Car Cultures (Materializing Culture)

Rating:
Summary: Humanity of the car. Nonhumanity of the driver?
Review: This collection edited by Miller is a fine addition for anyone remotely interested in automobility and car culture. So far it is the only edited collection that deals with the specific problems of automobility in contemporary late modernity. What I found very refreshing was that it did not fall back on 'common sense' or institutional discourses about the car or automobility. By that I mean the dominant discourses of 'speed', 'road safety', etc get a back seat...

The book is made up of ten chapters with interests ranging ethnographies of 'private vehicles' on the Pitjanjatjara lands, South Australia, to an account of the struggles and stories of a Ghanaian long-distance taxi-driver (whose taxi was named 'God Never Fails'!!).

The standout chapter for me was definitely Tom O'Dell's work on the 'raggare' of Sweden, although I may be biased. O'Dell did not attempt to impose a pre-existing set of ideas upon the male-dominated group of American-car enthusiasts called the 'raggare'. Instead he examined the specific problems that emerged _because_ of the car. That is, particular attributes of the car and automobility require different thought than that of studying other social and cultural formations and institutions. What modes of sociality does the car enable? What particular cultural forms only exist because of the car? These are the sorts of questions that are normally dismissed and talk about the car as a 'dumb' object rather than constellation of embodied forces that act in the world.

Along the same lines then, Miller's opening/introduction chapter was problematic for me. He wanted to talk about the 'humanity' of the car and argued the rest of the chapters in the collection did the same. To a certain extent he is right, but what I wanted him to pick up on is that such 'humanity' is as simplistic a concpet as 'alienation'. Where is what Marx called the 'nonhuman sex'? (Which Deleuze and Guattari find in the human.) Or Bruno Latour's nonhumans and strange ontological entities called actor-networks?

Mike Michael's essay on road rage "The Invisible Car" does a fine job of signposting the critical problems I am alluding to. I would've included Michael's essay with O'Dell's had I not already read most of the substance of his chapter in his own book "Reconnecting Culture, Technology and Nature" (Chapter 4). Such academic double dipping is a way of life now days, but it is still annoying. (Suffice to say I thought his 'Road Rage' in his own book was the best chapter.)

Lastly, perhaps the best thing about this book, is that (along with John Urry's work on automobility) it opens the door for further research and makes the academy slightly less introverted with the boring and regular hard-core proto- neo- post- Marxist, or feminist, or postmodernist, etc approaches where only certain things can be studied in only certain ways because they are the only things that 'fit the program'. I abhor such meatheaded 'mini-despotic regimes' (as Massumi has called something similar). Although I sense, but only sense, a whiff of the 'exoticisation of the Other' in the selection of chapters, but that is something other readers will have decide for themselves, or, maybe, you can say it is a 'World Book'.

Figuring out the score? Well because this is pretty much the only book on the subject I gave it a five. However, if we step away from such 'distinctions' and look at the potential of the book, what it could have become, then it probably only deserves a four.