Text page
Plant - Upward Mobility (Review) (Sight and Sound 1996)
A Sadie Plant review that reads French modernization through speed, cleanliness, media, and the cultural reordering of postwar life.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The review matters here because it treats modernization as an aesthetic and infrastructural reformatting of everyday life. Fast cars and clean bodies become shorthand for how technological culture reorganizes sensation, politics, and social order.
Plant uses review form to connect a book on postwar France to broader questions of media, mobility, and cultural engineering. The result is a compact example of criticism working as technocultural diagnosis.
That matters because the sonic section is also about public theory and cultural relay. This page shows Plant translating modernization into a vocabulary of speed, atmosphere, and mediated life.
How to read this text
Read past the repository wrapper until the review's own prose begins with postwar France, mobility, and modernization.
Track how the review turns a specific national history into a more general argument about media, speed, and cultural reordering.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 1
Find a copy Abstract Full Text Back to previous page document 1 of 1 Upward mobility Plant, Sadie.
Definition · paragraph 1
Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, however, looks back to an earlier period of rapid social change, and a 50s France which, in its desperation to become a modern and efficient capitalist state, refused to deal with the more ignominious aspects of its recent past and so set itself up for the troubles to come.
Definition · paragraph 2
It is no small irony that France shared its penchant for order and hygiene with the fascist Germany it wanted to escape. But Ross is in no doubt that the desire for cleanliness is indicative of a fundamental desire to forget the war and deny both the past and the present of French racism and colonial power.
Definition · paragraph 2
The latter too were decried as a noxious American import, while their connections to the homegrown structures of administrative life continued to be quietly overlooked. It is no small irony that France shared its penchant for order and hygiene with the fascist Germany it wanted to escape.
History · paragraph 2
Details Subject Book reviews; Nonfiction; Culture; Social sciences; Social change Location France People Ross, Kristin Title Upward mobility Author Plant, Sadie Publication title Sight and Sound Volume 6 Issue 2 Pages 3031,3 Number of pages 3 Publication year 1996 Publication date Feb 1996 Year 1996 Section books existentialism was subsumed.
Appears in sections
Sonic Futures and Audio Theory Primary section
Jungle, Hyperdub, sonic warfare, and the sound-centered pathways into the archive's theory culture.