The automobile has figured as an important issue of concern and a profound source of fascination for a wide range of intellectuals in France since the 1950s. The car has been understood variously as a covert vehicle of creeping Americanization and consumerization, a threatening object that obliterates nature, a harbinger of hyper-modern futures, and as a constitutive element of everyday practices. This article traces out the diverse ways in which the car has been ‘good to think with’ for a range (...) of French intellectuals in the period spanning roughly from 1950 through to the 1970s. It seeks to demonstrate the richness of those currents of thought in post-war France which were concerned to comprehend the nature of car cultures. It is argued that these ways of thinking can be drawn upon in the present day by those wishing to analyse contemporary features of automobility. (shrink)

This article takes the motorway seriously as a place where the society of traffic can be found and studied. While many kinds of activities are done by drivers and passengers in parallel with driving on the motorway, such as listening to the radio, eating lunch or caring for, or being, children, I focus here on office work. Empirical material from a video-ethnography of one driver doing paperwork and overtaking a slow-moving vehicle ahead is used to examine in detail some of (...) the practices of combining driving and office-duties in the car while in motion. Drawing on the work of Harvey Sacks, the article examines how this mobile society is naturally organized as an architectural configuration brought to life in the practices of driving in traffic. Overlooked phenomena that are orderly stable features of being mobile are analysed, such as ‘overtaking’, ‘tailgating’ and ‘cruising’. Where other writers have used ‘speed’ to theorize the contemporary period, a brief re-specification is offered in the light of the uses, moral and otherwise, of speed within, and as made apprehensible in relation to, traffic. (shrink)

This wide-ranging introduction to the special issue on Automobilities examines various dimensions of the automobile system and car cultures. In its broadest sense we can think of many automobilities - modes of autonomous, self-directed movement. It can be argued that there are many different car cultures and autoscapes which operate around the world, which cannot be seen as making driving (including freeways, motorways and autobahns) a uniform experience of movement in a controlled 'no-place' space. Yet, there clearly is an increasingly (...) globalizing car system, conceptualized as a powerful socio-economic and technological complex which sustains the car as a key object of mass production (Fordism) and mass consumption, which has impacted on spatial organization through roads, city layout, suburban housing and shopping malls and demands new forms of social life, sociability and time-space flexibility. This automobile system currently accounts for some 1.2 million deaths through traffic accidents a year world-wide, with the reversal of the long normalization of this form of 'mass murder,' now seen as a key topic for public health authorities. At the same time while it is potentially possible to subject cars to greater surveillance and systemic control through information technology, this in itself may not automatically lead to a reduction of accidents. In recent years the car has become a complex communicative platform for multi-tasking, a command centre for telephone, television, Internet etc., a place of work and instrumental tasking; but also a place of dwelling and refuge, a comfort zone for emotional decontrol via the sound system. Something which requires a more flexible driving habitus in which the senses are reconfigured and extended through the technology, as driving increasingly depends on the software as we move to intelligent cars and roads. Yet this is also something which generates an expanding set of new risks. The logic is for the driver to become the auto pilot and the automobile to become a sort of datasuit wrap. Yet it is not surprising that this view of the controlled safe car should also summon up its opposite: the car as dangerous and powerful, as a vehicle for excitement and speed. Especially so given that car racing practically originated alongside the birth of the automobile and is now itself a massive global industry whose imagery is central to the marketing of many types of cars. (shrink)

This article draws on an ethnography of road construction in the Peruvian Andes to explore how engineering projects operate as sites of contemporary governance. Focusing on the way in which engineering projects entail a confrontation with dangers of various kinds, we explore how people caught up in road construction processes become preoccupied with the problem of anticipated harm. Drawing on the notion of ‘codes of conduct’, we suggest that the governmental effects of practices which attempt to deal with the uncertainty (...) of the future might be analysed as a tension between the enactment of two different kinds of codification. Building on the notion of coding as a situated material practice, we investigate the appearance of two different ways of encoding a relationship with an uncertain future which we term ‘machinic’ and ‘emergent’. The article builds on a description of these two ways of encoding uncertainty to explore how formal mechanisms of dealing with anticipated harm, such as the regulations of health and safety, are both unsettled and reinvigorated by more affective and relational dimensions of practice. (shrink)

This article argues that de Certeau’s understanding of walking as the archetypal transhuman practice of making the city habitable cannot hold in a post-human world. By concentrating on the practices of driving, I argue that other experiences of the city can have an equal validity. In other words, de Certeau’s work on everyday life in the city needs to be reworked in order to take into account the rise of automobility. The bulk of this article is devoted to exploring how (...) that goal might be achieved, concentrating in particular on how new knowledge like software and ergonomics has become responsible for a large-scale spatial reordering of the city which presages an important change in what counts as making the city habitable. (shrink)

Revision in history is conventionally characterized as a linear sequence of changes over time. Drawing together the contributions of those engaged in historiographical debates that are often associated with the term "revision," however, we find our attention directed to the spaces rather than the sequences of history. Contributions to historical debates are characterized by the marked use of spatial imagery and spatialized language. These used to suggest both the demarcation of the "space of history" and the erasure of existing historiographies (...) from that space. Bearing these features in mind, the essay argues that traditional, temporally oriented explanations for revision in history, such as Thomas S. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, miss the mark, and that a more promising line of explanation arises from the combined use of Michel Foucault's idea of "heterotopias" and Marc Augé's idea of "non-places." Revision in history is to be found where writers use imagery to move readers away from rival historiographies and to control their movement in the space of history toward their desired vision. Revision is thus associated more with control than with liberation. (shrink)