). This practical use of rhetoric is ingrained in the context in which it arises and becomes evident not only in theory but also in its materiality. Language and discourse today are considered rhetorical, not just for what it means conceptually and theoretically—although I will show this to be an important factor—but also for what it produces. When we speak and communicate in various public settings, we are bringing into reality certain aspects of change based on the nature and reception of the communication acts themselves. Corax recognized the need for a sustained way to contemplate, initiate, and create change through symbolic means. In specific

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situations such as courts and in general spatial settings, a budding notion of a public sphere that is both discursive and physical takes shape. Corax’s student, Tisias, is said to have introduced Athens to his teacher’s now lost treatise “The Art of Rhetoric” (Foss et al. 2). The formulation of rhetoric becomes synonymous with this group of travelling teachers of wisdom. In a society in which power and the very notions of reality are determined through public deliberation, they become necessary. In this manner, people negotiate the shifts in culture, politics, and thinking that arise. From an increased attention to the ways in which public voices can be harnessed to bring about change, a new democratic concept of social life is created. Our current definitions of social advocacy stem from the original purpose for outlining the art of rhetoric. Their primary vehicle of practice was also their major content of instruction. Like cyclists, they become through doing and define their stances in context. Truth, for them, is in the public practice of oration and the use of language. It is always unfolding based on participation. This is constantly being challenged by Plato who searches for static conceptions of truth. Their rhetorical theory deliberately marks the construction of a symbolic reality that is subject to change through deliberation and articulation rather than through force, coercion, or convention. Early rhetorical theory as gleaned from the work of the Sophists, before it is diminished by Socrates and Plato and appropriated by Aristotle, is highly philosophical. Sophistic rhetorical theory, Glenn argues, “has become so familiar (and therefore acceptable) in the works of Sharon Crowley, Roger Moss, Jasper Neel, and John Poulakos” that scholars such as Edward Schiappa have criticized this trend as a mirage seeing only what we want to see in sophistic rhetoric (8). This revaluing of their contribution is important as they make an indelible contribution to Western thought and are thoroughly sidelined. Because of these twin elements, in their thought we can look for and use the Sophists to open new rhetorical territory and inform us of the larger structure of Western rhetorical theory. This is an important act of intellectual growth and resistance to the exclusionary forms of discourse that make such a recuperation necessary. The Sophists were well known and identified as a specific group rather than simply a general term applied to many, and we can find numerous themes and instances that support sustained projections of their thinking. A major premise of their thought is that they made the “intriguing but controversial promise to have the weaker argument prevail over the stronger” (J. Poulakos, Sophistical 18). This appealed to those that might want to hire their service. It is a powerful claim, but it is an aspect of their intellectual approach. It is also in line with the political origins of their practice to resist systems of power peacefully or creatively. This sophistic concept of dissoi logoi or contradictory arguments will continue to be at the center of

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classic rhetorical theory. The truth that is unpopular or less likely to be held as truthful could win a public argument and become widely accepted. To hetton refers to engage in the weaker argument precisely because it wields less authority in the minds of an audience. The notion is grounded in the fact that accepted truths shift and change according to societal norms and beliefs, rather than an objective truth in existence whether an individual understands or not. This shift is brought about through participation and argumentation. This form of thinking invites the audience to be active contributors to the process and encourages creativity rather than passivity. To kreitton is to engage in the stronger, more dominant argument according to established mores. By advocating hetton, the Sophists direct us not necessarily toward an untruthful situation but make us aware that truth itself is elusive and based partially on convention as well as opposition. It also places the onus on the role language plays in directing us toward certain conclusions rather than negating its importance in favor for pure noumenal concepts capable of transcending linguistic use (J. Poulakos, Sophistical 64). The development of rhetorical theory begins with sophistic rhetorical theory and any discussion of rhetoric deals simultaneously with their foundation as well as their marginalization. While there were quite a few that were associated with their thinking, their body of work is largely recognized by some of the group’s most well-known theorists. The Sophists were skeptics of the truth in that they often taught that our notions of reality were relative, arguing that one says the truth or nothing at all. The most well-known Sophists such as Protagoras and Gorgias, received ample attention from Plato within the major works that display their names (Phaedrus 4; Gorgias 9). Gorgias states in one of his most well-known philosophical moments that nothing exists, another powerful claim as the Sophists established their theories publicly along with their reputation as often audacious intellectuals. This is evident in the attention they bring to themselves, their profession, and ideas, which makes them available to us now. Of course, something does exist, as the naturalists or objectivist thinkers, based on empirical methods, might purport; however, Gorgias continues that if something does in fact exist, it cannot be fully known. The third component of his perspective on truth puts the audience's desire to locate a stationary place of knowledge to rest stating that even if it is known, it cannot be communicated (Jarratt 53). Rhetoric involves both thinking about reality and predicting the ways in which reality-concepts might change for people using symbolic systems. This is a philosophical project at the level of praxis or plan of action that occurs when people communicate with intention. Gorgias’s attention to the role communication plays in philosophy and consciousness is a hallmark of sophistic thought, which is at the heart of communication studies today. The goal is to create shared meaning; yet we often

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lose sight of the theoretical components of communication acts. The transition from materiality to symbolic systems to concept was not fully articulated by the Sophists, but they did initiate these connections. This metaphysical aspect of language and its use is all but lost when we see reality in objectively truthful ways. For the Sophists, this includes the nature of reality, use and meaning of words, and even overtly objective measurements such as the temperature in a room or the existence of material matter. Indeed, depending on our internal states, experiences, and movements, we all perceive a given temperature as slightly different. The ways in which we describe things based on our experiences and perspectives similarly govern their existence. Thus, we engage in discussions of a shared reality that is also unique for everyone. Communication is the path to understanding the ways in which similar contexts can produce differing realities, yet it is also a point of contention. We experience frustration when we fail to create shared meaning with others. Gorgias allows the space for this common occurrence with his final caveat that even if we were somehow capable of understanding truth, the process of communication contains its own forms of translation that are lost or entirely inaccessible. Working backward, we communicate as best we can, deciphering each other’s interpretations of reality through the symbols we use to construct messages. In doing so, as the Sophists noted, through rhetoric we move toward a shared or most likely truth while never fully settling in the territory we seek. Protagoras’s statement concerning humans as the measure of reality exemplifies the sophistic stance. That even if objectivity is located, it is a human measurement. This implies that humans create a world according to their own positions rather than merely describing a neutral reality. Our understandings and particularly our articulations of the external world are forms of measurement “of each thing as it is or as it is not” (Plato, Sophists 19). The truth here is subjective as even scientific thought is built on a series of studies put forth to an interpreting and responding audience who will then produce alternate assertions. The truth, even in its objective form, is continually changing based on new scientific studies and their subsequent acceptance or dismissal. From this perspective, the ability to persuade others to believe is like knowing the truth and producing this knowledge in others. Rhetoric for the Sophists functioned at the level of philosophy and praxis as it was both a path to uncovering reality and a plan to achieve it. Communication skills became indelible in this process of moving toward truth rather than a manipulative role to veer audiences away from it. In this participatory setting it is difficult to understand reality without the sharing of knowledge, as acceptance grants truth some merit. The role the Sophists envisioned for humans is one of individual responsibility in the ability and even necessity to take political and social action through public deliberation.

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When Protagoras was asked whether gods existed, he replied it was impossible to know due to the limits of humans. As Glenn notes, “The gods were no longer responsible for earthly actions; individuals were responsible for their own actions and were collectively responsible for the actions of the state” (Glenn 35). Instead of imagining a form of thought that was godlike, as Plato conceived, the Sophists recognized human limitations and devised formulae that positioned themselves as responsible for notions of truth rather than merely passive observers or authorial discoverers. Truth is created structurally based on perception rather than objective reality, existing outside of this perception based partially on our cultural expectations and norms. Perception is identity, and for Protagoras humans created these constructions. The term human serves a semantic function in that the term itself is a measurement. His human-measure concept notes that the ways we use signifiers such as human and measurement are subject to changing conventions. Protagoras points to the ways in which reality changes based on perception. Protagoras, in Theaetetus, written by Plato, defines knowledge as perception based on sensations, emotions, and visualizations of the mind (Sophists 3). The title of this work references color and the ways in which individuals perceive colors and things or chremata differently. Things are perceived as appearances or phainomena for everyone, uniquely resulting in logical conclusions. Just as there are numerous people, there are multiple truths. Around the world individuals from differing cultures recognize various color distinctions as there are multiple terms and varied arrangements of color differentiation. This example of perception places the actual reality of color somewhere between objective reality, perception, consciousness, and articulation. These theorists were some of the most ground-breaking in the ancient world, pushing the boundaries of what society accepted as valid and expanding our distinctions of what constituted knowledge in the process. Examining consciousness is a hallmark of philosophical pursuits, and the Sophists often used popular narratives to challenge mythological constructions. Aristotle in Rhetoric (3.1.8–9) notes that the Sophists were among the first to borrow the techniques of the poets on matters of style and delivery. Their use of familiar mythical figures preserves not only the characters but also the deeds and values that shaped Greek society. Their portrayals and interpretations often challenged traditions, prompting, according to John Poulakos, a new political and civic consciousness (Sophistical 13). This perspective questioned not so much the truthfulness of the mythical tales but the decisions that the fictional characters faced. In the story, the fictional dialog has real ramifications concerning social and cultural values. In turn, the Sophists used mythological narratives as popular discourse to challenge the concepts and values these tales often upheld.

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When Prodicus discusses the mythical hero of Hercules, for example, a one-sided narrative is turned into a debate between competing characters within the myth. He ends without a definitive concluding stance as Hercules is turned from a dominant force of physical strength into a “reflective character facing a dilemma between virtue and vice” (J. Poulakos, Sophistical 14). The story of Aphrodite in the hands of the Sophists and other examples illustrate the sophistic use of popular narratives in myths to make logical points concerning the concrete alteration of public life through words. In this regard, the Sophists combine mythos (symbols to construct a story) and logos (symbols to construct a logical argument) to comment on the socially fabricated nature of reality (Smith, Rhetoric 39). In the Encomium, Gorgias, known for his eloquence and persuasive skills in front of large crowds, speaks of rhetoric as an almost supernatural power. It is able to create entire worlds in the form of belief, he notes. In the text, the Sophist describes Helen and Palamedes to convey messages concerning the swaying of crowds toward accepting possible truths. Logos is important for Palamedes, as Gorgias notes; despite being a hero, his salvation is dependent on the persuasive nature of the words he chooses. Persuasion and the perception of reality are closely linked for Gorgias as power, in this formulation, lies in turning reality into a persuasive argument. This goes beyond knowing it. His views concerning knowledge rest in the limited capacity of humans to understand the external world and the difficulty to articulate such perceptions. Thus, the Sophists emphasized that the discourses we use to describe the perceptions of things become a thing in themselves, a sentiment that will be echoed later in poststructuralist theory (Nerczuk 48–47). The use of logos and mythos aided in creating an ethos for an individual who harnesses rhetoric as well the character of an audience and society at large. A collective consciousness is both tapped into and constructed by the sophistic use of popular discursive themes. These connections impact ethos as constantly in flux, reflecting a more contemporary philosophical concern with identity and subjectivity. This foretells examinations of being that turn into its critiques as notions of becoming are emphasized. Nerczuk states that the views of the Sophists are grounded in their interest in language, leading them to “examine the ontological status of a discourse (logos), the conditions determining the process of communication,” and the impact of various words, labels, and symbols. Reality or orthoepeia in this construction is something that is constantly changing based on the actions of individuals who harness the power of words. Thus, an objective static reality and identity is not only unrealistic for the Sophists but undesirable. Their intention is to teach others that such notions can be changed through expressive faculties (48). Time is also important, as kairos plays a large role in their formulation of rhetoric. Over time and through symbolic deliberation entire worldviews can

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shift. John Poulakos notes that a sophistic understanding of kairos expects an understanding of the ways in which prior knowledge of language may not always be useful and that traditional categories of meaning are almost always subject to shift (Sophistical 62). A specific context in both place and time is required for meaning to be constructed. If we look at the development, starting in the early 1900s, of communication models, we see a slow shift from linear, interactional, and transactional models to more holistic models that incorporate the historical, cultural, and social contexts based on fields of experience, which are left out of previous models (Turner and West 9–14). The context changes from place to place and over time. Kairos is important not only in use during a specific oration or display but also as a contextual element that plays a role in the assumptions of truth. Sophistic use of the hetton-kreitton as interchangeable, dissoi logoi, and kairos disrupt constructions of truth that remain durable over time and context (J. Poulakos, Sophistical 71). The rhetorical theory associated with the Sophists is based in language use and the ways in which we actively shift our notions of reality through symbolic deliberation. Like the structuralists, they noted the power of words to reflect reality, and like the poststructuralists, they were less concerned with the durability of the truth and more with the ways in which its structure changed over time. They were more concerned with how this framework was maintained and could be used to arrive at new and possibly contradictory conclusions. However, the Sophists were not only concerned with the musing of the mind and the ability to think abstractly about reality according to symbols. They were also highly concerned with the role the body played in cultivating individual skill and public consciousness. Ancient rhetoric through the Sophists developed on the go in the Greek Athenian polis but not necessarily only within its borders. It is a physical practice that took place in numerous sites and contexts. One common location was gymnasiums, where physical engagement, sport, and competition encountered oration, philosophy, and education. The body was central, yet it was always connected to symbols and concepts concerning material truths, which revealed themselves through an understanding of audience and space. This entailed an intentional tension and commitment to produce and embrace a shared outcome. Training and learning are shared practices that over time were separated to favor the machinations of the mind as separated from the workings of the body (Descartes 4). Rhetorical training occurred alongside sport as the body represented a corporeal site of theoretical engagement. This aspect enables us to incorporate our thinking about cycling as a rhetorical site of engagement. I now turn to some of the corporeal functions and contexts of sophistic rhetorical theory.

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Sophistic Rhetoric and Physicality The Sophists used and taught that the articulation of words could be a way to speak back to power. In this regard, it was taught alongside martial arts and other physical forms of competition. Language was harnessed by the accused as a form of symbolic defense in the courts of law in Athenian society at the time, an element of forensic rhetoric. Whereas the deliberative genre of rhetoric describes forms of public persuasion such as mobilization for military defense. Rhetoric itself was seen as a form of protection from material threats and was taught in gymnasiums alongside athletic and martial skills such as boxing. The physical elements of vocalization, oration, and breathing while standing in the presence of public audiences and gesturing make rhetoric a physical practice. The material, bodily, symbolic, and conceptual aspects of rhetoric separate it from other forms of thought and connect it to practices such as cycling. A physical presence at some point is required to engage and communicate through cycling as it does when speaking. Rhetorical theory as it arises through oration presents itself as a theoretical corporeality. Like thought itself, the body is necessary to produce. The ways in which sophistic rhetorical theory as a subject of study moves conceptually and physically help us understand the elements of communication involved in cycling. Like riding, the Sophists as itinerant scholars moved physically and developed an understanding of reality that shifted depending on social and physical contexts. The movement itself is a product of and a commentary on its context. When we change physical positions, places, and stations, we alter ways of knowing based on our previous movements. Barry Brummett, in Sporting Rhetoric: Performance, Games, & Politics, states that through performative aspects sports, athletics, “and games have their rhetorical effects in popular culture” (11). They state that to be an athlete you must perform that identity and present it to others. This rhetorical dimension can be applied to many acts that are athletic or even physical. The truth is embodied in the performance of the orator whose bodily engagement alone is involved in a process of articulation. As roads and vehicles allow humans to move through physical space in particular directions, rhetorical theory is dependent on an initial reading of a context that is continuously shifting. Cycling entails pedaling and motoring toward destinations, often emphasizing the ride as much as the arrival, enjoying the curves in the road or the scenery between, while Sophistry seeks to move toward truths, transforming reality-concepts according to the rules of the situation, participants, and place. Competition is an aspect of public articulation and many bodily pursuits such as cycling. As I prepare to compete in a mountain biking race, the event calls for endurance, stamina, skills in downhill ascents, and strength in uphill sections. The public performance pits myself against others in age groups

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and in elite classes for prizes and cultural capital. The daily act and joy of riding are funneled through competitive values. Hierarchy, respect, honor, and suffering are all necessary when contemplating and preparing for the competition. Brummett notes in the opening pages of “Rhetorical Dimensions of Popular Culture” that popular culture is inherently rhetorical, acting as the “cutting edge of culture’s instruments that shape people into what they are” (xxi, 28). As I watch cycling events and read texts on the subject such as this, I am involved in this discussion and reintroduced to the practice as a symbolic structure. Ultimately, we watch, read, and ride, becoming those that ride through identification. The body is not a “natural, trans-historical object,” it is socially produced and discursively defined as a product of culture (Malson 45, 49). Susan Bordo furthers this notion by suggesting, “The body that we experience and conceptualize is always mediated by constructs, associations,” and cultural images (35). John Poulakos identifies the rhetoric of the Sophists as distinct from other forms of rhetorical thinking. He describes their perspectives as possessing elements of opportunity, circumstance, playfulness, competition, possibility, and exhibition. The opportunity provided by kairos and context directs one toward a mobile conception of truth (Sophistical 56–57). The elements of play and movement are aspects of competitive displays in which various arguments, despite being socially weaker or improper, can lead to social acceptance, to the possibility for others to be persuaded by culture and for culture to persuade others. Sophistic rhetorical theory is a perspective of thinking and a praxis for change that occurs through corporeal engagements with material worlds. Before Plato’s Lyceum and Aristotle’s Academy, the Sophists taught the practice of rhetoric alongside athletic training. With a variety of social, physical, and political outcomes in mind, the Sophists formally connected thought, communication, and bodily engagement. Greek gymnasiums were a civic space of learning, instruction, and deliberation. They were large spaces used by the community. The Sophists turned these sites into a space of rhetorical instruction. They often contained numerous rooms where mostly young males would gather to engage in learning rhetoric while training in jumping, wrestling, and boxing as well as other intellectual and physical pursuits. All of this was intended to cultivate a more well-rounded citizen. Engagement in the public sphere occurred physically through presence and conceptually through the ability to articulate perceived truths and cultural values. In gymnasiums, rhetoric, sport, and movement formed a corporeal approach to learning. Debra Hawhee examines the pedagogy of the Sophists in relation to physical training. The physical and educational practices that intertwined in gymnasiums led to “the development of rhetoric as a bodily art: an art learned, practiced, and performed by and with the body as well as the mind” (144).

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Cycling is a way of thinking and a mode of communication based on movement. It presents itself as a corporeal model of engagement with socially produced and materially constructed spaces. Similarly, for the Sophists, symbols acted as vehicles to provide movement between possible truth-destinations. These symbolic utterances and actions typically entailed a performing body to produce persuasion through gestures. From pedagogical pursuits of training, the epistemological engagements with ideas, to the rhetorical outcomes of persuasive messages, the Sophists were concerned with thinking according to the faculties of the mind; they were also concerned with the importance of the body as a site of learning, teaching, and production. Isocrates stated in Antidosis that rhetorical and athletic training or epimeleias were “parallel and complementary” (Hawhee 182). For the Sophist the truth was something engrained in kairos as well as the actions of one’s body. The motorcycle and bicycle must be in motion to be functional and maintain balance. A cycling ontology is one of corporeal engagement and movement, a live and continuous act. Both subjects teach us that commentary is never without rhythm and process. Movement, bodily engagement, repetition, and communication are elements of cycling as well as sophistic rhetorical theory. The movement of bodies through spaces on cycles is a form of communication. To move in this manner is to articulate a series of messages through nonverbal utterances that entail an initial reading by a rider. This is followed by a potential reading of others as an audience. As a form of pedagogy, physical practices require mental engagement and activate the body as a site of learning. To control one’s breath while speaking is akin to engaging the mind while pedaling. It is after all, the mind that activates speech and pedaling (Hawhee 147). Whether walking, skating, cycling, or riding, quotidian utterances such as these impact our social and physical worlds. Once more, within the notion of a public sphere such nonverbal articulations are meaningful and politically charged. The spaces in which these performances occur is already imbued with meaning, which acts as a tablet for various ephemeral inscriptions. Epideictic displays are performed live and read through mediations of space, image, video, and sound. When we ride, we send movement-based messages through everyday environments, adding meaning to the paths we create and follow. To ride on two wheels is to engage with the public concerning various societal norms and values. Furthermore, the ways in which we represent, depict, and frame our interpretations of such forms of movement express even more about our shared notions of reality. The Sophists concentrated on the performance of rhetoric as entailing the repetitious acts of public speaking. Preparation entailed training, rehearsal, and practice that had similarities with sports. The philosophical and rhetorical arts require a corporeal attention in the achievement of expertise. The necessities of the everyday environments of capitalist modes of production and

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survival, which are heavily influenced by conflict and war, require mobility, while athletic and intellectual pursuits are thoroughly separated, yet cycling contains elements of each. It occurs in the everyday and requires athletic ability. The epistemological aspects of physical training were not lost on the educational programs introduced by the Sophists. They “emphasized the materiality of learning, the corporeal acquisition of rhetorical movements through rhythm, repetition, and response.” As a result, the body was an intensive site of learning “trafficked through and by neurons, muscles, and organs.” In this regard Hawhee continues that rhetorical education exceeded the transmission of ideas and the “boundaries of words” (158). Such an approach exhibits an awareness not only of the power of language and ideas but also their limits. We are only beginning to articulate the ways in which we learn and communicate through our bodies in Western intellectual discourse. Communication studies is grounded in the work of the Sophists and today reflects this by attending to both symbolic structures in communication as well as more embodied modes of learning discussed by performance studies and nonverbal communication. The fields of critical pedagogy, critical performance pedagogy, and place-based pedagogy also share connections with the pedagogical aspects of the Sophists. Nevertheless, the transmission of ideas to passive and placeless bodies comes to dominate Western education. This is summed up adequately in Freire’s notion of the “banking model,” which he proposes an active critique of in the form of critical pedagogy or problem-solving education (109). In this setting learners and educators cocreate knowledge by attending to the political, cultural, and material conditions in which learning takes place. The learning achieved through sophistic rhetorical pedagogy is distinctly corporeal. As we engage in rhetoric, we are learning about the connections between concepts and material. Rhetorical theory as devised by the Sophists functions philosophically at the level of praxis. It engages material contexts and audiences in the effort to first recognize a situation and then effect its change. A rhetoric of cycling functions similarly at the levels of thought, articulation, and action. By preparing and learning to ride, contemplating our movements, and performing them in public, we not only envision a future but actively map a plan to achieve its reality through cycling articulations. The productions of behavior that occur in formal learning are emphasized in this sophistic perspective on education. The Cartesian split in Western learning practices stands out in opposition to the holistic approach of the Sophists, while contemporary notions concerned with practices as a way of operating remind us of a certain unification of bodily and intellectual machinations. Hawhee notes that the Sophists systematized their arts according to kairos, as the right moment called on the application of certain rules (20). As in athletic sports, particular maneuvers should only be performed in

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relation to the movements of others and environmental factors. The author continues that when the right moment arises, it would be time “to put into practice a repertoire of devices or techniques” (20). To put into practice aptly approximates Isocrates’s phrasing concerning kairos. As Isocrates contends, “No system of knowledge can teach kairotic response; rather such response emerges out of repeated encounters with difference” (Hawhee 152). Hand movements or cheironomein as well as the use of posture have often been discussed in relation to effective public speaking and nonverbal communication. The reduction of nonverbal communication to emblematic gestures to make a point while speaking can be seen in the elocution movement of the eighteenth century. Cheironomein was also the term used for shadowboxing, a form of pugilistic training. Boxing was an important athletic pursuit in Greek gymnasiums and one of the original Olympic events. Sports and the creation of the Olympics have been celebrated, resuscitated, and sustained in Western culture as a hallmark of democratic opportunity, a way to enter the public sphere and compete with others for excellence as well as social status. Boxing with an opponent entails a nonverbal dialog, a back-and-forth between opponents or sparing partners, much like a debate in which movements are relational. Shadowboxing is a technique where a lone boxer rehearses their movements, jabs, punches, ducks, and leans, observing them and reacting with their own shadow. Cheiromoia became associated with training in rhetorical delivery, as young men learned to combine the force of their gestures with the dictation of their speech. Delivery, the aspect of rhetoric that deals with voice, gesture, and other elements of presentation, was the last rhetorical canon most obviously concerned with corporeality (Hawhee 156). The other canons discussed by Aristotle that precede delivery include invention, arrangement, style, and memory (Warren and Fassett 23). The physical aspects of rhetorical persuasion turn contemplation into practice. Rhetorical theory deals with contemplating the nature of society, entering the materiality of it, and altering that nature with others. Elements of play, competition, opportunity, and exhibition, as John and Takis Poulakos note, are like athletic and sports frameworks but also performances directed toward action and pedagogy (Classical 63–64). Riding cycles changes one’s perception of reality based on movement. It influences the social spaces riders move through, and as riders arrive, they take this movement with them becoming their own rhetorical performance. Butler’s notion of performativity recognizes identity as a “stylized repetition of acts” (140). Reactions can be objectified and transported, but rehearsal and training can hone bodies to perform in fluctuating contexts and in responsive ways. The repetitions of pedaling and the motions of leaning motorcycles teach one to maintain direction and control while in constant negotiation of numerous bodily and spatial

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variables. Bodily rhetorical training is larger than its ability to transport messages. Such a corporeal sensibility has been sidelined and separated from the machinations of the mind. This has been prevalent in Western philosophy and education for centuries, yet rhetoric as attached to the practical and corporeal practices of public speaking gives us an opportunity to revisit their separation. While the initial concentration on mental capacity sets a foundation for Western consciousness, the Sophists represent a moment where body epistemologies and rhetorical impacts are central to learning practices. There is a choreography of learning that comments on how bodies and spaces play indelible roles in how we learn and communicate. Cyclists enter collective life and comment on the public sphere, articulating a bodily writing in the process that also uses cycles to think, communicate, and bring about change. Sophistic Rhetorical Territory The spatial context of any form of writing influences what is written. Ways of moving comment on the structures in which they traverse. To discuss rhetoric in any capacity is to evoke the historical structure in which it arises. An awareness of the ways in which dominant structures form the basis for forms of exclusion must be present in any discussions concerning more inclusive interpretations. The marginalized body is partially a product of sophistic dismissal, which is followed by numerous exclusions. Sophistic rhetorical theory offers paths of opening rhetoric to more inclusive territory. The rhetorical functions of the cycling body and the ways in which cycling has functioned in the past for people of various societal positionalities are just one example of this territory. The Sophists were outsiders situated within the hostile context of exclusive Athenian society. They were noncitizens of the polis, the civic social public space they helped formulate (J. Poulakos, Sophistical 16). In this regard, poststructuralist and postcolonial paradigms encourage contemporary readers and critics to view culture in a similar manner, as both representative of cultural perspectives that are hostile and dismissive of certain forms of knowledge and practice in favor of others that become dominant. This dismissal is often directed toward those that are considered outside of the central power structure. Such moments must be recognized as a structuring lens peppering all that is subsequently known concerning the history of various subjects and even history itself. The notion of prejudice based on skin color in the context of Eurocentricity and white privilege is not necessarily evident in the ancient world; however, Indigenous displacement, foreign oppression, slavery, ethnocentrism, and female exclusion are very much a part of ancient Greek culture. Such positioning is the foundation for the retroactive pursuit of white normativity and

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male domination established by European-centric nations such as England, Germany, France, and the United States. Such traditions painstakingly return to the ancient Greek moment as a continuation through Roman and European renaissance. The continuity of such thought is important but also serves exclusionary outcomes. Slaves, women, and the foreign born were not granted citizenship as the context of formal exclusion based on structural political forms is the foundation in which sophistic rhetoric arises. All the notable Sophists were considered foreigners and therefore excluded from enjoying the privilege of the citizen class of Athenians, yet they were privileged as males within the Hellenic world and granted audiences due to their societal positionality and skill. In this context, we encounter not only the struggles of outsiders to have a public voice but also the context in which they succeeded. The Sophists represent this dichotomy, and we can see it in their reception by the citizen class of philosophers, notably Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle. Such a treatment can be seen in the Roman rhetorical views of Cicero, Quintilian, and Trigathor, while being upheld by countless Western scholars after. This treatment and codification of their thinking produced a hegemonic structure, which is difficult to disrupt as every symbolic utterance only reifies the narrative and its corresponding perspectives. John Poulakos refers to the Sophists as “resident aliens” accepted in some places and denied in others (Sophistical 17). Because of this, they were less restricted to the provincialism that marred specific locations. They taught multiple subjects to a variety of audiences in various contexts; nevertheless, as I have shown, their collective work constitutes a shared perspective that revolves around the attention to language and its role in constructing situational truths. Much like philosophers, many shared this sensibility, while specializing in differing interests, “arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, music, argumentation, linguistic research,” and history. As outsiders and travelers, they developed an understanding of rhetoric based on their experiences in multiple contexts, situations, and cultures. They saw real opportunities to effect change in political life, and as teachers they molded the perspectives of individuals in society (J. Poulakos, Sophistical 18–22). Glenn notes that as the Sophists were regarded as central and almost absent from the “rhetorical map, historiographers began practicing the crafts of resurrection, animation, and even ventriloquism to re-present them” (8). To see past their portrayal and small portions of texts attributed to them, Glenn recommends in Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity through the Renaissance (1997) that we can “continue to historicize and theorize, remapping our notions of rhetorical theoria and praxis.” As we replace the traditional map of rhetoric as “masculine performance” with new remappings that “better suit our needs,” we should remember that “historical narratives are primarily motivated actions to do something,” as these new maps should be (Glenn

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15–16). It is in this effort that I map sophistic rhetoric and utilize it to articulate the ways in which cycling functions. Kathleen E. Welch promotes an opening of rhetorical theory in her text Electric Rhetoric (1999), asserting a need within the academy to allow scholars the opportunity to move and think outside of the modernist walls that confine sophistical rhetorical theory. This is community action, a way for “electric rhetoric” to be the “next rhetoric,” a “third sophistic” that “will come after postmodernism” (Welch 136). Similarly, Susan C. Jarratt in Rereading the Sophists: Classical Rhetoric Refigured (1991) recalls the ways in which the sophistic themes of writing and “monument” are devalued in relation to speech, memory, and philosophy, representing the “other” to orthodox constructions of philosophy and classic rhetorical theory. She argues that Plato uses these hierarchies to set a “trap of logocentrism,” never allowing them to move outside of the binaries of the “the Platonic leaf” (7). The Sophists are positioned by Poulakos as the triadic development of Greek rhetoric and consciousness along with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Yet their ideas are built upon, while saving the conditions of, the initial defensive and dismissive readings. Many feminist scholars have worked toward creating a more inclusive rhetorical tradition. Karlyn Campbell works to include women in their rightful place in the rhetorical tradition, while Barbara Biesecker has noted that this inclusion only reifies the validity of the exclusionary structure of the patriarchal discourse of Western rhetoric. Meanwhile Glenn aims to regender the rhetorical tradition, quoting Blair and Kahl who state “restorying (on whatever grounds—gender, class, or race, for example) can take place only within a reevaluation of rhetorical theories in general” (9–10). In this regard, the exclusionary aspects within the Western rhetorical tradition are not an accident, and subsequently their dismantling should be intentional as well. The word rhetor is used in Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey (900–700 BCE), which entails some of the earliest references to rhetoric and its developing themes. Although women were excluded from formal rhetorical training and political discourse, in the works of Homer, females were acknowledged as “eloquent rhetors who participate in the also-fictional public domain: both Andromache and Helen pronounce their personal response to the Trojan War” (Glenn 20). In Homer’s worlds, we can read the role public displays of verbal eloquence played in Greek society. Psappho or Sappho of Lesbos (600 BCE) is “the only woman in all antiquity whose literary productions placed her on the same level as the greatest male poets” and her literary texts were some of the few to present women in their “full humanity” (Glenn 20–21). Recuperative work is necessary to read through hegemonic structures and shift our thinking to what was present. In doing so, we can come to understand the ways our own contemporary lenses function to produce

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similar obfuscations. In turn, we can better represent not only the worlds that have existed but also the ones we would like to see. We do not know much about the education of girls and women in the fourth century BCE as the absence of evidence remains an impediment to knowledge. Women in rhetoric must be read through the lens of gendered domination. Aspasia and Diotima represent visible examples of women rhetoricians that can be considered Sophists. While the scholarship that we have attributed to them is scant, their presence in the contemporary rhetorical canon is far greater than their textual territory. Because Aspasia of Miletus is noted as close to the Sophists “both in proximity and ideology,” she is erased even more so from mainstream philosophical history (Glenn 8). At the same time, it is through her connection to sophistry that we can engage in her voice at all. Discussed by Plato’s Socrates and others as exceptional teachers and thinkers, these women function within the sophistic rhetorical canon. Their role uplifts the tradition immensely, etching out a space that is more inclusive and dynamic, based on their perspectives and impact. The mobility and presence of women through history is a visible rhetoric, a representation within a hostile context that speaks volumes to structures of sex-based domination. National, ethnic, and gendered issues need to be worked into the very fabric of rhetorical education to create a more viable logos (Welch 129). Sophists were outsiders to the citizenry of the polis, and their understanding of rhetoric was formed through a colonial situation of oppression and developed through travel and instances of cultural interaction. We find the voice of women and noncitizens through their work. In this regard, we can try to locate through a discourse of appropriation the achievements of Indigenous, gendered, and raced forms of knowledge that are intentionally marginalized. Rhetoric must include these perspectives. How do we recuperate a tradition situated as the foundations for modernist structures of oppression and silencing? I argue that its appropriation is an affirmation of objectivist stances that produce paradigms of cultural erasure. Welch asks how classic rhetorical theory and race function in the contemporary sphere and what it means to race rhetoric. These questions, she states, acknowledge that these structures have been “constructed to make nonwhites and white women invisible,” which provides a fragmentation of possible stances of resistance and unification (Welch 128). Thus, an open rhetoric is critical, experimental, and expansive. If we look at Western thought through the lens of the sophistic rhetorical tradition and its treatment, we can see a potential and sustained self-critique of the very canon it sits within. As we connect this type of thinking with poststructuralist theory, as I do in the next chapter, we can create a unification, spanning millennia, of forms of resistance. Frank M. Snowden in Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks (1983) examines the possibilities of race by tracing amicable relations between Blacks and whites from Egyptian to Roman

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times. He writes, “There was clear cut respect among Mediterranean peoples for Ethiopians and their way of life. And, above all, the ancients did not stereotype all Blacks” (59). The Sophists were sidelined because they were paid for their craft. This was used to deem them uninterested in the discovery of ultimate truths. Their broad group cohesion enabled them to constitute a more open and inclusive intellectual group widely dispersed across nations, ethnicities, identities, and genders. In the process, they developed a very cosmopolitan and public identity that embodied these characteristics. This, as noted, is the hallmark of education in participatory societies and the liberal arts. Because they traveled and engaged in numerous social settings, including public speeches and teaching, they developed an interculturalsensibility. Because they were outsiders from occupied territories and transient thinkers, we must recuperate and search out within the writings of predominantly Athenian citizen philosophers their unique and lasting contributions. The origins of rhetoric initially occurred in colonial situations in Sicily and are based in a history of Indigenous eradication and displacement. The Indigenous Scathians displaced by Greek colonists throughout southern Italy necessitate the need for the development of rhetoric by Crisias. The story of the Sophists gives us an internal jumping-off point to critique European- and male-dominant discourse and open rhetoric to include the necessary voices and perspectives of differing subject positionalities. In turn, we can see more of the structure through what it negates, expanding rhetoric in the process and applying the intellectual and practical elements offered by more traditional rhetorical ideas. By integrating the thoughts gleaned from texts only a few were privileged to write, publish, and read, we can see a much broader scope of rhetoric at the heart of the foundation of the discipline. All that is written afterward contends with the sophistic foundations of rhetoric and the philosophical appropriation that occurred afterward. A more inclusive rhetoric begins in the context in which the Sophists emerge. Their art is one born out of resistance on occupied land and developed through travel and education. Furthermore, their desire to bring about change through discourse and theory helps us develop the tools to see forms of oppression based on symbolic structures. CONCLUSION The Sophists are the first to articulate the theory and practice of rhetoric, providing the foundations of the public sphere and the roles of public deliberation. First devised in a colonial situation to challenge oppressive situations through symbolic means, rhetoric emerged as a peaceful tactic to resist

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oppressive structures. Informed by the matrix of cultural influences from African and Asian civilizations present in this context, they go on to make their mark in the region. As the Sophists formed in the Greek colonies in what are today southern Italy, they traveled throughout the Hellenic world teaching numerous subjects. As paid orators, some of the first schools in the Western world began as a network of scholars surrounding their teaching. Through teaching and oration, they established their reputations as intellectuals concerned with the material outcomes of social situations based on public deliberation. They were examples of their major subject and were often challenged and celebrated; moving frequently, they found a sustained audience, livelihood, and influence in Athens. As outsiders they were not part of the privileged class of citizens but also not confined to the norms and expectations of the citizenry. Their outside status and relativist ways of thinking are inseparable from these elements, as is the hostile treatment they received from Plato and other Athenian philosophers (Barrett 31). The Sophists formed a rhetorical perspective centered around the functions of language, and they embodied the role of symbols by effecting material change and consciousness through discursive action. Their movements and corporeal attention offer much to understanding public forms of movement, such as cycling. Ultimately, their body of work can be drawn together as a cohesive paradigmatic perspective. This perspective, like more contemporary poststructuralist theory, functions at the intersections of language, material, context, and movement, which is the subject of the next chapter.

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Cycling requires motion to remain balanced, which entails constantly adjusting to spatial and social conditions. The Sophists saw rhetoric as a process of articulation within a constantly unfolding dialog that moved toward truth but avoided remaining there for very long. When we engage in rhetorical discourse, we come to understand the nature of our shared worlds, and when everyday practices such as cycling are viewed as symbolic, values are put on display. Similarly, poststructuralist theory moves along a network of meaning to expose the ways in which reality concepts are formed through structures of opposition. Poststructuralist theory is an extension of sophistic rhetorical theory in that they both challenge objectivist stances and frame various truths as symbolically and socially constructed. In this chapter, I apply this discussion to our subject matter, cycling, to better understand its rhetorical and theoretical functions. Along the way, I continue to attend to recently conducted cycling performances including races, building projects, and extended rides. Through riding and building, contexts are revealed as material conditions. In riding, weather, traffic, policy, gear, distance, and other factors come into consideration, and in building, cost, space, competency, time, and so on are considered. By looking at these physical acts as symbolic alongside poststructuralist theory as a method of criticism, I hope to offer a framework to read nonverbal discourse and use it as a form of inquiry. In the previous chapter, I revisited the work of the Sophists and examined the structure of classic rhetoric and Western philosophy through which we read them. The recuperative work necessary to read the Sophists encourages the opening of the rhetorical tradition. By discussing poststructuralist theory as an extension of sophistic rhetorical theory, I hope to also widen the territory of poststructuralist thought. The Situationist International and the avant-garde tradition of political philosophical thought as well as the various critical and 179

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creative practices associated with these movements, including the Dadaists, the Surrealists, and others, are positioned here as links between the two. Foucault in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970) states that language functions to bring the world into being and “must, therefore, be studied itself as a thing” (35). Foucault notes that the power of texts exists in their ability to subordinate material worlds to a world of words. The text is dominant in his formation as things come to have meaning within the relational structure in which they exist. By examining any structure, whether written or physical, we can better understand the roles the components within play. Just as “the experience of language belongs to the same archaeological network as the knowledge of things and nature,” the experiences of those moments and practices that become studied as a language can be explored (41). Nevertheless, we return to symbolic critique in the form of this text. Bicycling and motorcycling are ways of moving, communicating, and thinking that revolve around spatial commentary. After training for, maintaining, and riding in a motocross race at the Guam International Raceway on a Honda CRF450R, I encountered the various spaces, practices, and events that situate off-road motorcycling within society. The race itself is a display of values surrounding collective engagement in an athletic and technical pursuit with sponsors, volunteers, and participants. The maintained dirt track featuring straightaways, sharp and wide turns, tabletop kickers, woopty doo’s, step downs, and a series of other obstacles all entail their own unique approach and skill to successfully negotiate. The track stands in relation to the public road nearby that I and others use to arrive at the event. Small teams and individuals fill the parking lot with trucks, motorcycles, and trailers, setting up tents with workstations and coolers. The race consisted of a single twenty-minute heat in which riders complete as many laps around a track as possible. Times, photos, and ranking based on numbers and membership to a central body are all posted online, producing the structure of motorcycle race culture in relation to other physical and electronic spaces. Foucault notes that knowledge and discourse are inseparable. “Everything about which we can speak in a discursive formation is knowledge; knowledge is generated by discursive practice” (Foss et al. 195). A hallmark of structuralism is the organizing of material reality as a symbolic system. Similarly, the discourse on bicycles and motorcycles as well as the maintenance of them to perform these tasks are aspects of what it means to ride. Storing, insuring, maintaining, fueling, and transporting the motorcycle object are part of riding. On my way to the dirt track, I reflect on the type of motorcycling I am more familiar with, street motorcycling. The road I use to ride to work on a modified stunt bike, a Kawasaki Ninja 636 sportbike, passes near the



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track. The physical sites I visit and traverse through become an organizing principle that functions like a language (199). This is examined in the form of Foucault’s genealogy, which “rejects the constitutive or foundational role of the subject” as the subject is informed by “discursive practices” (200). The track is distinct from these sites of production and serves its own purpose. These specific riding and building experiences serve as a backdrop for this final chapter on cycling and poststructuralist theory. Ultimately, Foucault notes that “knowledge and discourse could not be separated from the operation of power” as “one can never be outside power” (204–5). In this authorship and reading, the two stations are combined in a performance of critique. Cycling is a visceral reminder of industrialization. It reflects a moment in time when notions of modernity were taking conceptual and physical shape. It continues to be emblematic of technological progress while supporting a desire to return—much like the perspectives of the Sophists who represent a moment in time before the turn toward the metaphysical philosophies of Socrates and Plato. The conventionalization of this paradigm is linked to that of modernity entailing notions such as technological progression, cultural differentiation, and others. In this parallel between and the power of Platonism, hegemonic structures of modernity, and the dominance of automobility, we find a resistant comingling of sophistry, poststructuralist theory, and cycling. Mobility has long been attached to communication, as bodies and physical spaces were the first mediums of communication. In turn, the material sites of importance, physical places, and material bodies, like the signifiers within a structure, become sites of meaning and power. Thus, to traverse space is an act of communication, and to arrive at a destination is to communicate meaning through presence. Derrida’s differánce attends to this space between sites of meaning. The theorist follows the links between signifiers that hold structures of language together. What occurs in this space is telling of the ways in which symbols find meaning over time. The method of deconstruction is an attempt to examine the abyss between structural signifiers. In this endless process, one can potentially disrupt the power of the logos behind a word or symbol, what Derrida refers to as the “violence of the letter” (Grammatology 99–101). Bicycling through collective spaces is indicative of this structural history. Before the advent of much that surrounds it, such as automobiles and highways, cycling is now a reminder of these origins as well as its questioning. The practice of bicycling developed over two hundred years ago as the result of industrialization helped produce the public roads and spaces now associated with automobility. Any representation of roads and highways references this aspect of its larger history. This space also produces bicycling as a product of industrialization and contemporary conditions of transportation. Each form allows us to interrogate the processes of structural signification.

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Poststructuralist theory functions as a form of critical examination, and bicycling, from this perspective, encourages us to rethink various processes of modernization such as pace and sustainability. The process of signification refers to a series of associations attached to signifiers. In this chain of symbols, a particular reality-concept is constructed, and rhetoric is at the heart of this process. The Sophists represent a moment when natural philosophy stemming from a pre-Socratic tradition takes a metaphysical turn. Rhetoric becomes relegated for the most part to a specialized area of action. Reducing rhetorical theory to a practice of oration as opposed to a way of thinking is a lasting effect of this turn; however, it has long been recognized as a utilitarian skill central to the formations of a participatory society. Nevertheless, it has subsequently been overshadowed by philosophy for its theoretical merit until the 1960s when structuralists and then poststructuralist thinkers continue some of their respective themes. With the poststructuralists we see a renewed attention to the roles symbols and language play in determining thought. The Sophists showed that notions of reality can be re-created through language, producing circumstances and material conditions that can be further examined through poststructuralism. The Sophists represent a disruption of philosophy according to Socrates and Plato and as a theoretical counterpoint they have much in common with Deleuze and Guattari’s figure of the nomad and de Certeau’s bricoleur (J. Poulakos, Sophistical 25). These figures share attributes with the derivisté of the Situationist International, Lefebvre’s rhythmanalyst, and Derrida’s deconstructionist. All these figures are based on physical and metaphysical constructions that move deliberately in relation to permeable networks, such as Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome, the structure of language of Derrida, de Certeau’s everyday life, Lefebvre’s lived space, and the quotidian spectacle of the Situationist International. Such constructions and the conceptualizations of the systems they move through have much in common with the itinerant Sophists—because they developed a way of thinking based partially on the physical movement and the cultural notions of truth encountered through it. They also share similarities with cycling, in both its human-powered and motorized forms, moving between sites, making meaning through riding. The structural critiques of the postmodern era, often noted as the critical and the linguistic turn, connected to structuralism and communication studies, can be viewed as continuations of sophistic rhetorical theory. These connections help us understand the various ways we move according to structural contexts. In doing so, we contribute to and influence society through the rhetorical notion of the public sphere. This includes those that occur physically, such as bicycling and motorcycling. In each instance noted, persistent and contextual movement resulting in structural critique unifies these approaches, concepts, and practices.



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The poststructuralist theoretical perspective, much like the sophistic, is not necessarily unified; however, there are many obvious themes that bring the thinkers from each camp together. These aspects are almost always grounded in movement, flux, and change in relation to the conditions of structures. They reveal themselves as the products of tension with their own circumstances. Just as we never forget how to ride a bicycle, we can come to understand a poststructuralist theoretical stance when we encounter one, but it is more difficult to define what that stance is objectively. It is based on a posture within a setting that requires recognition and relational movement. Once underway, the movements of bodies on bicycles and critiques of discursive systems sustains themselves through motion between specific sites of power. For the Sophists, the audience always partially determines the outcome of any debate and for poststructuralists, such as Derrida, the author is determined more by their reading. Derrida declares the death of the subject, upending notions of a shared metric, in this case, provided by the author (Grammatology 8–9). I advocate a combination of authorship and reading, returning the symbolic to the active processes of signification. In this, we might envision a rhetoric that is embodied and enacted through practice. Like Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the nomad, a philosophical postulate, in contradiction to royal conceptions of metaphysical theory, sophistic rhetorical theory arises as an internal critique of an external reality. Similarly, the nomad reterritorializes space by passing through this perspective, experiencing an interiorization of external elements. For de Certeau, the mobile ordinary practitioner makes do, according to the strategies of place, etching out a temporary space in the process of movement (xiv–xxi). Early rhetorical theory presented by the Sophists shifts to recognize numerous sites of truth and power. Framed through the symbolic negotiations of language, these sites partially determine thought and action. The poststructuralist, like the Sophist, reflects the shared critical perspectives of questioning, becoming, and relative thinking. One in which objective structural truths are actively avoided. This emphasizes the roles of language in the contemplation of more subjective truths. Subsequently, rhetorical theory and poststructuralist thought share a history of viewing the public sphere as a shifting site of power. This history encounters our shared physical spaces as well as what it means to comment on these spaces through public communication and movement. Cycling is a unique form of rhetorical display that promotes specific ways of thinking, learning, and communicating. The structure of symbols that creates a discourse influences the corporeal performances referenced. Cycling plays out as a symbolic mode of operation within a context, and poststructuralist theory is helpful in examining almost anything as a text, including cycling. Sophistic rhetorical theory is a theoretical precursor to

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poststructuralist theory as they both allude to metaphysical sites of truth and power while emphasizing language as the primary site of meaning. Sophistic rhetorical theory confronts the challenges of uncovering the hidden by bringing them into the open and unpacking their relationship with other structural elements. As we dismantle the acts of riding and examine how and why we move in the ways we do, we encounter a subject that is on the go. This destination-concept or conditions of truth is a place we can get close to but never fully own. Sophistic rhetorical theory, poststructuralist thinking, and riding cycles move toward truths while emphasizing the ways in which the journey itself brings us nearer to our shared reality-concepts. In poststructuralist theory this journey is best articulated as the method of deconstruction. Derrida notes that the appellation or symbolic logic of a word is a space of engagement, one where events take on meanings and transport messages. Drawing from sophistic rhetoric and its extension in poststructuralist theory, I have traced some of the movements of the symbolic cyclist as a way of knowing space through movement. Riding cycles makes a series of nonverbal statements concerning our shared conceptions of physical spaces and is subsequently a way of understanding reality. Poststructuralist theory, often attributed to the work of Roland Barthes, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Cixous, among others, recognizes and tracks the movements and meanings of symbols within a variety of reality-contexts that are structured like languages. Cycling is a practice that creates a nonverbal trace through an ongoing arrangement of spatial and symbolic locations that can be examined, like many others, as public acts of articulation and even writing. Sophistic rhetorical theory shares outlooks with contemporary postmodern and poststructuralist thought, which is also placed in context as a form of dialectical resistance. These perspectives as well as the conditions in which they arise are morphological continuations of one another, just as the horse, bicycle, and motorcycle are part of the same lineage. Just as the Sophists resisted group formations in both their work and the discussion of them by scholars after, so did the poststructuralists. The thinkers that I identify in this chapter at times resisted being coupled into this category; nevertheless, the label poststructuralist extends and critiques the themes established in structuralism and often brings together thinkers that are otherwise placed in differing traditions (Schrift 54). Like the Sophists, the poststructuralists note that an essential unaltering truth may not exist. This constitutes a critique of the structures of meaning that are created through language. The closest we can come to an objective truth is a recognition of the ways in which certain social constructions have become reified as the norm. In turn, linguistic signifiers, reified over time due to power structures, can be dismantled to undo the structural conditions and foundations that



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seem to support any given notion of truth. The oft-stated postmodernism and the lesser referred to poststructuralist theory refer to similar critiques of dominant narratives that have previously been articulated and positioned as neutral (Derrida, Alibi 1). However, some of the methodological approaches of poststructuralism have been appropriated in postmodernism, overshadowing many critical elements. Postmodernism is open to various critiques in ways that differ from poststructuralist theory. Postmodernism is tied formally to dominant processes such as colonization and modernization, for example. Ziauddin Sardar and Cook-Lynn note that postmodernism merely functions as a revisioning of the themes of domination inherent in modernist thinking. Manifested in the quest to relinquish old certainties, postmodern theory reestablishes an individualism steeped in universal identity and subjectivity claims. Sardar asserts that because postmodernity is not hindered by the need to justify claims of superiority as colonialism and modernity profess, postmodernity is marked by an instrumentalism that becomes its own justification (38–39). Modernity and postmodernity are each entrenched in the frameworks of technological progress and cultural differentiation that make them necessary to dismantle. As a tool, poststructuralist theory interrogates the structures of modernity and reminds us of what is at stake in the distinctions between postmodernism and poststructuralist theory. As noted, the Western tradition retroactively connected to ancient Greece is an obfuscation of Afroasiatic cultural influences and history, notably the Egyptian, Phoenician, and Indian civilizations (Bernal, Athena I 115–119). Furthermore, the ways in which this appropriation has been harnessed for colonial and imperial ends are an aspect of intellectual control. While any extension of Western philosophy such as postmodernism and poststructuralism should be directed toward their undoing. It is necessary first to recognize this hybridity inherent and second to confront its fundamental forms of exclusion. Poststructuralist theory offers a form of examination that can be used in such a task. In this chapter, I first discuss poststructuralist theory as it builds on some of the sophistic rhetorical themes discussed in the last chapter. Sophistic rhetorical theory, in this regard, is an example of proto-poststructuralist thinking. I also discuss poststructuralist theory in relation to my own rhetorical performances as a bicyclist and motorcyclist. These performances inform my cycling subjectivity and have something to tell us about the ways in which we are spatially and symbolically constructed based on shared practices. Then I examine poststructuralist theory as a critical stance, which actively avoids rigid structures of power. To this end, I emphasize Derrida’s notion of deconstruction as a poststructuralist method of structural critique. In these sections,

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I also note how poststructuralist theory can be applied to read ways of moving or nonverbal practice in general as texts. SOPHISTIC STRUCTURAL THEMES When viewed in relation to cycling, the two paradigms of thought examined here strengthen connections between ways of moving and their theorization as ways of thinking and communicating. Physical movements such as cycling are traceable public performances that take place in informed environments. Poststructuralist thought as a longer lineage stretching back to sophistic rhetorical theory and motorcycling as iterations of bicycling and horse riding expand the intellectual territory of each activity. The lineage of cycling begins with the use of the horse and is evident in the hobby horse and other simple designs that mimic the horse-mounted riding posture. Cycling is an embodied public experience much like the functions of oration in this space. As a physical practice it is a form of writing and a way of approaching and thinking about reality. Today we are reminded of the horse through various symbolic and spatial metaphors as well as the riding of cycles as an extension. Poststructuralist theory, by paying attention to the relational aspects of symbols in a system, is an extension of sophistic rhetorical theory. In sophistic rhetorical theory there is a conceptual framework that resonates with more contemporary poststructuralist thinking as each examines how language functions in determining notions of reality. The Sophists as a group present a sustained examination of the ways in which the uses of symbols can bring certain material worlds into being. This malleability of reality is not something we can uncover objectively, as there may be no absolute truth. We can, however, move toward collective meaning through dialog, aware of our roles in producing reality. The linguistic determinations of structuralism are the basic tools of poststructuralist theory. Poststructuralist theory is based on Saussure’s perspective of structural linguists outlined in “a science of language” in his Course in General Linguistics (Schrift 43). A sign-system is comprised of a signifier or word and the signified or idea associated with the word. The GT gravel bicycle object complete with packed bike-packing bags, water bottles, and lights, a sign, in front of me represents something based on what it provides in both concept and materiality. In this regard, it is a sign-system, a symbol, an idea, and a thing. We know that as an object the bicycle can take on various material configurations. As a symbol it can also take numerous forms, and as an idea it can conjure various connotations because we are aware of the connection between the sign, signifier, and signified.



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Plato emphasized a centralized cultural perspective and attempted to uncover an overarching truth. Such objectivist stances continue in structuralist postulations. They tend to deny a historical examination of the ways in which cultural convention and modes of power create such frameworks. For Plato it was the noumenal world, the perfect godlike idea that is somehow outside of human contemplation. For Saussure, it was the structure of language, and in this assumption the specific structural truths pertaining to the Germanic and European languages his theories revolved around (Bernal, Athena I 399). The meaning of individual signifiers is comprised by their relationship with other signifiers. The principal system is thus comprised by these connections rather than an individual symbol. This breakthrough is also a continuation of sophistic rhetorical theory which further establishes the understanding of how language shapes thought and creates a relational framework that provides individual acts their meaning. Saussure along with Charles Sanders Peirce and Roman Jakobson, who was the first to use the term structuralism, notes that the linguistic definitiveness of the structure provides the framework for which we come to understand reality. This attention to the ways in which our life-worlds are constructed as a language is applied to anthropological analysis by Claude Levi-Strauss and to psychological research by Jacques Lacan. Barthes functions as a structuralist and a poststructuralist throughout his career. He attends to the ways linguistic structures are formed and function in bringing societal values into being. As the intactness of both material reality and symbolic structures is disrupted and the placeness of Saussure’s linguistic analysis is rejected for stances indicative of poststructuralist positions, language itself becomes a thing. Both paradigms reestablish language—sidelined perhaps since the itinerant Sophists—as integral to philosophy and consciousness. However, the difference between structuralism and poststructuralism is large and deals with its function as critical theory. Without the critical and historical components of poststructuralist theory, structuralist applications tend to serve positivist and essentialist ends. They are stuck, as Derrida notes, “by an entire layer, sometimes the most vacant, of its stratification, within the metaphysics” of logocentrism (Grammatology 99). Lévi-Strauss, in The Raw and the Cooked (1969), Tristes Tropiques (1967), and other works, describes the “relationship among individuals and among groups, among cultures or within the same community” in a subtle discursive “violence” (107). Through Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist narration, culture is hierarchized as “primitive,” “lost,” and depicted as small in relation to advanced, known, and large distinctions. There is a violence in these structuralist descriptions that is supported by the structure of the language and context. The vital component of recognizing the ways in which structures change according to relationships of power over

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time discards the structuralist view of metaphysical objectivity. Derrida and the poststructuralists attend to a series of turns from the work of Saussure and Levi-Strauss and others. Poststructuralist theory entails an active undoing of these structural applications, which create distant frameworks of reality that seek legitimacy in reifying the distinction between cultural hierarchies. Poststructuralist theory critiques structuralist analysis by dismantling the logical inequalities that exist within the structure. By exposing and challenging the relationships between the signifier and the material realities they reference, the nature of things can be changed. Derrida, Julia Kristeva, François Lyotard, Delueze, Guattari, Foucault, and others critique the oppositional forms of power latent in linguistic structures of power. Their development over time or diachronically, rather than how it appears synchronically or at a given moment, becomes a major and vital concern (Schrift 56–58). Poststructuralist theory also returns attention to subjectivity as discussed in the Western philosophical tradition concerning humanism and subjectivity. The awareness of the ways in which knowledge is based on exclusion is another theme of poststructuralist theory that separates it from structuralism. Sophistic rhetoric is based in skepticism, and poststructuralist theory is based on an active undoing. Each can be seen as a form of resistance to tradition, hegemonic norms, and accepted power structures. Language is the vehicle for this dismantling. Because of the ways in which this reaffirms the symbolic hierarchy of writing and language, I attempt to understand nonverbal forms of articulation such as cycling and other practices as forms of communication. These practices become intertwined with verbal structures as they are encountered, performed, and viewed by others. They can be read as a form of performance rhetoric, and the individual acts such as the cycle itself or the ride as specific utterances. Language is a structure of symbols, with tension over meaning that functions to express ideas through the changing relationship between object and symbol. There is no inherent connection between a chair, for example, and the word for it. The meaning of individual sign systems is based on a system that is governed by the langue as a series of rules. A motorcycle on the road is a sign that quickly becomes a sign-system. It signifies its meaning according to its relationship with other signs in the system such as pedestrian, automobile, and location. A parole is the individual articulation that uses this system to produce meaning as the structure and the utterance are distinct but connected (Schrift 51). As a motorcyclist roams, it is read as a parole that takes on signification based on the infrastructure of the system or langue. Appearing synchronically at a specific moment in history, the motorcycle is imbued with meaning and presence, but more importantly as poststructuralist theory indicates, this appearance is due to its development diachronically across historical moments (Schrift 51). The structuralists follow the Sophist’s



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attention to kairos by noting the movement of relationships between language and reality. In this structuralist formation the superstructure is encountered and negotiated based on a series of significations that function in relation to its other moving parts. The rhetoric of cycling revolves around movement within a structure it is both produced by and informing of. Finally, the infrastructure of a linguistic system describes the underlying relations as the superstructure is the surface formation of a system open to interpretation (Schrift 51). As the bicyclist jumps scale and breaches space, they explore the superstructure, moving along the sidewalk with pedestrians and back into the middle of the road with automobiles. They are involved in an interpretation of the structure of social and physical spaces. When they return to the designated bicycle lane and park at an allocated bicycle parking area, they are adhering to the infrastructure of the system. While there is an etymological history, there is no innate meaning to the signifier “bicycle,” for example, that gives it its meaning; it is rather only defined through its contrast to other signifiers of mobility such as “motorcycle,” “automobile,” and “pedestrian.” These terms refer to each other and the larger spatial and social conventions that surround them. When we determine the meaning of these words, we alter materiality as expressed by Foucault when he discusses language itself as a thing. The arbitrariness of language gives way to meaning reified through historical negotiations in which power becomes involved. This acknowledgment denies an indelible reality embedded within subject-signs, and as we have seen, the bicycle object as a sign within a system has changed significantly. The relationship between the signifiers in the langue gives the individual parole its meaning. Viewed not necessarily as inadequate in relation to the automobile but perhaps a more environmentally friendly and healthier option that can potentially produce safer urban centers. When we talk about riding, we are referencing the history of cycling as well as its determinations in relation to other signifiers. The poststructuralists, such as Derrida, examine elements of power embedded within the two configurations—for example, how the bicycle is capable of a critique of the preconceived determinations of the parts and their relationships. Viewed through the lens of poststructuralist theory, the bicycle questions the dominant spatial structure because it questions our reliance on fossil fuels, slows the pace of automobility, and invites us to revisit notions of youthfulness and joy. The configuration of language is the primary site in which the materiality of life unfolds, and poststructuralist theory reminds us that it is next to impossible to fully leave the structure in which one exists. As a product of these forces, this process involves internal as well as external critiques. Preparing for a bike-packing trip through the Pacific Northwest of the United States,

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I am aware of the consumer products involved in outdoor activities such as camping and bicycling, the ways in which symbolic and physical elements of commodity constitute an experience such as this. While seemingly an escape from more productive life/work schedules and an embrace of minimalism, the technology and gear associated with them is a large part of the experience. The modern bike-packing trip is filled with expensive, lightweight, and technological products that allow one to momentarily step into and away from contemporary society. Bike-packing reminds one of this as the intention to leave the grid is also a reminder of its continual presence. To set off into nature or even the local road on a bicycle is a potentially risky and precarious act. Unless it is part of the roles bicycles play in ostracized communities such as homeless, migrating, and impoverished individuals, it is also one that entails privilege. The GT aluminum gravel bicycle and gear along with a series of resources, products, and expenses I am using for this touring trip are symbolic of the structural elements surrounding extended bicycle rides. They are also a commentary on automobile-dominated roads and a visible appreciation of outdoor environments. Philosophy has long centered around the discussion of ideas as the words for them have been positioned as secondary. With this structuralist breakthrough, we now contend with language as the site where concepts are formed. In this process of signification there exists a highly philosophical process. The concept is connected to the signifier, which reintroduces us to a world of things. This shifts the site of negotiation and contemplation from ideas to words (Weedon 23–24). It is difficult to discuss an idea outside of the words and symbols we use to understand them through intrapersonal communication (between oneself) and articulate them to others through interpersonal communication (with others). As almost all signifiers are contingent on social convention, we quickly turn to intercultural communication (between cultures) and public speaking (to audiences). The turn toward this emphasis on language is followed by turns toward the cultural, emphasized in texts such as The Postmodern Turn (1997), by Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, and The Cultural Turn (1998), by Frederic Jameson. This often included a shift toward the critical, emphasized in texts such as Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), also by Jameson. This process is visible in the method of deconstruction, continually asking how the structure is formed by relationships of power that are socially constructed based on cultural convention. Wary of this structure, yet cognizant of our inabilities to exist outside of it, these thinkers maintain the general premise; elements within symbolic structures are meaningful individually because of how they are assembled within a system and reified over time. When we enter physical environments that are partially constructed by the language systems we use to identify them, we are reading ourselves as



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signs. Road bicycling occurs on the margins of public roads but occasionally takes over in organized races, sanctioned events, and interventionist practices such as Critical Mass. Using the roads they otherwise are removed from and engaging in a sanctioned public performance, the structure momentarily shifts to account for their renewed place in it. Situated as athletes, the participants are in competition and, in capitalist frameworks, consumers. The events I’ve ridden in, such as the Guam Mountain Bike Championship and others, entail sponsors, paid participants, and governing bodies. Such events have been going on for over a hundred years and are part of the symbolic discourse surrounding cycling. Derrida observes that while signs present the effect of a durable representation, they are always open to endless processes of deferral (Weedon 25). Furthermore, the structure itself represents a normalization of socially constructed notions of truth that are powerful precisely because they are presented as neutral. To us, there is no bicycle outside of its description. In other words, we bring to life the subject in particular ways. What I have discussed throughout this text is a discussion of a thing that is developed, used, and approached in relation to others. Thus, what it means to be a “bicyclist” is contingent on the structure in which it is deployed. Established in 1901 to sell newspapers, the Tour de France and other extended and single-day rides are at the heart of road bicycling culture. Bicycling culture entails a series of public performances. Its presence in the daily lives of many is ubiquitous, becoming particularly evident in sanctioned rides and races. As an act of public communication, the bicycle in use declares presence within spatial structures that have historically looked beyond its form of mobility. Designating a course, blocking off roads, and employing personnel to ensure safety in the sanctioned race, the town, city, or countryside momentarily caters to the bicycle and its riders. The frequently organized races around the world have been occurring continuously for over a century and are a major part of bicycling that have much to say about the spaces through which they traverse. The route of the Tour of Guam traverses tropical conditions and large elevation gains, while the Tour de Palm Springs covers ground through rolling desert hills and hot, dry desert air. These oneday races I rode in are modeled after the Tour de France, as their names suggest, which traverses the country of France in changing routes to cover much of France’s varied topography. Bicycling is partly understood by how its materiality and movements are read, which predicts how it will be received. Its writing exists in its materiality. The movement and flux of a symbol, and in turn subjectivity, can only move so far within a system it can alter but never leave; however, our notions of reality can change over time through critical engagement with the structure itself. Derrida’s deconstruction hinges on the recognition of binaries as hierarchical rather than neutral. The sophistic use of the hetton-kreitton

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as interchangeable, dissoi logoi, and kairos perform similar functions (J. Poulakos, Sophistical 71). These concepts envision sites of meaning as fluctuating, depending on convention, which is a major theme in poststructuralist thinking. When positioned in relation to dominant or accepted societal values, such concepts are forms of critical awareness based on a reflexive resistance. The weaker argument is unpopular because of the ways in which historical relationships of power have established certain norms. The bicycle as a weaker spatial argument can be the more powerful in cases such as sanctioned races, events such as Critical Mass, and during times of emergency such as the pandemic of 2021. In these moments and countless others, the bicycle can be viewed as a momentarily more dominant spatial presence than the automobile or pedestrian. By training for sanctioned races, everyday rides take on a renewed significance. The preparation and maintenance of not only machines but bodies are an aspect of continual and regular use of the bicycle. Over time aging athletes are still able to compete in bicycling events. Endurance, stamina, strength, and energy come into consideration as well as nutrition and preparation. Economic resources, knowledge, and leisure time, if not a professional, also come into play, which caters to advanced age groups. Each orientation promotes a series of health-conscious practices leading up to a race. During training rides and the race, riders interact with space and their own bodies in ways that are unique. For a long sanctioned ride, such as the hundred-mile Tour de Palm Springs, maintaining hydration, monitoring food intake, before and during, are necessary concerns. By riding with others in sanctioned settings, a collective consciousness surrounding the bicycle is temporarily constructed. For a moment we can view a more bicycle-centric physical landscape. We are transported back in time before automobility and into a possible future without the reliance on fossil fuels. During the race individuals come together in spontaneous acts of teamwork—forming small groups along straightaways to reduce wind resistance, averaging a faster collective speed than individually. As miles stretch out in front of me during the race, other riders nearby cut down on drag and help me stay focused on the immediate moment. Small cracks and inconsistencies in the road for tires only 23mm wide become the central focus, as does the bicyclist just ahead. At around twenty miles per hour the trailing tire of the person directly in front, at times, is only an inch away from my front tire. Speed and direction of the group are based on those directly ahead as their eyes become mine. A tenet of poststructuralist theory is that the structures fluctuate depending on how we use and interpret them. Flocking with the peloton, I along with the herd move in unison. Communication through gesture produces synchronized mobility as the bicycle and its uses bring individuals together. Through this group enunciation a



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shared nonverbal language is created and read as the overall spatial nature of the road, city, and town shift. From the constitutive impact of such forms of communication, everyday space becomes slightly less daunting for an individual rider, a visceral example of dissoi logoi as the weaker bicycle enjoys the space of the stronger automobile. Poststructuralist Places Without a centralized place of meaning or power one might ask where poststructuralist theory arises and what truth-values it proposes. Unlike bicycling in sanctioned races, when riding alone or with friends the pace is determined by yourself and your immediate riding companions. In this section, I discuss the symbolic places in which poststructuralist theory coalesces, the stances it advocates, and my own rides through Portland, Oregon; Seattle and Port Townsend, Washington; and the Avenue of the Giants in Humboldt County, California. On these bicycle rides. I reflect on the places I visit and the spaces the use of the bicycle creates. I also explore my own symbolic rendering as a link between these sites. Similarly, poststructuralist theory moves from symbolic sites to critique how they function in relation to structures. Riding bicycles in this regard is slower and less intense than sanctioned races and rides. Each place is experienced for longer, which seems to slow time down altogether, which of course is only a feeling. Brief stops are satisfying while destinations become secondary to the journey. When I arrive at a destination, I feel a sense of accomplishment, but because I am tired and satisfied from the journey, the energy to enjoy the destination is lessened. I have few reasons to move around once arrived, as the desire to continue increases when bicycling long distances. The road, the journey, and progress are respite in these rides. Because energy is necessary for continuing the journey, this mental feeling is based partially on the physical challenges involved in bicycling as opposed to automobile, train, bus, or plane transportation. Saussure’s structural linguistics uncovers a central structure consisting of a rigid set of connections indicative of material systems that reflect their symbolic counterparts. As the synchronic attention shifts to a more diachronic approach in poststructuralist thought, an emphasis on the ways reality and language shift over time reveals where power operates. Power functions within the seams of the symbolic structure, between the signifiers that hold meaning. Riding outside of a sanctioned race or designated lane is risky due to motorists who, at times, are hostile to their presence. From a poststructuralist perspective, this arises from the position of power and privilege that has been granted to the automobile motorist throughout history, partly determined by the structure in which they exist. While some might be more accepting due to their experiences, others might be more combative due to theirs. Arriving

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at a particular location on the road in the Pacific Northwest, I am subject to this general spatial subjectivity. Once on the road after a ride, I fall back into the driver’s seat of an automobile and subsume the position of power, all the while staying within the network of the structure. Synchronic symbolic relationships tend to favor a consciousness outside of history and the political and material development of what sign systems come to mean (Wicks 107). Derek Attridge notes that Saussure did not necessarily deny historical development within language, he simply did not pay the historical aspects of culture, society, and power adequate attention. Instead, he relied too heavily on the etymological history of the ways in which words change. For Saussure words were merely “facts of language” (Attridge 187). The etymological history alone does not provide current meaning to symbols and their structures. The synchronic moment at which language is deployed entails a history and a series of material connections that are part of a much larger development than can be summarized in their etymological origins. It is an emphasis on history and the development of relationships of power within history that separates the structuralists from the poststructuralists. This attention to history and its power relations is paramount in this shift as Suassure’s emphasis on the current structure of a system upholds the power differentials that it entails. Setting out to undo its formations, a poststructuralist perspective recognizes this space as problematic. Schrift notes regarding Foucault’s text The Order of Things, that this order “operates within the fundamental codes of a culture: those governing its language, its schemes of perception, its techniques, exchanges, values, etc.” (57). The conception of language and its connection to the material world is evident in structuralism. In poststructuralist applications it becomes a disruption of seemingly naturalized ways of operating. They seem to be truthful because the entire structure that determines their strength caters to such conclusions. Poststructuralist theory invites us to question the assumptions offered by linguistic systems, which touches upon our very conceptions of reality. One might ask how seemingly neutral binaries become so far apart conceptually and materially. For example, how did men and women, citizen and immigrant, or motorists, bicyclist, and pedestrian all practitioners, become so different symbolically from each other. A poststructuralist perspective would question the material reality behind their signified differences. On the road, I am encouraged to examine the spaces that I might otherwise overlook. The area between spatial destinations is often sidelined as an obstacle to overcome. The reward is an experience of what is overlooked—the seldom seen parts near the highway, locations on the sides of roads, hidden green spaces, become sites of sanctuary in the middle of a long ride. The automobile speeds by loud and swift, and after it passes, the stillness and quietness return. For an automobile, a constructed highway serves its purpose of rapid and direct



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transit, but when approached via bicycle, small pieces of grass, plants, and shade just off to the side reveal themselves. In these spaces, little moments of rest exist after long stretches of pedaling. Back on the road a slight downhill, in coasting, produces another recuperating moment. After powering up an incline, the act of freewheeling down the slope of the other side is a direct reward. Most of this is lost in motorized forms of transportation. All the while the wind produced from pedaling and motion provides a constant cooling that can remedy the heat from the sun. If cold, the energy from pedaling warms the body. Because poststructuralist theory attends to structures critically, to dismantle the ways in which signifiers come to represent, misrepresent, and deny participation becomes necessary. Sal Newman, Todd May, and Lewis Call note that poststructuralist theory is a form of radical political philosophy. May notes that this philosophy is tactical in that it is based on a series of shifts in distinction to more strategic paradigms (Moral 10–12). Strategic thinking, the theorists state, emanates from a center and always returns to a specific site of truth. Saussure’s etymological centering positions the structure of language systems as this immovable site. The conclusions drawn therefore take us back to the relationships established through language. The development of a series of moments and interactions between bodies, institutions, and spaces continually define, redefine, and reaffirm the reality-concepts language constructs. A tactical approach shifts to locate moments of resistance, calls for action, and critical readings that exist in this historical development. Because poststructuralist theory moves from site to site and never seems to settle in one location, Call notes that it is difficult to locate a unifying “place of resistance” within the tradition (Bakunin 14). Its value as a form of resistance and critique is its hesitancy to establish a new site of power, an indelible position of meaning. Because once a truth has been established in all situations, it excludes the possibilities of others. Foucault uncovers the ways in which knowledge is based on exclusion. This awareness prompts the question, Is what is being produced through the affirmation of any one position applicable to all others? The Sophists and poststructuralist theory share similar qualities of movement and resistance in the form of structural critique, as do mobile practices such as bicycling. Bicycling on extended rides begins with shorter rides to train, assemble, and test body, bicycle, and gear. In this case, I plan to bike-pack and day ride through specific sites on a triple-diamond GT aluminum gravel bicycle. It is a road bicycle with a slightly more durable frame and components. It also has the capacity for wider tires at 45mm. The gear ratio is more akin to a mountain bicycle than a road bicycle with a single sprocket in the front and ten in the rear. Other road bicycle features include drop bars and brake levers, clip-on pedals, and rider ergonomics. Touring elements are present as well,

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a heavier frame, flexible seat, and a series of bicycle bags such as frame, top bar, and large seat bags. I avoid using a handlebar bag as they tend to effect steering negatively. The kinks and quirks of this gravel bicycle are adjusted to my height and weight, and a multiuse tool carried during rides is important for on-the-go adjustments and repairs. Even on a lightweight road bicycle during a single-day race, a tube or repair kit, pump, multiuse tool, and tire levers are important to carry. Through riding, any remaining nuances between rider and bicycle are ironed out. The bicycle conforms to my use just as my style of riding is altered by the bicycle. It is not as light as a road bicycle and as nimble, but less durable and flexible than a mountain bike. The gravel or touring bicycle fits between these forms of bicycling mobility. Through a combination of bicycle and rider this subsystem enters the structure of everyday space. The articulations involved in riding are material representations of public messages. The embodied trace left behind a rider’s path traces and comments on these conditions. One’s spatial approach is vastly changed via the type of bicycle and their riding choices. Cycling, oration, and the critical examinations of poststructuralist theory entail a series of responses to unfolding systems. Similarly, we might connect such theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches to the physical and intentional acts of cycling. This act requires the negotiation of a context, a relationship with an object, and constant movement. The poststructuralist tradition is deliberately mobile. It often produces a logic of uncertainty in its avoidance of reaffirming external positions of power. It is, in this manner, a tactical maneuvering that, like cycling, embraces temporary unities between bodies, objects, and spaces. By avoiding the tendency to exchange one place of power for another, poststructuralist political philosophy moves among numerous possible stances. Postcolonialism interrogates the ways in which colonial legacies are reified after colonization, while a poststructuralist approach might critique the way colonial sign systems remain in place through various states of settler-colonial structures. The structures surrounding bicycling are changing in the United States as cities are decidedly becoming more accepting of the bicycle. The cities that I ride in—Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles—are becoming more accommodating to bicycle mobility, but remain automobilecentric. With this acceptance comes the change of spatial expectations for motorists, pedestrians, and cyclists. As our orientations change, more pedestrians and motorists are prompted to take up bicycling. As I engage in urban rides through Seattle, Washington, I am struck by the blending of industrial and natural riding environments ideal for bicycling and an increased bicycle infrastructure. There are laws, policy, bicycle lanes, traffic lights, and intersections that support bicyclists. Technology also reflects the changing landscape concerning bicycling as global positioning systems offer bicycle routes



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along with walking, automobile, and public transportation options. I use these to partially plan my ride from point to point while accounting for the ability to drift that is not allowed in an automobile. On a bicycle, paths such as roads become less rigid. Even with these features, the bicycle offers the ability to dérive through spaces consuming mostly time and the social, technological, and political features of collective space. In a poststructuralist critique we find the avoidance of essentializations in favor for a questioning of the way sign systems function in constructing and maintaining material truths. It is often used to dismantle and critique a unified stance or position of power (Newman, Power 8–10, Bakunin 4–8; Call 13; May, Political 53, Moral 6–7). If power in everyday settings centers around automobility and its discursive and spatial structures, then the bicycle and motorcycle represent moments when this hierarchy breaks down. The bicycle serves a deconstructing function in its everyday use. Power and meaning are not fixed and durable constructs. If power inequalities appear stationary or durable, then it is a form of resistance to view them as mobile and temporary. Bicycles and motorcycles remain in place only when supported by a kickstand or rack, captured in image, or held upright by the rider. This is a temporary state, like the image of the structure of a language as it appears at any given time. If the object of mobility is captured and interpreted in texts, collections, or museums, its function is only symbolic of this movement. In poststructuralist theory, there is a desire to interpret the ways in which physical and discursive forces hinder, celebrate, condemn, and liberate certain positions. Diachronic attention is often missing from the theoretical constructions and the movements I provide examples of. Critical Mass started in San Francisco in 1992 to draw attention to the presence of bicyclists on public roads. It has since spread around the world, arising in each city or town as a leaderless intervention based on the gathering of individuals. These bicyclists share a similar spatial subjugation based on their forms of mobility, which entail a precarious road presence. If you are in a Critical Mass, you are a bicyclist rather than a Critical Mass protestor per se, you may break off at any point, you may decide to assist or even momentarily lead, but the form of resistance is based solely on an individual and group presence. It is, in this regard, a tactical approach to resistance rather than a strategy to produce specific ends other than recognition and awareness. A poststructuralist approach fragments a bodily text and locates this mode within a realm of radical antiauthoritarian political theory. Newman, Call, and May state that the poststructuralist approach questions metanarratives of normalcy and the legitimacy of institutions and practices that are supported by them (Newman, Power 1; Bakunin 14). Threads of this type of thinking can be seen in the theoretical underpinnings of many philosophical perspectives such as phenomenology, existentialism, and humanism, which through

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challenging external elements of power revolve around fixed constructions that are often internalized as natural. At the core of liberal humanist thinking exists an embedded essentialism that positions liberation in the form of a humanist potential, a confined location (Bakunin 14; 13; Political 13–15). Such essentializations stem from the objective underpinnings of Platonic philosophy that stretch through Western philosophy and radical political philosophical formations directed toward liberation. Every bicyclist in public settings is an advocate for diverse forms of mobility. The electronic, physical, and social infrastructure creates the spaces for alternative forms of transportation. The signs and public message that are part of bicycling infrastructure add to this awareness. The labels that allow riding as well as the electronic applications that cater to bicycle mobility point to the political, intellectual, and creative nature of bicycling in public contexts. For many these elements make bicycling possible. If one does not feel safe or comfortable on a bicycle in traffic with others, they will tend to not ride. Technology allows me to locate a bicycle route with less hills and protected lanes. Meanwhile the scale the bicycle offers allows me to go against traffic and policy at times if necessary. Bicycle paths make motorists aware of the presence of cyclists even when not present. This enables a general integration into the larger structure, a form of spatial representation. A protected lane becomes a shared lane when it ends, and in the larger context both forms of transportation routes coexist. While there appears to be a sense of freedom and autonomy in bicycling, a poststructuralist perspective problematizes this ability. Existentialist thinking positions the place of power and truth in the agency of a performing and thinking body. An ultimate freedom, described as anguish, it is also an uncontaminated essence. De Beauvoir, for example, must contend with her sexed subjectivity as well as her essential subjectivity as an existentialist. As an existentialist, she is condemned to be free, but as a female her subjectivity is based on a gendered hierarchical binary. She states the “representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from the point of view which is theirs and which they confuse with absolute truth” (Second 143). It is her subject positionality as a female that leads her to question the essentialism at the heart of existentialism. The structural contexts of sexbased oppression and such questioning pave the way for a larger structural critique of subjectivity. If this is considered another link and proto moment to poststructuralist theory, then it is telling of the strength it has in exposing the structures of inequality. Existential ethics notes that subjects have a responsibility to achieve transcendence from immanence or stagnation. This is achieved through freely chosen projects such as bicycling or determining one’s own route while doing so. It is this recognition of agency in self-creation that this morality hinges



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on. However, de Beauvoir finds herself othered from this discussion, and in cycling, women historically have had to work much harder than men to bicycle in public spaces. She writes that as soon as “man asserts himself as subject and free being, the idea of the Other arises. From that day, the relation with the Other is dramatic: the existence of the Other is a threat, a danger” (Second 79). Doomed to immanence, or en soi, her existential potential in the form of transcendence or en moi is hindered by this essential male subjectivity. Women use the bicycle to achieve a new form of freedom and thus alter the structure from which their othering is produced; however, they are not as free as the conception of subjectivity described in existentialist theory or a male bicyclist. Questioning the logical foundations of existentialism, she states that the production of women exists in the space of conflict between essential and “Other.” As the “inessential who never goes back to being the essential,” her subjectivity and independence is predetermined as dependent (Second 141). In The Second Sex, she asks how women within this state of dependency can attain fulfillment and recover independence. This initiates a sharp critique of the structural forces in which her subjectivity is conditioned, moving toward but not explicitly stating a method of critique to all signs (Weedon 47). She presents an exposure of the philosophical limits of structures that produce rigid notions of sex and gender, which support sex-based oppression. Just as de Beauvoir furthers objectivist existentialist philosophy, a modernist discourse, using male-centric language she also provides the hints of a possible method of internal critique. Similarly, the bicycle as a modernist invention now acts as a reminder of what is discarded in the name of technological progress. Along the forty-five-mile ride through the Avenue of the Giants in Humboldt County, California, I rode a short dirt trail through the redwoods, an excellent tangential route for the gravel bicycle. Packed with gear, the bicycle is a touring bike, but unloaded, the road-like bicycle becomes almost as quick and nimble as a mountain bike. Initially bicycles were designed to ride on a variety of surfaces, including dirt, gravel, and cobblestone. When the mountain bicycle was introduced in the 1980s, it arrived based on a history of riding bicycles off paved roads, including the original terrain explored by bicycles. It was also partially based on cyclocross, a mixture of road biking and hiking popular in Europe since the early 1900s. The modern gravel bicycle is growing in popularity and is an extension of cyclocross bicycles. Here it turns a twisty dirt trail through the redwoods into a speed run of lines and tight corners. The subjectivity of the bicyclist is partly determined by the subject positionality of the rider. Their struggles and privileges become that of the system, but they are also partly determined by the bicycle itself and its history, an object that provides a certain kind of mobility.

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Notable for their resistance to rigid conceptions of identity, the work of the poststructuralists and the Sophists as proto-poststructuralists function to expose the ways in which idealized structures of truth, meaning, and power function. Bicycling on the peninsula in Port Townsend and Fort Wordsen in Washington allows me to experience the natural surroundings at a humanpowered pace and scale. Crossing over bridges to small islands and riding along paths to remote trails and empty beaches reminds me of what is missed by way of other forms of transportation. Camping and riding on a beautiful bicycle-friendly peninsula complete with bicycle maps, and a system of designated bicycle trails, perfect for gravel bikes, also remind me of the importance of the riding destination. The scenery is large, the sound vast, as expansive bodies of water divide mountains and seascapes that stretch for miles in every direction. Such a desire to change our perceptions of reality through epistemological acts is also communicative. These actions function at the level of praxis by contributing to the creation of the material worlds we would like to see. In the process, this exposes the fabricated nature of our collective situations, the histories involved, and the spatial realities present. Deconstructing Distance A bicycling and motorcycling ontology is comprised by the choreographed movements of the mind, body, and machine to create creative traces through space. Alone, the bicycle and motorcycle objects are detached but continue to move symbolically. They appear in electronic and print media, displayed in store windows, front lawns, garages, and apartment building balconies. Outside, they remain available for public share, ride along attached to the backs of vehicles, and remain abandoned on the road often partially disassembled and still locked to more durable street objects. Chained bicycles in public spaces still perform. There are many lost, stolen, abandoned, confiscated, and broken-down bicycles throughout the world. Many of them are no longer in use but act as reminders of the ways previous practitioners moved. Other bicycles remain close to people and their intimate spaces, maintained and cherished, resting in various built, modified, or repaired stages. The Cinelli frame I am using to build a road bicycle remains in the corner of my house, a partial bicycle. A quiver of bicycles rests nearby: a Santa Cruz Bronson mountain bike, Chicago Schwinn fixed gear, GT gravel, and Giant Propel road bicycle awaiting attention. The bicycle and motorcycle objects are mechanical devices that can be manipulated and constructed in countless ways. In a small storage space, a Honda CRF450 rests with fairings and wheels removed in mid-restoration near a Kawasaki Ninja 636 sportbike turned stunt bike modified almost past recognition. These objects are not singular pieces but a system of many working parts that are an apt physical



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metaphor for structuralism and the poststructuralist method of deconstruction. In this section, I discuss deconstruction as the defining method of poststructuralist inquiry and the building of a road bicycle and the modification of a street and off-road motorcycle. The vast territory of the signified is contained in the signifier and comes into meaning through its relationship with others. In this structure, sites of meaning shift according to the movements of meaning that exist between symbols. In this way, meaning is constantly deferred as the distant territory of the sign remains elusive. Through history, conventions change, and as the meaning of certain aspects of the structure shift, so do its related parts. The word bicycle, for example, might conjure associations of play, sport, exercise, nostalgia, advocacy, health, poverty, struggle, privilege, or opportunity. At the same time a series of hierarchical binaries make up the symbolic structure these symbols fit within such as bicycle, automobile; bicyclist, pedestrian; leisure, work; sport, play; poverty, wealth; privilege, struggle; opportunity, destitution. In each of these pairings the former is subordinate to the latter, which reflects the chain of significations connected to the symbol. Poststructuralists find moments of rupture, resistance, and productive tension by challenging the synchronic tendencies of structuralism and the ultimate freedom expressed in perspectives such as existentialism. If subjectivity is devised according to a structure, then autonomy, outside of the influences of the structure, may be impossible; however, as products and producers of the structure there is always power in movement. Since all movement is relational, it has the power to move the larger structure in certain directions. So, if bicyclists move the spatial structure along in particular ways, then its direction is partially determining of the space in which it moves. Similarly, a bicycle system is composed of a series of parts that make up the structural components of a bicycle. Derrida’s deconstruction aims to disrupt constructed polarities that appear natural due to the symbolic structure in which they are contained. The method can bring an awareness to alternative ways of thinking. This process is like that of the Sophist of emphasizing the strength of the weaker argument (J. Poulakos, Sophistical 18; T. Poulakos 49). In the concept of dissoi logoi or contradictory arguments we can see the seeds of deconstruction as both perspectives and the groups to which they are associated present internal critiques. These perspectives recognize the ways in which opposing elements cannot be fully dismissed when discussing the meaning of any one element. As products of the structure, our own subjectivity is connected to its differing associations. Poststructuralist tendencies are grounded in an examination of discursive and material developments. History, for Derrida and deconstruction, is a past that can be examined endlessly for its potential to provide a sustained self-critique (Welch 129). Deconstruction exposes the infinite potential

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between signifiers that is at once lost and systematically obscured. Separated by almost two thousand years, these loosely connected traditions help inform our understanding of both rhetoric and poststructuralist theory. The levels of critique are heightened after millennia of civilizational, intellectual, and structural development. The method of deconstruction as an example of poststructuralist theory “invites us to rethink every structure of opposition” as the place of power in poststructuralist theory shifts to avoid establishing new rigid sites of power (Cusset 126). Building a frame is the ultimate experience in bicycle building, and having one built for you specifically is a close second. In the pursuit of bicycle building, I can only start by buying a frame and adding components. The building or assembling of a road bicycle is a process of assembly rather than fabrication, but in the process, one becomes familiar with every part that goes into comprising a functional bicycle. I choose each part specifically, becoming aware of and familiar with their function in the system. If a part breaks down or becomes worn as they inevitably do, I will have, because of this experience, a more intimate knowledge of how to fix, replace, or adjust the issue. The meaning of the bicycle part exists in its relation to the structure, and the history of the bicycle object exists in this building process. The structure itself is comprised by a series of signifiers that continually delay and distance meaning. Spread across the symbolic relationships of a system, Derrida’s methodological processes of deconstruction call for an examination of how these connections have formed. Words find meaning through a process of differing or a difference between them and other words as well as a deferring or a distancing between the word, its opposite, and the things they represent. Derrida refers to this quality as differánce, a combination of these terms and processes. It also sums up poststructuralist theory and provides the foundation for the method of deconstruction. Deconstruction entails a close reading of the tensions created between the symbolic parts of a structure. By unpacking and problematizing the ways in which signifiers come to hold meaning, we can also undo some of the material inequalities that are promoted through these meanings. Cycling is a communicative act that moves within a symbolic and material context; encountering other forms, it explores the spaces between places. In commentary with the structure itself, it is produced as it moves along roads and routes that are “also tension-ridden and unstable” (Wicks 204). Those who ride are conditioned similarly based on shared movement; a temporary spatial subjectivity is created as one eventually returns to that of nonrider. Power shifts from the structure itself to its movement over time, a process that is liberating or leveling, depending on the social setting and a rider’s societal positionality (Schrift 59). Building a bicycle is a way to encounter each part of the bicycle rather than a singular object or product manufactured and assembled elsewhere. In the



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process, consumer practices are skewed, and the typical bicycle is opened to differing assemblages and combinations. What a bicycle is at this point early in the building process is yet to be determined. The starting point for me is the frame and a choice between chromoly steel, aluminum alloy, titanium, or carbon fiber. There are other types of frame materials in existence such as wood and bamboo, but these are the main manufactured options. The frame selection will send me down certain paths. Small nuances such as the type of bottom bracket and whether the front derailleur is a clip on or built in, for example, will be unchangeable. The light Cinelli carbon fiber road frame will never be able to become a mountain or gravel bicycle as wide tires and other elements will not fit the frame specifications. The bicycle with this frame selection will also not become a fixed gear bicycle as the frame is not optimal for that type of build. I am pursuing a path based on these choices. To alter this path is to change the entire structure as everything is related and necessary to function as a bicycle. This lightweight racing style bicycle will emphasize speed and be used only on paved roads. The classic Italian brand is a bright orange Veltrix model. This choice establishes a function and aesthetic that reflects a long history of Italian bicycle design as well as a global network of production as they are now built in Taiwan. The process of building and assembling a bicycle is epistemological and functional, while the experiences of riding are rhetorical and performative. Mooring meaning and truth to the logic of any one place produces essentialized ways of thinking. This occurs when identities and meanings are framed as innate or natural, limiting movement and becoming while being grounded in exclusion. Derrida builds on the sophistic rhetorical tradition extending the themes of flux, movement, and resistance while emphasizing systems of signs as the primary space of critique. There are rhetorical dimensions in Derrida’s philosophical work as his method of textual analysis represents a tactical poststructuralist approach. From the perspective of the method of deconstruction, the parole or word is a suspicious place loaded with dualistic differences based on relationships of power. To find these stations as intact and immovable is to reify their inherent logic and often inequality. Over time the logic of the word becomes connected to the signified territory in thought and materiality. For Derrida this logocentricity is a major concern, and his method of deconstruction is potentially an endless process that attempts to undo its rigidity. The ways dialectic tension allows meaning to unfold over time are not innocent or neutral. It is often a procedure that produces hegemonic ways of thinking and operating frequently framed by the appearance of the structuralist parole, which can only make certain sense within the larger langue. Poststructuralist thinkers Kristeva, Butler, and Cixous extend the notion of logocentricity to expose the ways in which this logic of the word privileges

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the male experience (Butler 40–42). Cixous describes this establishment of a social construction based on sex that runs through the structure of language as phallogocentrism. The power inequality observed here is critiqued through Kristeva’s use of deconstruction and Cixous advent of écriture feminine or feminine writing. To change the structure of the language is to alter the materiality of its referents. While there are many small parts such as nuts, washers, and bolts as well as grease, tape, and oil that compose a bicycle, there are relatively few major components. These include the frame, bottom bracket, crankset, brake levers, disc brakes, rims, tires, seat post, seat, front and rear derailleur, front and rear sprockets, pedals, chain, stem, and handlebars. With these major parts there are numerous specialty tools that can be specific to the part, type, and brand. The ways in which the parts go together function like a language to give the bicycle its overall meaning and direction. The form the bicycle build will take is based on all the parts, yet any shift in one can severely alter the direction of the whole. As I assemble and add vital components such as the Shimano Ultima gearset and aftermarket Cinelli seat post, handlebars, and headset, the structure becomes its character, a road bicycle. Even if I were able to put on a mountain bike style seat or change the forks to allow front suspension or a wider front tire, for example, the bicycle would remain a road bicycle. The symbolic conditions surrounding cycling connect discursive elements of everyday space to gestures, which function in relation to spatial narratives. The bicycle build entails the process of doing and undoing until the structure of the bicycle finds its form. In this construction the structural system will be geared toward a performance of writing. In the streets, roads, and trails, the bicycle will create relationships between motorcyclists, motorists, pedestrians, and built form. The poststructuralist breakthrough is to critically examine the structure of discourse as a site of critique itself. I argue for a shift of the structure from language to space and physical practice. This takes Derrida’s project of logocentric critique to its logical conclusion. That there is something suspicious about the ways in which sign systems dominate the physical territory they describe that should be approached skeptically. I promote a return to the practice as the primary site of meaning and inquiry. As a performance the practice itself is the site of critique. Nevertheless, we can examine the bicycle as a symbol within a structure and further elaborate this process through traditional texts. As certain locations are reserved for bicycles and others are open or off-limits, the ability to move in certain ways is a social negotiation. In poststructuralist thinking, sites of power shift to avoid sites that remain stationary, becoming what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as aborified. In this state, meaning is fixed, and all that arises from this central structure acts as branches that one must return to (14–16). Such positions produce life-worlds



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according to specific norms that deny possible opportunities of growth and change (Newman, Bakunin 3). While spaces are reserved for bicycling, there are almost none for motorcycles, aside from parking. As I modify a sportbike into a stunt bike by altering and adding parts such as a crash cage and augmented power differentials between gears, achieved through differing front and rear sprocket ratios, which produces more power in the low end, I am changing the space in which the motorcycle performs. Stunt motorcycle culture uses sportbikes, intended to go exceedingly fast around smooth tracks with tight turns or on public roads, to perform in confined areas such as parking lots and short sections of road. This type of mobility harnesses most of its horsepower and stopping ability to perform maneuvers in tighter spaces. The output of the motorcycle is harnessed to produce wheelies and then quickly converted and used to turn the wheelie into a controlled and elongated stoppie. Burnouts are an almost entirely sedentary use of maximum horsepower and stopping power. In this maneuver one can observe parts of a new tire completely disappear as every bit of engine and braking power is applied by a rider standing still. Dirtbike maintenance and restoration are necessary when repeatedly performing on a designated track with jumps and features that require optimal and rugged motorcycle performance. Both motorcycle builds are expressions of this movement and made possible by a systematic reordering of the bicycle configuration or structure. Specifically designated spaces for bicycling are on the rise in many cities, yet there is in our understanding of these areas a necessity to recognize a similar return and the larger notion of shared use. Poststructuralist political philosophy is a form of critical inquiry that is tactical, a heuristic approach rather than a fixed paradigm. Not so much an ideology, it is more a methodology that can be deployed and recognized in specific situations. Bicycles force motorists to share the road as sites of power and meaning shift depending on conditions. As a bicyclist enters this space, the expectations of the structure change. Within reserved spaces, bicyclists are situated as a bicycling subjectivity, an everyday practitioner that cycles momentarily holds power. Within a shared spatial conception, one retains and sheds various spatial subjectivities according to movement. Poststructuralist approaches to political philosophy involve the critical deconstruction and decontextualization of individual experiences as aspects of political change (Weedon 74). Cyclists must constantly locate themselves in space, an environment that is also moving, referencing, and identifying the positions of landmarks as sites of power. The bicycle, for example, is marginalized and largely forced to share the road unequally but gains the ability to move off-road and into the seams of the everyday. Motorcyclists move similarly in the highly regulated space of the road, finding temporary spaces between conceived places. A cycling subjectivity is like a poststructuralist one in that to think about an abstract notion of

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a cyclist, where the individual exists in a free market, allowed to “ignore the various dominations that are involved” does not exist, even in a bicycle lane, on a stock motorcycle, or an abandoned frame on the side of the road; context is a defining factor (Newman 12). Cycling is an embodied understanding and articulation of how to move through systems according to a series of relationships. Rather than attending to previous paradigms of domination and potentially proposing new organizations of power, a poststructuralist critique moves to confront its structural and historical limits. To cycle, like speaking, is to enter history and the development of collective space and discourse. The movement itself is a commentary on the formation of the performing subject. The ways in which we move across space and time reflect our relationships with the objects we use and design our environments for. As our subjectivity is altered, the performing practitioner reflects these discussions between space and use, a process of becoming alike. Cycling has unfolded alongside space as a continuation of previous riding practices. This process has produced a relational ontology and has much to teach us about how we move and communicate within structures. Through poststructuralist theory, we can further examine the ways in which these two elements inform each other. CONCLUSION The horse has been in use for over six thousand years and has played a major role in our individual, social, and spatial orientation. Our interactions with the species represent an early form of rapid movement and remain a memory ingrained in the history of global networks of transportation and communication. Movement is directly connected to power in forms of domination and liberation. The spread of ideas, peoples, and civilizations is paramount to the development of human history. Speed, as Virilio notes, is a defining aspect of contemporary and historical society. In this dromocratic space, speed is its own form of power, and it is first harnessed through physical movement. Today all human movement is potentially communicative, epistemological, and political. As ways of moving grow in rapidity, comfort, and scale, so do the ways in which we conceive of, harness, and produce them. Sophistic rhetorical theory established over two thousand years ago arrives in a world in which horse riding, competition, war, and vehicle combinations such as the wagon and chariot, are already in use. In retrospect, a budding notion of humanism begins to unfold surrounding the horse involving individual mobility and communication within the growing notion of the public sphere. Sophistic rhetorical theory is grounded in the physical practices of oration and revolves around conceptual movement based on these physical



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practices. In travel, the Sophists established a flexible notion of meaning depending on audience, context, and convention. Through oration and public deliberation, the physical site of truth is elusive and grounded in states of becoming that are dependent on place. With industrialization, one of the many aspects of our notions of modernity, the bicycle, follows. By inventing and fabricating a human-powered horse alternative, the bicycle separates humans from nature as the dependency on the horse is lessened. The industrial processes that harness and reform natural materials into mechanical devices are present in the bicycle. As it is used by practitioners around the world, it comes to exemplify many modernist values, such as individuality, social and physical mobility, independence, comfort, and, as its name identifies, safety. In its early history, the bicycle developed at the forefront of technological progress and the industrialization of everyday spaces. In the process, they have become ingrained in modernist thinking and are a reminder of our collective past. As we pedaled toward a postmodern future aware of the ills of modernist conceptions, the bicycle comes to represent a form of nostalgia. In this space of memory, we long for the opportunities to celebrate differing ideals. The ability to move freely along socially informed landscapes correlates with modernist notions of autonomy. Existentialist theory, a lasting message from modernist philosophy, envisions an individual condemned to freedom at the conceptual level of choice. This produces an anguish that should be embraced as existential authenticity or freedom and responsibility. Both Sartre and de Beauvoir are avid bicyclists who mention bicycling in their work, connecting the sense of philosophical freedom they sought with the feeling and understanding provided by riding them. Communities of bicyclists gather across the world to ride for various reasons. From the daily commute and leisure ride for exercise or expression, group excursions across longer distances on roads, intense mountain biking single track trails through maintained or rough terrain, as well as urban single speed, and fixed gear dérives—they all involve choices concerning the decisions and routes to ride. Cyclists ride together en masse in deliberative expressions of social advocacy such as Critical Mass. Other manifestations of cycling rhetoric include bicycle parades, lowrider bicycle scenes, and an entire competitive arena ranging from BMX freestyle to professional and amateur mountain, gravel, and road bicycle racing circuits. Individual bicyclists slip into and out of the regulated and policed places of the everyday that caters to automobility. These instances are a commentary on our shared situation, involving not only a history of each bicyclist but also a shared history of bicycling. In mechanized form, the motorcycle is indicative of postmodern thinking, capable of disrupting our notions of progress. The motorcycle challenges this ability as one can only move as fast as the structure allows. In the nascent

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development of modernity, the motorcycle emerges as a loud, intense source of energy capable of destruction as well as great achievement in speed and maneuverability. The Futurists, embracing the damaging elements of technological progress, celebrated the aesthetics of brutality and elements of rupture captured by motorcycling rapidity. This embracing of modernist values also established its direction, which ultimately came to territorialize the globe in imperial and colonial acts of seizure that harnessed such energy. In use, the motorcycle functions similarly to the bicycle, as millions of motorbikes traverse various geographic terrains and roads across the world. Cities from Amsterdam to Manila are filled with a mixture of bicycles and motorcycles as well as variations such as tuk tuks, jeepnies, pedicabs, cycle rickshaws, and motor taxis, to name a few. All these manifestations remind us of a past and a future where such forms of cycling merge and emerge. In the United States, with larger distances and increased speed requirements, the motorcycle can compete with the automobile. The motorcycle, like the bicycle, is used in group formations, much more than automobiles, to come together to express their identity and positions of advocacy through rhetorical displays. In these instances, akin to the public march or protest, individuals find strength and meaning in numbers and harness the road, body, and object as mediums of communication. Urban youth and marginalized communities systemically confined in terms of socioeconomic class and spatial relations have turned motocross motorcycles and all-terrain vehicles into a form of social expression on public roads. Amateur racing of various types from drag racing to off-road trials push motorcycling into as many facets of economic, political, and cultural life that exist. Each instance connects territories with the people that move through them and is an act of communication within the physical and symbolic structures of society. Followed by two world wars involving the territories, settled, and Indigenous lands, modernity closes in on its own conceptions. In this space, bicycles and motorcycles continue to move, creating temporary spaces, durable settlements, communities, and co-cultures based on the mobility and identity of the riders, objects, and contexts. At times this movement has been inclusive and liberating; at others it has been exclusionary and oppressive. All the while they remind us of these developments, the opportunities lost and the spaces that can potentially be recuperated. Poststructuralist theory offers the conceptual framework to look back at these developments as a material discourse, a network of places and moments that function as sites of truth and possible resistance. By examining sophistic rhetorical and poststructuralist theory alongside riding cycles, this text hopes to contribute to our understandings of bicycling and motorcycling as articulations of theory and communication. Poststructuralist theory is a critical approach to the ways in which symbolic



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systems structure material life. It is defined primarily by the critical examination of the ways in which signifiers move through history to form discursive and material structures of power. Similarly, cycling in its various iterations is a physical form of articulation that is defined by movement, functions contextually, and is continually worthy of further practice and examination.

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Index

1%, 136 12 O’Clock Boys (film), 134, 143 Acropolis, 24 Ader, Bas Jan, 60 affect, 20, 21, 146; theory, 133 affectus, 20 Africa, 5, 34, 40, 41, 84, 161, 178 African American, 89, 115, 74, 126, 28 Afroasiatic, 25, 160, 185, 159 agora, 18, 22, 24–25 airplane, 11, 53, 67–68, 97, 74, 91, 113, 141 Akira (film), 145 Alcidamas, 151 aluminum alloy, 203 American Motorcyclist Association, 131 Amsterdam, Netherlands, 82, 86, 91, 208 analog, 78, 145–46, 102 Anatolia, 40 Angels from Hell (film), 134, 138, 141 Angels’ Wild Women (film), 136 Angel Unchained (film), 134, 138, 140 animal, 3, 6, 19, 32, 37, 39–40, 45, 49, 52–53, 55, 56, 58, 50, 121 Anthony, Susan B., 61 Antidosis, 170 Antiphon, 152

Antwerp, 91 Aphrodite, 166 Apple, 59 appropriation, 46, 93, 176, 185, 159, 161, 116 Arcata, California, 151 architecture, 14, 18, 35, 43, 81 argument, 23, 57, 59, 79, 158, 163, 166, 169, 174, 192, 201 Aristotle, 40, 158–59, 165, 174, 161–62, 169, 172, 175 articulation, 2, 3–4, 8, 11, 23, 29, 50, 58, 70, 74, 162, 164–65, 168–69, 170–71, 179, 184, 190, 196, 206, 209 artifacts, 51, 60–61, 90, 103 asabiyyah, 46 Asia, 5, 28, 160, 178; south, 98; southeast, 98, 160 Aspasia, 152, 156, 159, 176 assemblages, 39, 203; heterogeneous, 21 assembly line, 78, 113 Assyrian, 43 Athens, 24, 27, 83, 160, 162, 178 athletic, 8, 28, 63, 65–66, 68, 76–77, 81, 86, 105, 111, 130, 150, 168–70, 171, 172, 178, 191 Atilla, 44 Austin, 84 Australia, 82 223

224

Index

automobile, 6, 10, 11, 17, 23, 25, 27, 29, 35, 39, 41, 46, 48, 50–51, 53, 59–60, 63, 65, 67–69, 72, 74, 77–81, 82, 84–85, 87, 93, 97–99, 102–3, 105, 108, 112, 114, 121, 123–24, 131, 142, 146, 181, 188, 190, 192, 194–97, 189, 193, 201, 208 automobility, 4, 8, 10, 23, 27, 30–31, 63, 69, 77, 79, 82–83, 85, 97–98, 102, 106, 181, 189, 192, 197, 207 avant-garde, 14–15, 17, 30, 73, 111, 113, 115, 135, 179 Avenue of the Giants, 193, 199 Aztecs, 47 Bacon, Roger, 68 Baja 502, 121 Balla, Giacomo, 112 ball bearing, 6, 60, 63 Barbwire (film), 144 Barthes, Roland, 70, 184, 187 baseball, 28, 74 Baudrillad, Jean, 119 Beat writers, 135 Beauvoir, Simone de, 60, 71, 198–99, 207 Beckett, Samuel, 60 Beijing, China, 91 Berger, Sonny, 134, 141 Berlin, 52 Beyond the Law (film), 144 Bianchi, 89 bicycle: mountain, 9, 11, 16, 64, 72, 89–90, 93–94, 106, 125, 150, 169, 191, 195–96, 199, 203, 205, 207; bike-packing, 92–93, 186, 189–90; BMX, 64, 94, 120, 207; cargo, 39, 90; electric, 39, 90–91; elevated, 90; folding, 67, 90–91; freestyle, 16, 63–64, 94; ghost, 20–21; gravel, 88–89, 93–94, 186, 190, 195–96, 199–200, 203, 207; jeepneys, 39; lanes, 26, 82, 84, 86–87, 196, 198; lowrider, 16, 21, 90, 207; messenger, 69–70, 80, 93; motorized, 25, 39,

97, 101–2, 105–6, 123–24; parades, 65, 85, 90, 151, 207; rickshaws, 39, 208; safety, 5, 9, 13, 66–68, 72, 75, 89–90, 95, 97, 101, 106–7; scraper, 21, 90; song, 60; taxi-, 39; tuk-tuks, 39 Bicycle Thieves (film), 77, 142 Biker Boyz (film), 134, 145 Black, 28, 51, 67, 74, 77, 126, 139, 177 Black Athena (Bernal), 159–60 Black Lives Matter, 85 Black Panthers, 140 Black Power, 128 Black Rain (film), 144 Black Rebels, 137 bloomers, 75, 26, 61, 67 Boccioni, Umberto, 60 Bogotá, Columbia, 82 Bond, James, 144 Bolivar, Simone, 34, 42–43, 47–48 bolts, 204 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 43, 44 The Born Losers (film), 140 bottom bracket, 203–4 boxing, 28, 86, 168–69, 172. See also shadowboxing boycott, 151 brakes, 71, 72, 89, 92–93, 109, 120, 204 Brando, Marlon, 133, 136–37, 140 bricoleur, 183 British, 41, 64, 109, 116, 118, 125–26, 132, 140, 144 Brooklyn, 21, 109 Brough Superior, 116 Buell, 132 Burke, Kenneth, 20, 56 burnout, 205 Burnout (film), 134, 145 Burroughs, William, 135 Butler, Judith, 130, 137, 173, 204 Byrne, David, 60 Byzantine Empire, 83 café racer, 110, 118–19, 122, 124–25, 137, 141, 146

Index

California, 9, 13, 21, 89, 91, 128, 134, 136, 151, 199, 193 Calloway, Cab, 113 camel, 39 Campagnolo, 89 camping, 92–93, 190, 200 Canary, Daniel J., 66 canon, 6; of rhetoric, 156, 172, 176 capitalist, 60, 86, 110, 115, 171, 191 carbon fiber, 94, 153, 203 carriages, 83, 63 Cartesian, 58, 70, 172 Catwomen: Hunted (film), 144 Certeau, Michele de, 12–13, 22, 25, 29–30, 35, 61, 182–83 chain, 6, 38, 60, 64, 75, 101, 106, 133, 146, 153, 204; theory, 71 chariot, 33–34, 36, 40–41, 44–45, 53, 56, 62, 96, 206 Charm City Kings (film), 143 chase, 135 cheiromoia, 172; cheironomein, 172 Chicago, Illinois, 13, 66, 90, 153, 200 childhood, 42, 75, 78, 104 China, 5, 34, 40–41, 42, 44, 84, 132 CHiPs (film), 134; (television), 134 Cholula, 47 chora, 35 choreography, 173 chremata, 165 chromoly steel, 203 chronemics, 103 Cicero, 156, 161, 174 Cinelli, 153, 200, 203, 204 circuit racing, 93, 207, 88 cities, 9–10, 13, 29, 52, 79, 82, 86–87, 91, 95, 97–98, 161, 196, 205, 208 citizen, 18, 22–23, 28, 37, 48, 82, 87, 96, 117–18, 132, 151, 170, 177–78, 194; citizenry, 62, 140, 160, 176; citizenship, 99, 174; noncitizen, 83, 159, 173 civilization, 4–5, 7, 33–34, 40–43, 46, 50, 52–53, 55, 160, 178, 185, 202, 206

225

Cixous, Hélène, 184, 204 Cliff, Jimmy, 142 clutch, 94, 102, 110, 146 Coachella Valley Serving People in Need, 151 coasting, 20, 40, 53, 57, 62, 85, 195 colonization, 5, 34, 40–41, 47, 79, 160, 185, 196; colonies, 41, 159, 178; decolonization, 119 Columbus, Texas, 47, 115 commons, 83–84 communication, 7, 12, 21–22, 24, 26, 28–29, 33, 36–37, 39, 42–45, 48–49, 53, 56, 59, 70, 73, 77–79, 114, 130, 150–51, 157–59, 161–62, 164–65, 169–70, 181, 183, 188, 192–93, 206, 208, 209; public, 84, 149, 191; interpersonal, 190; intrapersonal, 190; intercultural, 11, 125; models, 167; studies, 1, 3, 155, 171, 173; nonverbal, 4, 20, 72, 103, 172 The Communist Manifesto (Marx), 78, 111 community, 13, 15, 24, 61, 90, 106, 131, 139, 143, 158, 169, 175, 187 commute, 10, 15, 72, 76, 91, 105, 151, 153, 207 competition, 39–40, 44, 77, 83, 86, 94, 101, 105, 108, 110–11, 113–14, 117–18, 123–24, 138, 143, 150–51, 167–69, 172, 191, 206 computer, 59, 145 consciousness, 3, 6–7, 25–25, 55, 73, 82, 134, 142, 151, 152, 156, 161, 164–67, 173, 175, 178, 187, 192, 194 conflict, 6, 10, 108, 114, 116, 118, 126– 28, 132, 135–36, 171, 199 conquistadors, 41, 47, 115 consumerism, 15, 101, 150 Copenhagen, 91 Le Corbusier, 14–15, 18–19 Cook, James, 160 Corax of Syracuse, 161–62 crank, 38, 64, 67, 57, 60, 101, 106, 153; crankset, 204

226

Index

Crested Butte, Colorado, 89 Crisias, 177 Critias, 152 Critical Mass, 86, 150–51, 191– 92, 197, 207 The Crow (film), 134, 144 Crusty Demons of Dirt (film), 143 culture, 5, 15, 17, 22, 25, 35, 40–41, 46, 49, 66, 72, 74, 80, 85, 90, 105, 111, 113, 116, 118–19, 124, 126–28, 130– 32, 138–42, 154–55, 159–62, 165, 169, 173–74, 187, 194; bicycling, 76, 89, 93–94, 191; co-cultures, 208; counterculture, 80, 123, 126, 128, 130, 134, 136, 141; equestrian, 43; motorcycle, 99, 110, 117, 120, 124, 129, 133, 137, 143–45, 180, 205; outlaw, 129; popular, 51, 168; remix, 153 customization, 72, 90, 103, 118– 19, 126, 131 The Cycle Savages (film), 134, 138 cycling, 1–2, 4–5, 8, 12, 15, 17–20, 26, 28, 33, 43, 46, 49, 51–53, 58, 67, 70, 74, 89–90, 92–94, 97–98, 102, 150, 153, 160, 169, 171, 173, 175, 179, 181, 186, 191, 196, 199, 208; communication, 37, 170, 188, 202; culture, 118; discourse, 130; identity, 100; ontology, 22, 33, 38, 50; performance, 14, 34, 105, 184; recuperation, 29; rhetoric, 24, 36, 77, 152, 168, 170, 178, 189, 204; subjectivity, 206; text, 151, 156. See also culture cyclotopia, 81–82, 85 cylinder, 107 Dada, 113, 115, 180 Daimler, Gottlieb, 102 Dallas, Texas, 91 dance, 66, 72 The Dark Knight (film), 144 Dayton, Ohio, 68

deconstruction, 139, 182, 184, 190–91, 201, 202–3, 204–5 Deleuze, Gilles, 16–17, 21, 46–47, 182–84, 204 delivery, 76, 86, 151, 165, 172 Delphia, 160 demilitarization, 17 derailleur, 94, 203–4 dérive, 15–16, 197, 207; dériviste, 16, 182 Derrida, Jacques, 17, 181–84, 187–89, 191, 201, 202–4 détournement, 15, 16, 90 Devils Angels (film), 141 diachronic, 188, 193, 197 Dialogues (Plato), 155 Díaz, Porfirio, 48 differánce, 181, 202 Diotima, 152, 156, 159, 176 displacement, 174, 177 dissoi logoi, 163, 167, 192–93, 201 Drais, Karl Von, 37–38, 62 Draisine, 62, 63 Dream Racer (film), 144 driving, 25, 27, 29, 60, 72, 102, 149 dromocracy, 48 dropper seat post, 89 Du Bois, W. E. B., 13 Ducati, 118, 133; Scrambler Café Racer, 118 Duchamp, Marcel, 60 Dunlop, John Boyd, 67 Earth Day, 73 Earthrise, 73 Easy Rider (film), 126, 136, 141 écriture feminine, 204 Egyptian, 5, 25, 34, 40–41, 44, 159– 60, 177, 185 Einstein, Albert, 60 Electra Glide in Blue (film), 134 electronic, 14, 16, 38–39, 43, 59, 72, 78, 84, 89, 91, 95, 120–21, 124, 145–46, 180, 198, 200 elephant, 39

Index

elocution movement, 172 eloquence, 66, 158, 166, 176 emancipation, 17, 141 Encomium, 166 Endless Summer (film), 136, 142 Endless Summer 2 (film), 143 engine, 6, 51, 58, 67, 91, 96–97, 100– 102, 106–7, 109–10, 112, 115–16, 120, 124–25, 133, 146, 205 English, 83, 89, 107, 173 en soi, 199; en moi, 199 epideictic, 22, 86, 149–50, 170 epimeleias, 170 epistemology, 7, 75, 103–4, 146 equestrian, 1, 5, 33–34, 39–41, 43, 45, 47–48, 52, 55, 102 erasure, 14, 126, 129, 159, 176 ergonomics, 11, 22, 68, 107, 121, 196 escape, 99, 116, 118, 123, 128, 130, 135, 137, 142, 190 ethos, 46, 71–72, 91, 99, 105, 119, 126, 128, 135–36, 138, 166 Eurasia, 40–41, 45, 117 Europe, 5, 8, 25, 28, 41, 45, 47, 50, 60, 62–63, 66, 68, 76–77, 82, 83–86, 88–89, 93, 95, 98–99, 107, 119, 124, 126, 144, 159–61, 174, 177, 187, 199 Excelsior Motor Company, 107 exercise, 9, 22, 42, 57–58, 69, 72–73, 151, 201, 207 exhaust, 113, 146 existentialism, 71, 198–99, 201 Eye of the Tiger (film), 144 fabrication, 6, 50, 56–57, 60, 68, 74, 116, 202 Fast and Furious (film), 145 femininity, 114 First Nations, 17 Fitzgerald, Ella, 113 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 60 fixed gear, 16, 64, 71, 80, 92–93, 153, 200, 203, 207 Fluxus, 115 Fonda, Peter, 126, 140–41

227

football, 150 Ford, Henry, 67 Ford, John, 135 forklift, 78 Fort Wordsen, 200 Foucault, Michel, 16, 27, 82, 130, 156, 180–81, 184, 188–89, 194–95 four-stroke, 115, 120, 125, 146 four-wheeled cycles, 39 frame, 33, 38, 67–68, 70, 72, 75, 88–89, 92, 106, 108, 153, 195–96, 202– 4, 200, 206 France, 33, 63–64, 70, 72, 76, 81, 144, 174, 191; Tour de, 70, 72, 76, 81, 191 freewheel, 71; freewheeling, 195 full suspension, 64, 72, 89, 94 futuristic, 111, 124, 134, 147 Futurists, 111, 114–15, 120, 208 gallop, 38, 52 gasoline, 6, 9, 101, 104, 125, 147 gears, 71, 88, 102, 146, 205 gender, 14, 26, 49, 60–62, 86, 114, 130, 137–39, 150, 156, 159–60, 176–77, 198–99 geometry, 19, 70, 89, 174 Germany, 102, 174, 132 Ghost Rider (film), 134, 144 Giant, 89, 200; Propel, 200 Ginsburg, Allen, 135 The Girl on a Motorcycle (film), 138, 141 Giro de Italia, 76, 81 Gobi Desert, 117 the Good Roads Movement, 23, 69, 106 Goodyear, Charles, 67 Gorgias, 152, 156–58, 161, 163–64, 166 Gramsci, Antonio, 159 The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck), 135 Grapes of Wrath (film), 135 grease, 204 The Great Escape (film), 136

228

Index

Greek, 5, 18, 20, 22–24, 33, 37, 40, 43–44, 83, 86, 150, 155–56, 159–61, 166–67, 169, 172, 174–78 Guam: International Raceway, 180; Cycling Federation, 151; Tour of, 150, 191 Guattari, Felix, 16, 17, 21, 45–47, 182– 84, 188, 204 Guevara, Ernesto “Che,” 145 Gulf War, 119 Habermas, Jürgen, 83, 86–87 handlebar, 37–38, 57, 65, 88, 92, 101, 107, 196, 204 Handy, George M., 104 The Harder They Come (film), 142 Harley-Davidson, 107–9, 115, 117, 126, 133–34, 136, 138, 146 Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man (film), 134 Hawai’i, 66 he‘e nalu, 66 hegemony, 159 Hell Ride (film), 140 Hellcats (film), 134, 138 Hellenic, 22, 25, 83, 151, 155, 159, 161, 174, 178 Hells Angels MC, 128, 139–41 Hells Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (Thompson), 139 Hells Angels on Wheels (film), 134, 138, 140 Hells Belles (film), 138 Hemingway, Ernest, 60 Hercules, 44, 166 Herodotus, 36, 44, 155, 160 heteronormativity, 51, 140 heterotopias, 82 hetton, 163; hetton-kreitton, 167, 192 highway, 20, 69, 72, 85, 93, 97, 106, 120–21, 134, 181, 194–95 highwheeler, 5, 63–66, 68, 101 Hildebrand, Wilhelm and Hinrich, 102 hip-hop, 90, 113, 142

Hippias, 152, 157 holistic, 167, 172 Hollister, 136, 139 Hollywood, 48, 128, 136 Homer, 36, 44, 175–76 Honda: CB1000R Neo Sports Café, 118; CBR929RR, 133; CRF450R, 180; Cub, 99; Ichiro, 124; Motor Company, 11, 21, 107, 118, 124–25, 132–33, 180, 200 Hong, Ge, 68 Hopper, Dennis, 126, 141 horse, 1, 3–6, 8–9, 19, 26, 33–42, 44–50, 52–53, 55–56, 62–63, 65, 69, 75, 84, 96, 102, 106, 108, 114, 116, 121, 130, 135, 147, 184, 186, 206–7; alternative, 60; and civilization, 117, 160; dandy, 64; hobby, 65; horseback, 10, 83; horse-mounted, 1, 3, 5, 33–34, 43, 51, 65, 97, 107, 115; horsepower, 5, 107, 109–10, 115, 125, 146, 205; iron, 51; metaphor, 51, 61, 95; mobility, 7, 25, 59, 85, 129; representations of, 137; Trojan, 44 Huexotzinco, 47 humanism, 96, 188, 198, 206 human-powered, 1, 6, 8, 38, 55, 57, 62, 72–73, 84, 91, 102, 108, 146, 200, 207 Humber, 102 Humboldt County, 193, 199 Hume, David, 25 Hungary, 41 Huns, 44 Husqvarna, 132 Hyosung, 132 The Iliad (Homer), 175 imperialism, 113 Incas, 47 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (film), 144 Indianapolis Motor Speedway, 109 Indian Company, 107, 126, 132

Index

Indigenous, 13, 17, 47–48, 51, 66, 77, 85, 89, 115, 139, 161, 174, 176–77, 208 Indonesia, 62 industrialization, 6–7, 10, 55–59, 63, 75, 78–79, 82, 85, 95, 99, 106, 112–14, 127, 181, 196, 207 infrastructure, 9, 13, 27, 69, 80, 82, 87, 105, 188–89, 198 inquiry, 2–3, 18, 20, 27, 30, 35, 46, 79, 82, 135, 138–39, 149, 151, 157, 179, 201, 204–5 interactional, 167 interface, 19, 95 Iran, 40 Irigaray, Luce, 184 Islam, 161 Isle of Man Tourist Trophy, 109– 10, 117, 121 Isocrates, 23, 40, 152, 155, 161, 170, 172 Italy, 84, 132, 159, 160–61, 177–78 Jakobson, Roman, 187 Japan, 10–11, 118–19, 123–26, 132, 144–46 Jim Crow, 74 Johnson, Isaac R., 67 Johnson, Jack, 28 jouissance, 92, 127 Juvenile, 113 kairos, 167, 169, 170, 172, 192 kando, 124 Kawasaki, 11, 118, 123, 125, 153, 180, 200; Ninja, 11, 125, 153, 180, 200; Z900RS Café, 118 Kerouac, Jack, 41, 135 Khan, Genghis, 45, 48, 115 kick start, 110 kinesics, 103 Knightriders (film), 144 kreitton, 163, 167, 192 Kristeva, Julia, 17, 127, 184, 188, 204 KTM, 132

229

label theory, 136 Lacan, Jacques, 187 language, 16, 36, 20, 22–23, 25–26, 29, 94, 104, 113, 156–58, 161–64, 166– 68, 171, 174, 177–78, 180–84, 186– 88, 189–90, 193–95, 197, 199, 204 langue, 188–89, 203 Lascaux Cave, 33 Latino/a, 140 Lawrence of Arabia (film), 116 Lawson, Harry John, 67 Le Figaro (periodical), 111 League of American Wheelmen, 69 The Leather Boys (film), 140 Lefebvre, Henri, 12–14, 18, 25, 32, 35, 70, 88, 103, 182 leisure, 8, 61, 63–64, 68, 77, 86, 134, 141, 192, 201, 207 Letterist International, 115 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 187 LGTBQ, 139 Libya, 34, 36, 40 linear, 93, 100, 167 linguistic, 24–25, 113, 146, 158, 163, 174, 182, 184, 186–89, 193–94 Locke, John, 25 logic, 7, 14, 17, 28, 66, 108, 147, 158, 165, 184, 188, 199, 204, 208 logocentricity, 203–4 logos, 106, 113, 146, 153, 158, 166, 176, 181 London, 52, 119 London, Jack, 66 loom, 6, 124 Los Angeles, 21, 84, 86–87, 126, 151, 196 Louveture, Toussaint, 43 The Loveless (film), 134, 144 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 78, 184, 188 Madison Square Garden, 109 Mad Max (film), 137 Mandiargues, André Pieyre de, 141 Manila, 208 Marin County, California, 89

230

Index

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 111–13, 116 Marlboro Man, 51 Marrakesh, Morocco, 84 Marx, Karl, 78 masculinity, 34, 42–44, 51, 65, 127–30, 135, 137–38, 140, 145; hypermasculinity, 138–39 Massachusetts, 107 The Matrix: Resurrections (film), 134, 144 Maybach, Wilhelm, 102 McQueen, Alexander, 128 McQueen, Steve, 133 Mediterranean, 161, 177 Meek Mill, 144 Mexican Revolution, 47–49, 115 Mexico, 47–48, 73, 81, 115; Mexica, 47 Mercedes-Benz, 102 Mesopotamia, 43 metaphysical, 24, 36, 48, 93, 154, 156– 57, 164, 181–84, 188 Meyer, Eugéne, 64 Michaux, Pierre, 64 McLuhan, Marshal, 12, 36–37, 78 Mestizo/a, 13, 47 memory, 23, 40, 52, 61, 82, 98, 133, 172, 175, 206–7 medium, 12, 22, 26, 28, 36, 29, 37, 49, 103, 181, 208 Middle East, 41, 117, 161 Minneapolis, Minnesota, 82, 92 Mission Impossible II (film), 134, 144 Missouri, 49 Moctezuma, 47 modernity, 4–7, 14–18, 25, 34, 51, 55, 57, 68, 71, 73, 75, 77–79, 93, 95–96, 100, 111, 113–14, 120, 123, 127, 129, 135, 146, 181, 185, 207–8 modernization, 3, 6–7, 14, 59, 73, 77–79, 93, 95, 112–14, 119– 20, 182, 185 Mongol, 40, 128, 130 Mongolia, 41 Moors, 47, 161

motocross, 143, 180, 208 Moto GP, 109–10, 120–21, 125, 143–44 motorcycle: bobber, 126; café racer, 110, 118, 124–25, 131, 137, 146; chopper, 118, 126, 138; dirt bike, 11, 106, 110, 120, 125, 143, 131, 205; freestyle moto, 143; stunt bike, 120, 127, 180, 201, 205 The Motorcycle Diaries (film), 145 The Motorcycle Diaries (Guevara), 145 Motorcycle Maids, 130 motility, 2, 97, 138 Moto Guzzi, 132 Mt. Tamalpais, 89 Munster, 91 MV Augusta, 132 My Own Private Idaho (film), 145 myth, 44, 70, 78, 127, 135, 155– 56, 166; mythology, 34, 135, 144, 165–66 mythos, 105, 166 Naked Angles (film), 138 Naples, 160–61 national, 47, 70, 111, 114, 126, 136, 150, 176 nationalist, 118 nationality, 27, 44, 49, 113 Native American, 41, 129, 135 Newark, New Jersey, 109 New Orleans, Louisiana, 13 New York, New York, 13, 91 New Zealand, 143 Nicholson, Jack, 126, 134, 140–41 nomad, 45–46, 182–83; nomadic, 40, 45–47, 49, 52; nomadism, 41 nonplace, 18–19 North America, 60, 62, 86, 115, 117 North Shore (film), 144 Norton, 117, 132, 145; Norton 502, 145 nostalgia, 5, 74–75, 78, 80, 82, 89, 91, 92, 95, 98, 101, 125, 145, 201, 207 Notorious B.I.G., 113 Oakland, 9, 21, 84, 128, 151

Index

Ocean, Frank, 60 Oceanic, 160 The Odyssey (Homer), 175 off-road, 11, 38, 88, 93, 102, 104, 106, 125, 127, 131, 201, 205, 208 oil, 73, 125, 204 Olympics, 76, 172 On Any Sunday (film), 134, 142, 143 On Any Sunday 2 (film), 143 One Week (film), 145 On the Road (Kerouac), 135 ontology, 1, 2, 18, 22, 29–31, 35, 38, 50, 70, 72, 97, 100, 127, 154, 170, 200, 206 oppression, 25–26, 51, 115, 161, 174, 176, 178, 198–99 Orange County Choppers (television), 138 organizational, 19, 60 Orientalism, 116, 129 orthoepeia, 167 other, 26, 116, 129–30, 159, 175, 199 Ottoman Empire, 116 Outlaw Biker (magazine), 138 Pacific Northwest, 189, 194 Palamedes, 166 Palm Springs, 72, 150, 191–92; Tour de, 72, 150, 191–92 parole, 188–89, 203 pedagogy, 161, 170, 172; critical, 171; critical performance, 171; place-based, 171 pedals, 2, 22, 58, 64, 62, 67, 89, 91, 97, 101, 106, 107, 120, 196, 204 pedestrian, 23, 30, 46, 63, 79, 86, 98, 106, 124, 188–89, 192, 194, 196, 201 Pegasos, 44 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 187 peloton, 30, 76, 192 People of Color, 28, 51, 77, 85, 139 performance, 2–3, 8, 11, 14–15, 17, 19–23, 25–26, 31, 36, 38, 43, 45–47, 49, 56, 58, 66, 71–72, 81, 85–86, 92, 103–8, 114, 116–17,

231

121, 125, 131, 133, 137–40, 143, 149–50, 152, 157, 168, 169–73, 175, 179, 181, 183, 185–86, 188, 191, 204; nonperformance, 18; performativity, 173; reperformance, 153; studies, 1, 171 Pericles, 155, 161 Persia, 44, 117 Peru, 44 Peugeot, 102 phainomena, 165 phallogocentrism, 204 phenomenology, 29, 198 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 13, 144 Phoenician, 25, 40–41, 43, 159–61, 185 Pizzaro, Francisco, 34, 44, 115 Plato, 19, 35, 40, 69, 71, 152, 155–58, 161–63, 165, 169, 174–76, 178, 181–82, 187; Platonic, 27, 198; Platonism, 175, 181 Plutarch, 156 pneumatic tire, 6, 63, 67, 75, 101 polis, 18, 22–26, 83, 160, 167, 173, 176 Polo, Marco, 115 Polos, 152 Pony Express, 49 Portland, Oregon, 82, 84–86, 193, 196 Port Townsend, 193, 200 postcolonialism, 1, 36, 48, 85, 129, 159, 173, 196; postcolonial studies, 1, 48 posthuman, 7, 95, 100 postindustrial, 14, 60 postmodernity, 4, 6–7, 11, 15–17, 59–60, 72–73, 77–79, 92–93, 95, 100, 122, 127, 129, 135, 147, 175, 182, 184, 185, 207–8 poststructuralist theory, 1, 2, 4, 7, 15–18, 21, 24–25, 27, 32, 36, 48, 70, 139, 147, 156, 159–60, 166–67, 178, 181, 182–89, 177, 179, 192–97, 199, 201–2, 204–6, 208–9; protopoststructuralist, 8, 99, 185, 198, 200 posture, 3, 29, 33, 44, 55, 58, 103, 172, 183, 186 poverty, 15, 137, 201

232

Index

praxis, 164–65, 169, 171, 175, 200 print, 43, 63, 200 Prodicus, 152, 166 professional, 28, 74, 76, 90, 124, 137, 139, 145, 192, 207 Protagoras, 108, 152–54, 156–57, 163–65 protest, 69, 79, 126, 131, 141, 142, 150, 151, 208; protestor, 85, 197 proxemics, 103 public sphere, 24–28, 37, 51, 61, 62, 79, 82, 86–87, 94, 131, 149, 153, 162, 170, 172, 178, 182, 183, 206–7 pump (bicycle), 154, 196 push start, 110 Queen, 60 Quintilian, 161, 174 race, 30, 63, 72, 76, 88–89, 93, 102, 108–10, 117, 121, 136, 144, 150, 153, 169, 179–80, 191–93, 196 Race for Glory (film), 134, 144 railroad, 34 Ramessēs III, 34 rapidity, 5, 64, 99, 116, 119–20, 206 Rastafarian, 142 rebel, 8, 128, 130, 133–35, 137, 139–42, 145 reconciliation, 19 Red Hot Chili Peppers, 60 Redbull Rampage, 94 reflexivity, 17, 82, 100, 123 regulation, 14–16, 25, 60, 72, 76, 104, 116, 146, 150 renaissance, 83, 86, 174–75 repair, 50, 68–69, 104, 106, 153– 54, 196, 200 rhetorical theory, 1–2, 4, 7–8, 17, 24, 27, 30, 83, 86, 147, 149–52, 154, 156, 158–60, 162–63, 167–68, 170– 71, 172, 175, 179, 182–84, 186–87, 206–7, 209; sophistic, 1–2, 7, 17, 30, 36, 83, 86, 147, 150–51, 156,

158–59, 163, 168–70, 173, 175–76, 179, 182–84, 186, 207 rhizome, 21, 182 rhythm, 21, 85, 120, 133, 170–71; rhythmanalyst, 182 ride-outs, 21, 90, 120 rims, 107, 204 risk, 15, 22, 38, 63–65, 66, 72, 76, 93, 102, 110, 112, 116, 130, 135, 142, 147, 190, 193 Rober, 102 Robinson, Jackie, 28, 74 Rockers (film), 142 roller skates, 84, 90 Roman, 5, 33, 44, 83, 86, 157, 174, 177 Roper, Sylvester H., 101 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 25 Royal Enfield, 107, 118, 132; Continental GT 652, 118 running, 38, 72, 89, 100; machine, 57, 62–64, 67 Sacramento, 49 saddle, 3, 38, 44, 110 Sahara, 34, 41 Said, Edward, 129, 159 sales, 9, 11, 95, 108, 110, 117, 123–24 San Diego, 87 Santa Cruz Bronson, 200 Sappho of Lesbos, 176 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 60, 71, 78, 207 Savage Dawn (film), 144 Schott, Irving, 119 Schott Perfecto, 118, 119, 137 Schwinn, 90, 153, 200 seat, 38, 62, 65, 89, 92, 106, 194, 196, 204; seating, 67–68, 102, 107 Seattle, 13, 84, 193, 196 The Second Sex (de Beauvoir), 199 sedentary, 4, 24, 45–46, 49–50, 52, 205 segregation, 26–28, 61, 67, 74, 86; desegregation, 19 sex, 25–26, 113, 120, 142, 199, 204; heterosexuality, 77, 129, 138–40; homosexuality, 140; intersex, 114;

Index

sex-based, 25, 61, 67, 74, 159, 176, 198–99; sexed, 130, 198; sexism, 28, 51; sexuality, 27, 130 shadowboxing, 172 She Devils on Wheels (film), 138 Shimano, 89, 94, 204; Ultima, 204 Siberia, 41 Sicanians, 161 Sicily, 151, 159, 161, 177 sign, 21, 73, 87, 135, 187, 191, 198–99, 201, 203; systems, 194, 196–97, 204 signified, 6, 103, 194, 201, 203; signifier, 146–47, 153, 165, 181, 184, 187–90, 193, 195, 201, 202, 209; signification, 8, 20, 105, 114, 181, 182–83, 187, 189–90, 201 Silk Road, 117 Silver Dream Racer (film), 134 Singer, 102 Sironi, Mario, 112 Situationist International, 4, 14, 15, 16, 30, 92, 115, 179, 182 skateboarding, 2, 8–9, 16, 62, 120, 149 Skyfall (film), 143 slavery, 28, 174 snowmobile, 78 socio-spatial, 18, 20 Socrates, 23, 152, 155–57, 162, 174–76, 181–82; Pre-Socratic, 22, 152, 154, 182 sofos, 157 Sophists, 2, 7–8, 22–27, 30, 83, 86, 105, 149–52, 154–81, 182–87, 195, 200, 207 South America, 41, 85, 145 South Korea, 132 Spain, 41, 44, 47–48 Specialized, 89 spectacle, 15–17, 92, 150–51, 182 speed, 8, 10–11, 26, 34, 41, 44–45, 48–49, 64, 68, 72, 84–85, 88, 93, 96–97, 99, 104, 106, 108, 110, 111– 13, 120–21, 123–24, 126, 143–44, 146, 192, 194, 199, 203, 207–8 spoke, 33

233

sport, 65, 76, 81, 89, 93, 109, 143, 149, 151, 167–68, 170–72, 201 SRAM, 89 standardization, 55, 75, 132 Starley, James, 64 Starley, John Kemp, 67 Steinbeck, John, 135 stem, 204 stirrups, 44 strategies, 29, 61, 83, 138 A Streetcar Named Desire (film), 137 Stridentist, 115 structuralism, 17, 25, 70, 73, 153, 167, 173, 182, 185–86, 188–90, 193–94, 199, 201, 204 Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, 126 Sturgis, South Dakota, 126 subjectivity, 2, 7, 13, 45, 48, 69, 71, 76, 78, 100, 139, 166, 185, 188, 191, 194, 198–99, 201–2, 206; spatial, 51, 76, 194, 202, 205 Sumerian, 40, 43–45 supermodernity, 18 surfing, 2, 8–9, 66, 120, 134, 149, 221 Surrealism, 111, 113, 115, 141, 180 Suzuki, 11, 123–25, 132; GSXR, 125; Hill-Billy, 11; K-15, 11; Power Free, 124 Sweden, 132 swimming, 38, 57 synchronic, 188, 193–94, 201 T2 (film), 144 tactics, 15, 45, 73, 113, 178; tactical, 16, 61, 195–97, 203, 205 tape, 204 Tarantino, Quentin, 140 Taylor, Marshall “Major,” 28 technical, 1, 8, 19–20, 29, 37, 52–53, 56, 63, 65, 70, 76, 78, 97, 104–5, 109, 117, 121, 125, 145 Thailand, 98 Theaetetus (Plato), 165 Thompson, Hunter S., 139 Thrasymachus, 152

234

Index

throttle, 2, 22, 37, 101, 102, 107, 138 Timaeus (Plato), 35 tires, 22, 64, 67, 72, 75, 88–89, 93, 107, 192, 195, 203–4; tire levers, 153 Tisias, 162 titanium, 203 Tlaxcala, 47 tools, 55–56, 59, 68, 101, 116, 121, 178, 186, 204 Torque (film), 134, 145 tractor, 78 traffic, 15, 22, 58, 81, 93, 98, 110, 179, 196, 198 train, 9, 25, 53, 91, 193 transactional, 167 transcendence, 199 The Travels (Polo), 136 Trek, 89 tricycles, 39 Trigathor, 174 Triumph, 102, 107, 114, 117, 126, 132, 134, 137, 141; Bonneville 600, 137; Thunderbird 6T, 134, 137; Type H, 114 Tron (film), 145 Tron: Legacy (film), 145 Twain, Mark, 66 two-stroke, 120, 125, 146 Union Cycliste Internationale, 76, 88–89 United States, 8–9, 13, 16, 28, 49, 68, 74, 77, 93–94, 98–99, 101, 104–5, 107, 108–9, 114–15, 117, 126–27, 129, 131–32, 136, 174, 189, 196, 208 utopia, 78, 82 Varanasi, India, 84 velocipede, 5, 37–38, 62–64, 67, 95, 97, 101 Venice, Italy, 84 Venom (film), 144 Venom 2 (film), 142 viae publicae, 83 Vietnam, 98, 132, 144; War, 127, 115– 16, 134, 141

Villa, Francisco “Pancho,” 48, 115 Vinci, Leonardo di, 58, 68 Vuelta a España, 76 wagon, 33, 41, 53, 56, 62, 206 walking, 10, 19, 23, 29, 36–38, 53, 57, 60, 62, 75, 84, 104–5, 149, 170, 197; machine, 5, 55, 101 war, 41, 45, 49, 89, 101, 105, 111, 113–15, 117–19, 121, 123–24, 132, 136–37, 141, 177, 206 Warwickshire, England, 107 Washington, 13, 200, 193, 196 Washington, George, 34, 41, 43–44 Wells, H. G., 60 Western, 3, 22, 25, 66, 70, 86, 151, 152, 156, 158–61, 162, 171, 172–75, 177–79, 185, 188, 198 wheelie, 21, 65–66, 72, 120, 143, 205 wheels, 19, 22–23, 33, 37–38, 40, 44–45, 58, 62, 64, 66–67, 70, 75, 77, 97, 107, 109, 170, 200 white, 28, 118, 126, 129, 144, 176–77; labor, 91; privilege, 130, 174; supremacy, 28, 74; whiteness, 129 wide tires, 72, 89, 93, 195, 203 The Wild Angels (film), 134, 138, 140 Wild Hogs (film), 134, 145 The Wild One (film), 136, 140 Wolfüller, Alois, 102 World Championship, 88 The World’s Fastest Indian (film), 143 World War I, 117, 127, 208 World War II, 10, 117, 127, 133, 208 Wright Cycle Company, 68; Wright Flyer, 68 Wright, Orville and Wilbur, 68 X-Games, 143 Yak, 39 Yamaha, 123–25; R1, 125; R6, 125; SX 650 Twin, 125 youth, 8, 21, 37, 41–42, 73–74, 82, 118–19, 189, 208

Index

Zapata, Emiliano, 48 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig), 153–54

Zola, Émile, 60 Zongshen, 132 Zurich, Switzerland, 115

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About the Author

Hunter H. Fine (PhD, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale) is a communication scholar working at the intersections of intercultural communication, rhetorical theory, and performance studies. He is currently an assistant professor of communication at the University of Guam, where he also serves as an apprentice to traditional Austronesian seafaring in Micronesia. He is an avid surfer and cyclist, and these interests are often incorporated into his academic research. He has taught courses in public discourse, nonverbal communication, communication theory, intercultural communication, and rhetoric. His academic work employs a variety of qualitative research methodologies drawn from these interests and can be found in Text & Performance Quarterly, Asia Pacific Inquiry Journal, Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, and Micronesian Educator. This text builds on his previous book, Surfing, Street Skateboarding, Performance, and Space: On Board Motility (2018).

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