The Rhetoric of Autopia

Accumulatio
There are overpasses, fly-overs, as well as underpasses and tunnels wormholing their way through mountains and under the seas. There are interstates, highways and freeways, Autobahns and autostradas. Meandering country roads of dirt and gravel, abandoned routes lingering idly alongside its straight-edge successors. Exits and ramps, roundabouts and turnstiles. A circulatory system with cells of many colours, fuelling up, exploding and exhausting themselves through its vast network of arteries, veins and capillaries. The cities are hearts to this system, dark sediments underneath oceans are their lungs. We don’t know everything about the body it powers, but it must be an ageing one – prone to clogging and congestion – depending on constant surveillance. But still pulsing, and still capable of expanding and renewing itself like fungi through the forest, stretching and dividing fine threads of its rhizome – blindly and restlessly adding new strands and junctions, and for every one, new points of departure.


Actio
There are diamonds on your windshield, and they are tears from heaven. Night has fallen as you sit restful at the speed of about 70 miles an hour, mindlessly caressing the knob of the gearshift – contemplating the nature of traffic and your minuscule part of it.

The radio is playing a melancholic tune from the eighties; Drive, fittingly by the band The Cars. You start wondering about what McLuhan said about one media always containing other media. What does this mean to you: listening to music about driving while you are driving? And you realise, as you approach the city limits and the traffic thickens, that lots of your fellow drivers must be tuned in to the same station right now, and that you all listen to the same stupid song. And you imagine a similar, more potent situation on the Autobahn between Frankfurt and Munich, only with Kraftwerks anthem booming through squadrons of black and silver BMWs, Audis and Mercedes’s. You are yourself seated in one of those nicely trimmed leather seats, nodding along with the others – not headbanging, just nodding. And tapping your fingers on the steering wheel. It could be a gesamtkunstwerk of monstrous proportions, assembled of the very finest of modern machinery. A streamlined experience. Einfach genial. Genial Einfach.

Adiunctio
What can you see through your three rear view mirrors? A fragmented, angular image of the past, especially if you, like me – have had your mirrors broken. We live in a rear view mirror culture, where it is supposed than you can predict the future by looking back at history. In the car, this is literally true.

Adynaton
Yes, I think we can imagine an end of car culture. I think it will be the end when man has finally drained the solar system of energy, or perished in the process. Like the poet said; there will once be a heart without love, it will be when the rivers run upstream. If you don´t like cars, that’s fine with me, but still I believe that car driving is as integral to the human condition as writing, or drinking. The design critic Rick Poynor wants us to imagine a world without advertising. He thinks it would be a wonderful world. I’m not so sure. It would be a world without writing on the walls, and newspapers with only sensible things in them. Like he says, its not something you have to struggle hard to visualize, just take a trip to the countryside. For some reason, Poynor felt it necessary to go all the way to a Croatian island. Myself I have never needed to go to such extremes to experience an ad-free environment. Just jump in the car and hit the countryside.

Pierre
Pierre is 95 years old, and his Opel is parked in a designated space outside the sheltered accomodation where he lives. At least twice a week he gets in the car to go shopping a couple of miles away. Generally, Pierre resents having reached such a high age – all his friends, and two wives have died from him. Even though his health is ok, he doesnt like walking around too much; he is afraid of how his legs may betray him, that he may slip or stumble and be hospitalised for ever so long. Once he gets behind the wheel of the Opel, all these worries go away. He is no longer trapped in an old mans body. The need for constant attention in traffic sharpens him and gets his juices flowing. Being part of traffic is to take part in life. It seemed to me that landscape, weather, and indeed the shopping itself, all decent reasons for taking a leisurely ride in the car for most of us – all that was definetely secondary to Pierre. The driving itself is his primary goal. He made no secret of it. But when I asked if he would ever drive around without purpose, he said no. I guess men of his generation always have a purpose with what they do. And you can only do so much shopping, if you have a very small fridge.

Transformation
Baudrillards states that every object transforms something. In the case of the coffee grinder, it is quite obvious what is transformed. But what about the coffee table, or the mirror in the hall?

The car transforms time and space. But it also does a lot to transform the people seated inside them. Being seated in a car en route to somewhere creates a very different situation from that of being seated in the domestic sofa. Yet the car is a continuation of that domestic zone, a home away from home. Another transformation is detectible: the car as garment, or armor. Especially low sportscars where the driver must eek himself down into the bucket-seat yield the experience of dressing up in an enormous, yet sleek and comfortable armour. The design of the interior, not just the seat – all parts are curved and shaped around the body, a tough, cold and shiny shield from the outside world – yet soft, warm and flexible inside. Horse, hermeline and armour in one. Fit for a king – of the road.

Games
Consider how the relationship between two people changes when they get seated in a car. Now, one is the driver and the other passenger. This clear cut distinction of roles is coupled with the agreed purpose of the journey from A to B. The distance traveled and what’s remaining is easy to calculate from traffic, road conditions and information displayed. The strict conditions and conventions of car-driving resemble that of a game. Just as games are situations that shift players from the complex life at large to a more managable miniature simulation, the rigid structure of the driving situation share some of the same characteristics. In both games and car driving all parameters for making the right decision are visible.

Conversation
In the car, there is freedom to talk, or to keep quiet. It is astonishing how silence between strangers is allowed, and can even be comfortable in the intimate space of the car interior. Conversation is allowed to stop and start again, freely interrupted and colored by impressions from the fly-by world outside. The weight of the world feels a bit less heavy, when its cushioned by full suspension – and fuelled by gasoline. But conversations do get awry, and when they foul in the car, they can be scary. The driver can use, or abuse the car in his argumentation. He might say; well, if you don’t agree, just get out of my car. Or he can put emphasis in certain places by flooring the gas, or manouvering dangerously. The passenger has few such weapons at his disposal.

Crash
In Crash we meet Vaughn, who lives for his own reenactments, or simulations of famous car-accidents. Vaughn goes to great lengths in his art form, to the extent of buying period cars in the right colors, and dressing up partipicants in authentic costumes. These reenactments, or more precisely, their culmination at the moment of impact – trigger Vaughn and his accomplices sexually. As a matter of fact, it is the only thing that will turn them on. The movie is shot in the realm of the automobile, and the cities we see are the ones McLuhan describes, where cars are the real inhabitants. There are no signs of nature, only highways with overpasses and spaghetti junctions from which endless stretches of tarmac extend. It is a world where nature and man recedes into the background, and where technology seems to survive and thrive on its own, as some kind of superior life-form.

The people in Crash are deeply involved in a love affair with the car, but it is no easy relationship. The cars and car culture enjoy divinity, under which the subjugated humans hurt and sacrifice themselves; much like the Mayan aristocracy did with their razor-sharp stingray-spines. Ritual self-mutilation serves both to appease the gods and to reach an erotic and metaphysical high. Crash is, of course a hyperbolic fable – but only yesterday the local boulevard press ran this headline: “60 percent of the population has had sex in the car”. It is my personal opinion that to have sex in a car is so uncomfortable and inconvenient that it must carry a further freudian meaning of wide appeal – perhaps that of having sex with the car. A sort of menage a trois with leather and steel.

Random
Driving at random is difficult. It takes character and perseverance. Wanderlust and a sunny disposition. It’s difficult because it is wholly unnatural. We are rationalistic creatures who cry out for structure, a sensible path from A-B. My own so-called random driving, unless I’m unfathomably melancholic – usually need some kind of pretext, such as aiming for a cup of coffee and then drive for hours to get it. The pretext, especially if its silly and useless - makes the ride more a lot more enjoyable.

I recently heard of some guys who equipped a car with light sensors on the roof, and then hooked them up with the GPS wayfinder. Whenever the road forked the computer would read the sensors and then suggest a direction depending on the amount of light hitting the sensors. More light on the left, and the computer says left. More light in the center, then it says go straight ahead. This opens up to a new way of exploring the world. The drivers would end up in totally unpredicted places. Now, when man has mapped all the surfaces of the earth, there is nothing left to explore, unless we start reappropriating our maps. This device may also help us to drive randomly, without a pretext. We deal poorly with freedom of choice – even in the car – our number one symbol of personal freedom and integrity.